Mississippi Lynchings: Emmett Till, Trey Reed, and Cold Case Laws

Mississippi recorded more lynchings than any other state in the United States. Between 1882 and 1968, at least 581 people were lynched there, 539 of them Black, according to records kept by the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute.¹² Georgia was next with 531, then Texas with 493. Using a narrower definition of racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950, the Equal Justice Initiative places Mississippi among the four states with the highest per-capita rates, alongside Florida, Arkansas, and Louisiana, out of nearly 6,500 such killings it has documented nationwide.³ The violence shaped modern Mississippi, and its legal and political echoes reach into the present.

How the Legal System Allowed It

Lynching in Mississippi was not something the state’s institutions failed to stop. It was something they were structured to permit. After the Civil War, white supremacists carried out the “Mississippi Plan,” a campaign of lynchings, massacres, and political intimidation aimed at overthrowing Reconstruction governments. Charles Caldwell, a Black state senator and delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention, was assassinated in 1875 as part of that campaign.⁴

The 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention wrote poll taxes, literacy tests, and felony disenfranchisement into the state’s foundational law. State Representative James K. Vardaman, later governor, said the convention was “held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n–ger from politics.”⁴ In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld those provisions in Williams v. Mississippi, reasoning that because the statutory text was not explicitly racial, discriminatory intent was only a “possibility.”⁵

Federal courts offered little corrective. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court ruled that federal law could not punish private citizens for murder, only state actors. In Screws v. United States (1945), it overturned the conviction of a Georgia sheriff who had beaten a handcuffed Black man to death. Between 1904 and 1935, no conviction of a Black defendant was reversed on grounds of discriminatory jury selection, while all-white juries routinely acquitted the perpetrators of lynchings.⁵

The Scale and the Worst Atrocities

The violence was spread across the state. Hinds and Leflore counties each recorded 22 documented racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950, the state’s highest totals. Kemper recorded 21, Carroll 19, and Lowndes 19. Amite, Bolivar, Coahoma, and Monroe each recorded 14.⁶ Charges of interracial sexual assault were frequently used as a pretext for punishing what white Mississippians considered violations of racial etiquette. Many killings were public, with hundreds of spectators, and were carried out by hanging, burning, or shooting. White newspapers and police often condoned them.⁷

Some of the worst episodes were mass killings. On March 17, 1886, a mob of 50 to 100 armed white men stormed the Carroll County Courthouse during a hearing in which two Black brothers, Ed and Charley Brown, had charged a white attorney with attempted murder. The mob opened fire on the brothers and on every other Black person in the courtroom. Those who tried to escape through second-floor windows were shot by men stationed outside. At least 23 people were killed. No white person was struck by a bullet. Governor Robert Lowry blamed the victims, and no one was ever prosecuted.⁸⁹

Three years later, in Leflore County, white cotton growers launched a massacre against Black farmers who had organized an agricultural alliance that threatened white economic dominance. Historian William F. Holmes documented at least 25 African Americans killed. No perpetrators faced consequences.⁹

On February 7, 1904, in Sunflower County, a mob of hundreds tortured Luther Holbert and an unidentified Black woman, distributing severed fingers and ears as souvenirs before burning both victims alive. Woods Eastland, whose brother had triggered the violence, named his son James Oliver Eastland. That son later served 36 years in the U.S. Senate as the leading congressional opponent of civil rights legislation.⁵

Emmett Till

The 1955 killing of Emmett Till is the Mississippi lynching most Americans know by name. On August 28, the 14-year-old from Chicago was kidnapped from the home of his great-uncle, Moses Wright, in Money, Mississippi, after allegedly whistling at a white shopkeeper named Carolyn Bryant. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, beat Till, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River with a metal fan tied to his neck with barbed wire.¹⁰

Till’s mother, Mamie Till, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago. Photographs of her son’s mutilated body ran in Jet and Life, provoking international outrage; the Jet issue was reprinted to meet demand.¹¹ Rosa Parks later identified Till’s murder as a factor in her decision to refuse to give up her bus seat three months later.¹² NAACP Southeast Regional Director Ruby Hurley, Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers, and Bolivar County branch president Amzie Moore pressed for the homicide investigation and helped secure witnesses.¹

Bryant and Milam were tried for murder and acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. Four months later, in January 1956, they confessed to the killing in a Look magazine article.¹³ No one else was ever prosecuted. The FBI reopened the case in 2004 and Till’s body was exhumed the following year, but the agency determined that statutes of limitations barred federal prosecution.¹⁰ A second reopening in 2017, prompted by allegations that Carolyn Bryant had recanted her trial testimony, closed on December 6, 2021 with no new charges; Bryant denied recanting when interviewed by the FBI.

