Is This Subliminal Warfare?

Lydia Alston-Murphy

I am scared.

I am angry.

And I am heartbroken.

I have been looking at reports of Black people being found hanging across this country, and I cannot simply look away.

One report disturbed me.

Then I saw another.

And another.

And another.

At some point, I stopped seeing isolated headlines and started asking questions.

In February, 21-year-old Kyle Bassinga was found hanging in Georgia.

In May, 16-year-old Juliana Umba Nzita was found hanging in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In June, 27-year-old To'Nea Nicole Miller was found hanging near a park in Miami.

Twenty-one-year-old Justice Kai James was found hanged outside the Turner Job Corps center in Albany, Georgia.

That same month, 28-year-old Jerard "Jay" Jackson was found dead in a wooded area in Michigan after disappearing following the Electric Forest music festival.

Then, 29-year-old Tasia Fortune, a Black woman and mother of four, was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant house in Jackson, Mississippi on August 3, 2026. In the most recent reporting I reviewed, authorities had not yet announced an official cause or manner of death.

Less than two weeks later, a 32-year-old Black man was found hanging from a tree in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina.

And days after that, 38-year-old Demetrius Fleming was found dead in an apparent hanging in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.

There is also Demartravion "Trey" Reed, the 21-year-old Delta State University student who was found hanging on campus in Mississippi in September 2025.

These cases are not all the same.

That needs to be said clearly.

Some have been ruled suicides. Some families have questioned those determinations. Some investigations have produced evidence supporting suicide. And some cases have remained under investigation.

I am not saying that all of these people were murdered.

I am not saying every hanging is a lynching.

And I am not saying that every official determination of suicide is wrong.

But I am saying something else.

I find what I am seeing suspicious.

Maybe not suspicious in the legal sense that authorities use to classify a death. Suspicious to me as a Black woman who knows the history of this country and is watching report after report of Black people being found hanging.

There are enough of these reports that I believe we should be paying attention.

And I need to say something else that may make some people uncomfortable.

When I see them, I wonder whether someone is hanging Black people.

I cannot prove that.

I have no evidence that these deaths are connected.

I cannot tell you that one person or one group is responsible.

But I would be dishonest with my readers if I pretended the thought had not crossed my mind.

It has.

And there is no way for me to hear about a Black person being found hanging—especially from a tree—without knowing what that image means in the history of this country.

There are some images history simply will not allow us to see innocently.

A Black body hanging from a tree is one of them.

For generations, lynching was used as an instrument of terror against Black Americans. It was not only about taking a life. The image itself sent a message.

That history does not disappear simply because time has passed.

So I have questions.

How did the person get there?

What happened in the hours before that person's death?

What does the physical evidence show?

Was surveillance footage available?

Were witnesses interviewed?

Were phones and other evidence examined?

Were all reasonable possibilities considered?

And was enough investigation completed before a conclusion was reached?

I keep coming back to one principle:

The conclusion should follow the investigation.

The investigation should not follow the conclusion.

I understand that people die by suicide, including by hanging.

I also understand that an investigation may establish clearly that no other person was involved.

In Raleigh, for example, police said surveillance footage showed the man walking alone toward the tree carrying an electrical cord and that no other person appeared in the footage when the death occurred.

Evidence like that matters.

If I am going to demand that authorities follow the evidence when it raises questions, then I also have to accept the evidence when it answers them.

But what about the cases where the answers are not yet there?

What about the families who still have questions?

And what happens if authorities ever get it wrong?

That leads me to an even more uncomfortable question.

What if something is being missed?

Or worse, what if something is being covered up?

I want to be very clear about what I am saying.

I do not have evidence that police departments, medical examiners or government officials are covering up these deaths.

I am not accusing them of doing so.

I am asking what the consequences would be if a cover-up existed—or even if an investigation simply reached the wrong conclusion too soon.

Because what would that prevent us from discovering?

If a death is prematurely classified as suicide, does the search for another person stop?

Are connections to other cases considered?

Is evidence still collected and preserved?

Are witnesses still sought?

Does anyone continue looking for a pattern?

And if someone actually were hurting people, could an incorrect conclusion leave that person free to hurt someone else?

That possibility frightens me.

A failure to uncover the truth would not necessarily require some enormous conspiracy.

It could begin with an assumption.

A question nobody asked.

A piece of evidence nobody pursued.

A connection nobody looked for.

Or an investigation that stopped looking because everyone believed the answer had already been found.

Again, I am not saying that happened in these cases.

I am saying what could be lost if it ever did.

If these deaths are suicides, thorough investigations should help establish that.

If they are not, thorough investigations become even more important.

Because the purpose of asking these questions is not to manufacture a murderer where there isn't one.

It is to make certain we don't overlook one if there is.

And before we debate what any particular death means, I want us to remember something else.

These are people.

Someone lost a child.

Someone lost a mother.

Someone lost a father.

Someone lost a brother or sister.

Someone lost a friend.

Whatever an investigation ultimately determines, somebody is grieving.

And I grieve for them.

But grief is not the only thing I feel.

I am angry.

And underneath that anger is something I do not particularly like admitting.

I am scared.

I live in the North.

For many of us here, racism can look different. It can be quieter. More subtle. Sometimes it can be so carefully disguised that we question whether what we are seeing is racism at all.

And because many of these deaths happened hundreds of miles away, it can be easy to believe they have nothing to do with us.

But I know enough about history to know better than to become that comfortable.

I don't want another Black person found hanging to become something we simply scroll past.

I don't want us to become accustomed to the headline.

I don't want the words "ruled a suicide" to automatically prevent us from asking whether the investigation supporting that determination was complete.

But I don't want our fear to become evidence either.

We have to be able to hold both thoughts at the same time.

We can question without accusing.

We can demand transparency without deciding the answer beforehand.

We can accept evidence when it establishes suicide while continuing to demand answers in cases where the evidence has not yet provided them.

And we can remember our history without pretending history alone proves what happened today.

Which leaves me with a question I never imagined I would be asking in 2026.

Is this subliminal warfare?

I don't know.

Maybe these deaths have nothing to do with one another.

Maybe every investigation will ultimately give us an answer.

I sincerely hope so.

But I cannot look at what I am seeing and tell myself there is nothing worth questioning.

Something about this demands our attention.

We should be watching.

We should be asking questions.

We should be demanding thorough investigations and transparency.

And if there is nothing connecting these deaths, thorough investigations can help establish that too.

I hope my fears prove unfounded.

I hope there is no connection.

I hope there is no cover-up.

I hope there is no person out there hurting people while the rest of us are being told there is nothing more to see.

But hope is not a substitute for answers.

So until the evidence provides those answers, I refuse to look away.

Because whatever these investigations ultimately tell us, there is one thing I know:

This is not normal.

~

Lydia Alston-Murphy, is a political editorial writer for Minority Reporter. Her articles focus on politics in all levels of government as well as every day issues. Email: alstonmurphy@gmail.com