In the early 1900s, a 10-year-old boy hauling kindling to sell on the streets of Cordele, Georgia, had just missed the lynching of an 18-year-old young man on a willow tree. He witnessed the aftermath, and his little town was tense and frightened.

That 10-year-old boy was the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam.

“It was a terrible sight to behold, a man who had never been before a court of justice, his body dangling from a tree limb. There was no friend for him there; no attempt to determine his innocence or guilt. He was judged by murderers and shot to death in the midst of his own people,” the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad said in an article published in Muhammad Speaks newspaper. “My friends, these things have been going on for many years.”

Despite 1981 being marked as one of the last recorded lynchings, modern lynchings are still happening today, according to a report released earlier this year by JULIAN, a civil and human rights organization founded by civil rights attorney Jill Collen Jefferson.

The 222-page report, titled “A Crimson Record,” authored by Ms. Jefferson, analyzes modern-day lynchings, hate crimes resulting in death, and suspicious deaths in seven Southern states—Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama—from 2000 to 2025. 

JULIAN documented 75 modern-day lynchings and 83 hate crimes or suspicious deaths across the seven states in a 25-year time span.

The report’s premise argues that modern-day lynchings are not “historical echoes,” but are, instead, evolved and adapted forms of racial violence. JULIAN defined a “modern-day lynching” as “a discriminatory killing in the late 20th or early 21st century, under the pretext of administering justice, committed by more than one person for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial.”

Others link the concept of modern-day lynchings to the racial terror Black people continue to experience in the U.S. After the slew of killings in 2020, including the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, United Nations experts condemned “modern-day racial terror lynchings,” which they described as involving “impunity, particular disregard or depravity toward human life and the use of public spaces to assert racial control.”

In the 1800s and 1900s, a lynching might have consisted of a mob of White men hanging a Black person from a tree. Lynchings were often public, neighborhood spectacles, with families and children attending. Black people were not only hanged from trees; they were tortured, mutilated, decapitated, and sometimes burned alive.

The report released in February notes that “historically, describing a lynching as a ‘suicide’ was both a cover-up and a cruel joke—a way for White authorities and communities to deny culpability in racial killings while mocking the victims and their families.”

“From the late 19th through the mid-20th century, local law enforcement, coroners and newspapers in the South often recorded lynchings as suicides or accidents. When Black men were found hanging from trees, bridges or jail rafters, the ‘official’ verdict was frequently: ‘Death by suicide,’ ‘No foul play suspected,’ or ‘Accidental death by hanging,’” the report added.

Today, a modern-day lynching might occur in jail or prison or during a police encounter. JULIAN found that 23 cases involved police officers or correctional guards, and 12 took place in carceral (restricted) settings. Most of the cases examined were classified as suicides, homicides without a proven discriminatory motive or conventional hate crimes, according to the report. 

Yet, JULIAN found that many of the cases included premature conclusions, lack of psychological autopsies, compromised crime scenes, shoddy investigations and evasive reporting. 

Mississippi
The report documented 20 modern-day lynchings and seven hate crimes or suspicious deaths in Mississippi. Mississippi had the highest number of modern-day lynchings out of all seven states, and JULIAN found that cases have been increasing since 2021.

The report goes into the “disturbing pattern” found in Rankin County, Miss., in particular, a county known for its racism, brutality, and sundown towns. “Black men would often go missing around the same date and place every couple of years,” the report alleges.

Texas
The report documented 13 modern-day lynchings and 22 hate crimes or suspicious deaths in Texas. It noted that Texas has seen a sharp rise since 2019, with a high concentration of migrant deaths and disappearances.

Georgia
The report documented 14 modern-day lynchings and 11 hate crimes or suspicious deaths in Georgia. JULIAN found a consistent pattern of racially charged deaths in the state, with more than one-third occurring in custodial settings, jails, prisons or during police encounters and several clustered in rural counties.

Louisiana
The report documented 11 modern-day lynchings and 14 hate crimes or suspicious deaths in Louisiana. The state saw a surge after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and renewed activity after 2020. 

Florida
The report documented 11 modern-day lynchings and 20 hate crimes or suspicious deaths in Florida. The state’s “stand your ground” law played a role in several of the cases. 

Tennessee and Alabama
The report documented five modern-day lynchings and four hate crimes or suspicious deaths in Tennessee and one modern-day lynching and five hate crimes or suspicious deaths in Alabama.

JULIAN faced difficulty in documenting cases from Tennessee and Alabama. 

In Alabama, the organization found that autopsy reports, investigative records and police body camera footage were not automatically public, and local newspapers often relied on police press releases. 

In Tennessee, the organization was challenged with misclassified cases and transparency issues, including delays in autopsy releases, incomplete incident reports and limited updates.

The story of Don’Tavia Bryant
Don’Tavia Bryant, a 31-year-old Black man, had just parked his car at a casino in Bossier City, Louisiana, on February 26, 2023, when police officers approached him. Mr. Bryant, who was standing outside of his vehicle, suddenly ran from the officers. Officers chased him to a nearby river, and he was never seen again.

