“The death of Tasia Fortune, a Black Mississippi woman found hanging from a tree on Aug. 3, has stirred distressing memories of the grim history of lynchings.”
The suspect in the hanging death of Tasia Fortune, a black woman, is a black man that she knew, but this hasn't stopped attempts to racialize the incident and for media outlets to stoke racial hatred. The Associated Press has taken up the false narrative that Fortune's death is emblematic of racial lynchings and run with it in their coverage of her killing.
In a story from the AP, “Cases of Black people found hanged in the US South are a reminder of nation’s lynching history,” the outlet led with how there have been “distressing memories” of the grim history of lynchings across the US in history because of Fortune’s death that took place in Mississippi. Fortune was found hanging behind an abandoned home in Jackson, Mississippi.
Although the second paragraph of the report from the outlet mentions that her suspected killer, Jarques Ratliff, 51, is also black, there was no mention of this fact in a post from the outlet on X. Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also both taken up the case to discuss racially motivated lynchings, even though that hasn't happened in this case or any cases in recent memory.
The caption from post read, “The death of Tasia Fortune, a Black Mississippi woman found hanging from a tree on Aug. 3, has stirred distressing memories of the grim history of lynchings across the U.S. South”
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View on XThe video also peddled the false narrative that there are lynchings in the US by citing a number of deaths of black people found hanging over the past few years, all of which have been ruled suicide or murder.
A community note to the post that was added read, “Jackson police arrested 51-year-old Jarques Ratliff, a Black man with an association to Tasia Fortune, for her murder on Sept. 11 after the death was ruled a homicide.”
But the AP suggested the narrative anyway. Their story read, “Regardless of the circumstances of the case, for many Black people, the imagery of a rope and noose evokes the legacy of lynching and vigilante violence against Black people in the U.S. and brings with it deep pain and trauma.”
The last known documented lynching took place in 1981 when members of the Ku Klux Klan killed Michael Donald in Alabama. Henry Hays, one of the Klansmen behind the killing, was later executed via the electric chair. Another perpetrator, James Knowles, was sentenced to life in prison after he pleaded guilty and testified against Hays.
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