BLACK MEN DO NOT LYNCH THEMSELVES

Two men were found hanging from trees in Mississippi.

One, Trey Reed, a 23-year-old Delta State University student, discovered near a pickleball court. The other, Cory Zukatis, a 42-year-old white homeless man, found in Vicksburg not long after. In a state with the blood-soaked history of lynching Black people—Mississippi is ground zero for racial terror—these deaths cannot be divorced from context. To pretend otherwise is either naïve or willfully complicit.

The United States is fresh off the assassination of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk. The same Kirk who spent years spitting venom about women, queer people, Black people, immigrants—anyone outside his ideological comfort zone. In death, he has been treated as a martyr. Air Force Two carried his body, the White House draped him in reverence, and he was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This nation, once again, extended its full moral imagination to a racist. Meanwhile, those hanging from trees in Mississippi are left with silence.

The Justice Department and White House have gone further, threatening to prosecute anyone accused of “celebrating” Kirk’s death under a hastily invoked “hate speech” clause. We have reached the absurd stage of American politics where a man who spent his life ridiculing oppressed people is now enforced as sacred canon. Black Americans are told—no, demanded—to bow their heads in honor of a man who used his platform to demean us. That is not just hypocrisy, it is state-sponsored gaslighting.

While the media carpet-bombs us with wall-to-wall coverage of Kirk, the deaths of Trey and Cory are whispered, if mentioned at all. CNN, The New York Times, and other so-called “paper of record” outlets have offered little more than placeholders. Their silence is not benign. It is an editorial choice, a signal that white supremacy—even in death—commands more urgency than Black life in peril. And the outrage grows: why are we forced to perform respectability for racists while our dead are buried without justice or national mourning?

 

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The facts around Trey’s death remain muddled, and we demand independent investigation. Social media is clear: Black men do not lynch themselves. This refrain echoes decades of denial in cases that law enforcement rushed to call “suicide” even as nooses dangled in broad daylight. The NAACP has long documented America’s lynching legacy; Mississippi was its stage, its soil still thick with bodies of men whose only crime was being Black at the wrong time. To assume Trey chose this death absent thorough inquiry is not only irresponsible, it’s dangerous.

Cory’s death, too, should not be brushed aside. He was homeless, white, and therefore disposable in America’s caste system. His hanging came on the heels of Fox News anchor Brian Kilmeade suggesting that homeless people should be executed by lethal injection—a statement he later apologized for, but only after backlash. He remains employed, his platform intact. That’s not just maddening—it is instructive. The poor, whether Black or white, are positioned as waste to be discarded. Cory’s death is proof: low-income white people are often more at risk than a threat.

This duality is America. Where poor Black men hang in silence, poor white men hang in silence, and the only voices amplified belong to racists elevated to sainthood. It is the great con of our democracy: the lives of the vulnerable are expendable, their stories unworthy of headlines, while white resentment receives federal honors. Mississippi’s trees are still speaking, and America is still pretending not to hear them. If this is freedom, if this is justice, then tell me—freedom and justice for who?