Suicides or Lynchings?
23rd June 2020 · 0 Comments
While Black Lives Matter protests continue against killer cops and white supremacists who have killed Black people with impunity, we have paid scant attention to a rash of alleged “suicides by hangings” of African Americans occurring across America.
Over the past three weeks four Black men and one Latino man were found hanging in California, Texas and New York.
In California, Malcolm Harsch, a 38-year-old Black man, was found hanging from a tree on May 31 in Victorville. In Palmdale, the body of 24-year-old Robert Fuller was discovered on June 10, also hanging from a tree.
A day before Fuller was found, Dominique Alexander, 27, was discovered on June 9, hanging from a tree in Fort Tyron Park in Upper Manhattan.
In Texas, on Monday, June 15, a Latino man was found hanging and, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, a 17-year-old Black male teenager hung himself in the early morning hours of Wednesday, June 17.
That Billie Holliday’s “Southern Trees Bear Strange Fruit,” the singer’s 20th century ode to the epidemic of lynching across the 19th- and 20th-century south by neo-confederates, may still be relevant in the 21st Century is both saddening and maddening, especially when we may be witnessing the probable spread of lynching nationwide.
In the past, most lynchings went unpunished. Rarely, if ever, in the 20th century and early 21st century, was anyone held accountable for lynching Black people.
Today, more often than not, when a Black body is found hanging, the authorities immediately cite suicide as the cause of death.
Which begs the question, when did suicide by lynching become the chosen method of self-destruction by Black people?
Protesters and activists suspect Fuller and Harsch were lynched. “My brother was not suicidal,” said Fuller’s sister, Diamond Alexander at a weekend rally. “My brother was a survivor.”
We contend that authorities must pause and conduct in-depth investigations of these hangings because what we know as Black people, is that we value life and family, above all else, because we have to fight to live every day that the sun rises. And we don’t usually go in for purposeful suicide. Maybe accidental suicide: drug overdoses, benign neglect, maybe, because we don’t go for medical checkups, smoking or other self-harming habits, maybe…but suicide? No way.
That’s not to say that Black people don’t commit suicide. Suicide was the 16th-leading cause of death overall in 2003 for African Americans. Also, a Centers for Disease Control Report found that firearms were the predominant method of suicide among African Americans regardless of sex or age, accounting for 47.42 percent of all suicides.
Ball State University researchers found that 52 percent of the 560 males aged 13 to 19 who died by suicide from 2015 to 2017 used firearms – a method for which the fatality rate approaches 90 percent.
These statistics don’t exclude hanging as a method of suicide, rather that suicide within the African-American population is concentrated among adolescents and youth. The suicide rate declines among older African Americans, specifically among adult Black males.
Which is why we are asking, did these five people commit suicide or could these deaths be homicidal lynchings? Were these Black and brown people lynched by white supremacists?
We may never know, given the authorities’ proclivity for what is clearly willful blindness.
Rushing to declare suicide as the cause of these deaths raises two questions: Why the rush to judgment? Will protesters have to demonstrate against authorities for the lack of real investigations into what appears to be suspicious hangings?
This is a time of reckoning. The killings of Black people by those in authorities and white supremacists must end, by any means necessary. Full Stop.
This article originally published in the June 22, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