In August 2025, the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board released 6,510 pages of federal documents related to the case, including 1955 correspondence in which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stated that the Department of Justice had found “no violation of Federal law” after the acquittals.¹⁴

Delayed Prosecutions and the Cold Case Laws

For most of Mississippi’s history, perpetrators faced no legal consequences. The Equal Justice Initiative describes these killings as having been carried out with “impunity,” often in broad daylight and sometimes on courthouse lawns.¹⁵ The rare cases that produced convictions took decades.

Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson on June 12, 1963 by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. A fingerprint on the rifle scope matched Beckwith, and a semi-circular scar above his right eye was consistent with the weapon’s recoil. Two all-white juries deadlocked in 1964, producing mistrials, and Beckwith walked free for nearly three decades. After the case was reopened in the early 1990s at the insistence of Evers’ widow, Myrlie, six witnesses came forward to testify they had heard Beckwith boast about the killing. He was convicted of murder in 1994 and sentenced to life.¹⁶¹⁷ The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in 1997.¹⁸

The 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County followed a similar arc. A 1967 federal trial convicted seven of eighteen defendants on conspiracy charges but none on murder. Ku Klux Klan organizer Edgar Ray Killen, widely believed to have orchestrated the killings, escaped conviction after a juror refused to convict a preacher. Killen was convicted of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the 41st anniversary of the crime, sentenced to three consecutive 20-year terms, and died in prison on January 11, 2018 at age 92.¹⁹²⁰

Congress formalized the effort to revisit these killings with the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2008, which provided $10 million in annual funding for a Justice Department cold case unit investigating pre-1970 racial murders. Between 2008 and 2012, the DOJ reopened more than 100 cases. Congress reauthorized the Act in 2016 and extended its scope to killings through 1980.²¹ The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018 created a review board tasked with declassifying federal records from unresolved cases between 1940 and 1979; since fall 2024 the board has released files on 31 incidents involving 36 victims, and its statutory deadline is January 2027.¹⁴ After nearly 200 failed attempts over more than a century, Congress passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in 2022, establishing lynching as a federal hate crime.²²

Contested Hanging Deaths in the Twenty-First Century

The question of whether Black Mississippians are still being lynched is not confined to history. Since 2000, at least eight Black men and teenagers have been found hanging from trees in the state. In most of these cases, law enforcement ruled the deaths suicides while families and advocates disputed the findings.²³

Raynard Johnson, 17, found hanging in Kokomo on June 16, 2000. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation ruled it a suicide; the DOJ closed its investigation in February 2001.
Nick Naylor, 23, found hanging in Porterville on January 9, 2003. Ruled a suicide.
Roy Veal, 55, found near Woodville on April 22, 2004. State police called the death “consistent with suicide.”
Frederick Jermaine Carter, 26, found in Greenwood on December 3, 2010. Ruled a suicide by the state medical examiner.
Otis Byrd, 54, found hanging from a tree in Port Gibson on March 19, 2015. The FBI and DOJ concluded there was no evidence of homicide.
Phillip Carroll, 22, found in Jackson on May 28, 2017. Ruled a suicide.
Deondrey Montreal Hopkins, 35, found in Columbus on May 5, 2019. Police ruled the death not a homicide.²³

The Death of Trey Reed

On September 15, 2025, 21-year-old Delta State University student Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found hanging from a tree on campus in Cleveland, Mississippi. The Mississippi State Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide on September 18, saying the autopsy showed no injuries consistent with an assault. The Bolivar County Coroner confirmed no broken bones, lacerations, contusions, or defensive wounds.²⁴²⁵