Mr. Bryant was on his way to meet friends at the casino when someone called the police on a suspicious White man with a gun. His mother, Shereba Bryant, told The Final Call that the last time anyone had heard from him was when he texted his friends to ask where they were parked and said he was “pulling up.”

Video footage captures officers with the Bossier City Police Department chasing Mr. Bryant. There is also an audio recording of the man who called 911, speaking to police. “He’s a White guy. This is a Black guy they were chasing,” the 911 caller said. 

Ms. Bryant filed a missing person’s report after days of her son being missing.

“That’s when the police said they had an encounter with him and that because he had a warrant, they said that he didn’t want to be found,” she said. “They said that a missing person has the right to go missing or to not be found, and I disagree with that.”

Mr. Bryant was living in Texas before he disappeared. His mother said subpoenas were filed for police body and car camera footage. She also claimed the Bossier City Police Department turned the case over to the U.S. Marshals in 2025, but she alleged that all evidence pertaining to her son’s case was destroyed before the case was turned over. When asked if she considers her son’s case an example of a modern-day lynching, she said, “Yes.”

“It goes through my mind every day. During the time that all this took place, what happened? What was he thinking? How was he feeling? What was going through your mind when the police were after you?” she questioned. “You just wonder what happened.”

Mr. Bryant’s case is one of the examples listed in the report. The report included other cases of people who went missing under strange circumstances. 

It also included high-profile cases and cases that received national media attention. The Final Call reported on some of the cases brought up in the report, including the cases of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who was found hanging in her jail cell in Waller County, Texas, in 2015; Quawan “Bobby” Charles, a 15-year-old Black boy who was found dead in a sugarcane field in Iberia Parish, La., days after being reported missing, in 2020; Rasheem Carter, a 25-year-old Black man from Mississippi whose dismembered body parts were found after he went missing in 2022; Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man fatally beaten by five Black police officers in Memphis, Tenn., in 2023; Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man killed by three White men in a neighborhood near Brunswick, Ga., in 2020; Qaadir and Naazir Lewis, 19-year-old twins found dead at the top of a Georgia mountain in 2025; Kendrick Johnson, a Black teen who was found dead in a rolled-up gym mat in Valdosta, Ga., in 2013 and Jordan Davis, a Black teen killed after listening to loud music at a gas station in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2012.

‘Justifiable Homicide’
JULIAN’s report takes inspiration from Ida B. Wells, an investigative journalist and anti-lynching activist who documented lynchings in the U.S. and compiled the data, along with individual case studies, in a pamphlet titled “A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892–1893–1894.”

In a message titled “Justifiable Homicide: Black Youth in Peril,” delivered on Oct. 28, 2007, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, National Representative of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, explained how White people began lynching former slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation as a way to stop Black people from progressing, and how the culture of lynching has evolved in modern times.

“Those freed slaves who would want to make a free step; those that would challenge their former slave master by wanting to vote, purchase land, pursue education or striving to do anything but plantation labor—these kinds of Black brothers and sisters would be dealt with harshly by the former slave-masters, and there was no deliberative body that would judge our affairs with justice,” he said. “Therefore, every killing of a Black man or woman; every lynching of a Black man or woman was excusable.”

He called lynchings a “monstrous form of public homicide” that White America began to engage in more frequently during the country’s Reconstruction period. 

“This ritualized community murder masqueraded as crime fighting, but it was actually a strategy to instill terror in the hearts and minds of the Black population,” he said. “Now, this atmosphere is beginning to spread again in America. I want to really make it clear to you today what we are going to face, what we are facing, as it will increase in the days ahead,” Minister Farrakhan warned.

Minister Farrakhan pointed out how in several of the Southern states also covered in the report—Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Georgia—Black people are still intimidated and gripped by fear. 

More than half of modern-day lynchings documented by JULIAN were of teenagers and people in their 20s. In his message, “Justifiable Homicide,” Minister Farrakhan spoke directly to Black youth who are the frequent victims of present-day lynch mobs.

“I want Black youth to hear this message, because police authorities are the same today as they were during slavery. In fact, this is how policing began. Police were formed to catch runaway slaves, bring them back to their masters and make examples of them to throw fear into other slaves. It’s the same today. Police authorities are trained to kill, as well as to protect. But where Black people are concerned, police legitimize their mob attacks under the name of ‘back up.’ Police back up is often no different than the lynch mobs 100 years ago,” Minister Farrakhan said.

“The killing of our people, shooting them with many bullets when one would have done the job. And then, that deliberative body which is to discuss the brutal murder of our people by looking into the facts, comes away calling it justifiable homicide.”

He ended the message asking the following questions: “Is there only sacredness and value to White life, and not Brown, Red and Black life? Is there value to a dog in this society, and yet no value on the life of a human being such that people can go to jail for mistreating a dog, and the same person who kills a Black youth can go home to dinner with his children with no feeling of having done something wrong, because in his own heart and mind, he did society a favor by killing another Black person? What do you think God has to say about this?”