The Post ignored that Raynard Johnson had suffered a break-up hours before his death, among other relevant facts.
According to the Washington Post’s DeNeen L. Brown, the campaign of terror prosecuted against black Mississippians in the Jim Crow era persists to the present day — a disturbing revelation that must be backed up by shocking new evidence.
“Since 2000, there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in Mississippi, according to court records and police reports,” begins Brown. The article, titled “Lynchings in Mississippi Never Stopped,” catalogues all eight, referring to the subjects unambiguously as “victims.”
Oddly, the article fails to reproduce for the reader the relevant facts surrounding most of these incidents, relying instead on incomplete summaries of the controversies, followed by commentary from the deceased’s family.
Perhaps the most striking example of Brown’s journalistic malpractice comes in her representation of the death of Raynard Johnson. The 17-year-old Mississippi native’s passing in 2000 triggered not only local turmoil, but a Department of Justice investigation and national scrutiny brought on by the involvement of the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Brown’s account of Johnson’s death reads:
Raynard Johnson was found hanging from a pecan tree in his front yard in Kokomo, Miss. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation called the hanging a suicide, according to records. But his family believes Johnson was lynched, Jefferson [a civil rights lawyer] said.
In 2000, the Rev. Jesse Jackson traveled to Mississippi to call attention to Johnson’s hanging.
“There’s enough circumstantial stuff here that warrants a serious investigation. We will not rest until those who committed this murder are brought to justice,” Jackson told demonstrators before leading a march to the pecan tree where Raynard was found. “We reject the suicide theory.”
In February 2001, the Justice Department announced it ended its investigation into Johnson’s death: “The evidence does not support a federal criminal civil rights prosecution.”
Raynard’s mother, Maria Johnson, says she is still waiting for some kind of justice. “My son’s death marked the modern age of a fight that Black people have been in in Mississippi and this nation for centuries,” Johnson said. “They tried to cover this up, but I’ve never given up hope. And that’s the thing that should scare them, because I never will.”
Innuendo and invocation of Jesse Jackson aside, it’s entirely unclear why anyone should believe that Johnson’s death was a race-related homicide covered up by the authorities rather than a suicide. Every single major piece of evidence in the case — forensic and circumstantial — points to the latter.
In fact, there exists an obvious and proximate cause for the tragedy; Brown omits the fact that Johnson’s death was directly preceded by heartbreak. Only hours before he was found, Johnson was spurned by his love interest, Taccara Matthews, who recounted the events of that day to investigators, telling them, “I told him I love him, but I loved someone else, and he sat there just looking at me. And he asked me if I was ready to go home.” Johnson’s brother, Roger, confirmed that the two were together prior to Johnson’s death, and he even provided evidence that Matthews was concerned about Johnson’s mental state.
“She called back and said, ‘Did Raynard make it back all right?’” he remembered.
The physical evidence also supports the theory that Johnson died by his own hand. Neither his body, the surrounding area, nor his manner of death indicated foul play.
Two separate autopsies — one commissioned by the Johnson family — and a review of the evidence by famed medical examiner Dr. Michael Baden came to the same conclusion: Johnson had committed suicide.
Andrew Corsello summed up the coroners’ findings for GQ:
No signs of struggle. No bruises or scratches. Nothing under the fingernails. No handcuff or duct-tape marks. Nothing forceful enough to tear the bead bracelet, with its flimsy elastic band, from the wrist. No horizontal ligature marks (the signature of manual strangulation) to go with the belt’s V-shaped mark. No broken hyoid—the fragile neck bone almost always pulverized by the violence of strangulation. No bruising on the inner lip to indicate the forceful application of chloroform cloth. No burns from the tines of a stun gun. Nothing at the scene that smacked of any kind of skirmish; even the flowers in the pecan-tree planter, where Jerry Johnson stood to cut his son down, remained untouched.
And the circumstantial evidence speculated upon by activists such as Jackson turns out to be much less convincing than Brown lets on.
For example, there were legitimate questions to be asked about the origins of the belt from which Johnson was hanging — with early accounts maintaining that the belt wasn’t his. However, others who knew Johnson well confirmed that it was indeed his. One friend noted she’d seen him wear multiple belts. Matthews went further, saying she’d seen him wearing a braided belt just like the one he used to hang himself. Security footage from a grocery store supported Matthews’ statement, showing the belt around his waist on the day of his death.
There were also rumors that the murderers may not have been fond of Johnson spending time with young, white women. Roger claimed that a nameless white officer had complained about as much to him. What this murder motive adds in stoking the nation’s collective imagination it lacks in evidence, though.
Not only did the physical evidence at the scene show no signs of anyone else’s involvement, but by Roger’s own admission, that same white officer had dropped off two girls — including the officer’s niece — at his home just a couple of days before Johnson’s death. It would be odd indeed for a violently racist man to let his white niece out at a black boy’s house.
Jackson alleged that the FBI had confiscated and conveniently lost track of an answering-machine tape with damning evidence. Was it a cover-up? Not at all, the “disappeared” material was returned to the family in due course after routine examination.
Finally, after the autopsies and Raynard Johnson’s funeral, came the reverend’s most inflammatory statement, and on national television to boot: Johnson’s throat had been slit.
“He [Jackson] knew it wasn’t true,” said one local law-enforcement official at the time. “If by some stretch of the imagination he didn’t, he should have. He was in direct contact with the family, and the family had the police and autopsy reports.”
Raynard Johnson’s death was a horrible tragedy. But it was, in all likelihood, one caused by inner agony and teenage angst — not deep-seated racial animus. The hard evidence — as opposed to the history of and stereotypes about the American South, emotional appeals of scarred relatives, and willingness of the likes of Jesse Jackson to capitalize on the situation — points to a personal crisis, not a conspiracy.
Luther Ray Abel is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and attends Lawrence University. He is a returning summer editorial intern at National Review. Isaac Schorr is an ISI Fellow at National Review.