A Young Black Man, a Tree in Mississippi, and the Wounds That Never Heal
The news out of Mississippi this week has been shattering. Demartravion “Trey” Reed, a 21-year-old college student, was found hanging from a tree on the campus of Delta State University. Officials were quick to say there was “no foul play,” but in the Black community, the story doesn’t end with official statements. It begins with an image that haunts us: a Black body, a tree, in Mississippi.
That image carries generations of terror. For Black folks, especially in the South, a tree is never just a tree. It is a site of memory and violence. It is a reminder of strange fruit swinging in the Southern breeze, of thousands of lynchings meant to crush our spirit, of families forced to bury sons and daughters without justice. Mississippi holds some of the darkest chapters of that history — from Emmett Till’s brutal murder to the countless unnamed victims who never made the headlines. Trees became gallows, public squares became stages, and white mobs gathered not in shame but in celebration. That legacy doesn’t disappear just because the state wants to call this tragedy an “isolated incident”. To see a young man hanging from a tree there, in 2025, is to have the past rush back with all its weight.
And we know too well the long pattern of cover-ups. In 1955, when Emmett Till’s mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, Mississippi authorities tried to bury the truth with him. They rushed the body into a coffin, sealed it, and told his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, not to open it. But she insisted the world see what was done to her 14-year-old son. Without her defiance, history might have recorded Emmett’s lynching as just another tragic “accident.”
The same script has repeated itself across generations. In 1981, in Mobile, Alabama, 19-year-old Michael Donald was lynched by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Police initially told his mother he had been killed in a drug deal gone bad. It was only through her persistence — and eventually, the involvement of the Southern Poverty Law Center — that the truth came to light and the killers were convicted.
Even in recent years, we’ve seen Black deaths by hanging dismissed as suicides without thorough investigation. In 2014, Otis Byrd was found hanging from a tree in Port Gibson, Mississippi, not far from where he lived. The FBI investigated, but many in the Black community doubted the official conclusion of suicide, given the echoes of the past and the lack of transparency. In 2020, during the height of the George Floyd protests, two Black men — Robert Fuller in Palmdale, California, and Malcolm Harsch in Victorville — were found hanging from trees just weeks apart. Authorities were quick to call both suicides. Families and communities, haunted by history, demanded answers. The speed of those conclusions only deepened mistrust.
This is why our people don’t, can’t, simply take the coroner’s word. The official record has betrayed us too many times. Black skepticism isn’t paranoia; it’s born of survival. It is learned through centuries of cover-ups, through the silence of institutions that would rather protect their image than confront their complicity.
And so when Trey Reed was found, it wasn’t just his family’s grief. It was the collective grief of a people who know this story all too well. It was the fear of Black students on campuses across this country who wondered: if it can happen there, can it happen here? It was the weariness of elders who fought for civil rights and who now see, decades later, that the violence against us still takes familiar forms.
This tragedy arrives at a time when America is rolling back the very progress Black people fought for. DEI offices are being dismantled. Black history is being erased from classrooms. Conversations about race are being silenced. Against that backdrop, the sight of a young Black man hanging in Mississippi feels like both a flashback and a warning. History is not behind us. It is repeating itself in plain sight.
Trey Reed deserves more than to be remembered as a headline, more than to be reduced to the manner of his death. He was a student, a son, a young man with joy and potential. But his story forces us to confront a larger truth: Black life in this country is still vulnerable, still questioned, still precarious. And until America confronts its deepest wounds — not with denial, but with honesty and accountability — those wounds will continue to split open.
So I ask: if the sight of a Black body hanging from a tree in Mississippi does not force this nation to reckon, what will?
For more information
People
https://people.com/body-black-student-found-hanging-tree-college-campus-11810983
Economic Times
WAPT
Clarion Ledger
ABC 7 Chicago