Reed’s family rejected the finding. Attorney Ben Crump and forensic pathologist Dr. Matthias I. Okoye conducted an independent autopsy, funded by Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp. U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson called for a federal investigation, and the NAACP characterized the death as a lynching. Representative Jonathan L. Jackson urged the Justice Department and Attorney General Pam Bondi to “fully deploy” the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.²⁶ As of April 2026, the independent autopsy results have not been released, Reed’s family has publicly expressed frustration about a lack of communication from Crump’s legal team, and no federal investigation has been announced.²⁷

The One Modern Case That Produced Convictions

On June 26, 2011, James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old Black man, was beaten and then run over by a pickup truck driven by white teenagers in Jackson. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves characterized the attack as a “lynching.” Ten defendants pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The driver, Deryl Paul Dedmon, received 50 years in federal prison and two life sentences in state court. John Aaron Rice received more than 18 years; Dylan Wade Butler received 7. The defendants were ordered to pay $840,000 in restitution to Anderson’s estate.²⁸²⁹

Where the Record Is Kept

The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson houses the state’s most direct effort to confront this history. Its Lynching Victims Monolith, in a gallery titled “Mississippi in Black and White,” features glass panels etched with the names of documented racial killing victims and the attackers’ stated motives. More than 600 victims are recorded.³⁰ The museum’s archives preserve individual narratives, including that of William H. Foote, a Civil War veteran and Oberlin College graduate serving as a deputy tax collector in Yazoo City when a mob killed him in 1883.³¹

The Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project partners with local coalitions to collect soil from lynching sites and install historical markers; a Newton County community dedicated one such marker in March 2024.³² EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, recognizes more than 4,400 lynching victims by name, including Emmett Till.³³

The decline of public spectacle lynching by the mid-twentieth century did not end racial murder in Mississippi. As one scholar has documented, the violence shifted from public rituals involving crowds to “secret and covert” killings.⁷ The contested hangings of the 2000s and 2020s, the disenfranchisement provisions still rooted in the 1890 constitution, and the still-unreleased autopsy of Trey Reed all indicate that the reckoning is unfinished.

1
NAACP. History of Lynching in America
2
Tuskegee University Archives. Lynching Statistics by Year, Dates, and Causes
3
Equal Justice Initiative. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
4
Mississippi Free Press. How Mississippi’s Jim Crow Laws Still Haunt Black Voters Today
5
Equal Justice Initiative. From Slavery to Segregation
6
Equal Justice Initiative. Lynching in America – Supplement: Lynchings by County
7
Mississippi Encyclopedia. Lynching and Mob Violence
8
Equal Justice Initiative. Carroll County Courthouse Massacre
9
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The Carroll County Courthouse Massacre
10
FBI. Emmett Till
11
Library of Congress. Murder of Emmett Till
12
Bill of Rights Institute. The Murder of Emmett Till
13
U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Officials Close Cold Case Re-Investigation of Murder of Emmett Till
14
Civil Rights Cold Case Records. Board Releases 6,510 Pages of Federal Records in Emmett Till Lynching Case
15
Equal Justice Initiative. Lynching in America
16
FBI. Medgar Evers
17
Mississippi Today. Byron De La Beckwith Convicted for Murder of Medgar Evers
18
Justia. Beckwith v. State of Mississippi
19
FBI. Mississippi Burning
20
WAPT News. Man Convicted in 1964 Killings of 3 Civil Rights Workers Dies in Prison
21
Center for Research on Race and Justice. Emmett Till Seventy Years Later
22
Equal Justice Initiative. Antilynching Act Signed Into Law
23
Washington Post. Modern-Day Mississippi Lynchings
24
Mississippi Free Press. Timeline: Trey Reed’s Hanging Death at Delta State University
25
Clarion-Ledger. What We Know About the Mississippi Hanging Death Investigation
26
Office of Rep. Jonathan L. Jackson. Statement on Tragic Lynching Deaths in Mississippi
27
Clarion-Ledger. Trey Reed Hanging Death: Family Wants Independent Autopsy Report
28
FBI. Ten Sentenced in Hate Crime Case
29
U.S. Department of Justice. Restitution Ordered in Jackson, Mississippi Hate Crime Case
30
Politico. Mississippi Reveals Its Full History for America’s Anniversary Year
31
Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Lynching Victims
32
Equal Justice Initiative. Community Remembrance Project
33
Equal Justice Initiative. National Memorial for Peace and Justice