The “Crimson Record” Study Highlights Patterns in Suspected Lynching Cases Often Ruled Suicides in the South Over the Last 25 Years
A new civil rights report is challenging the long held belief that lynching in America is a crime of the distant past.
In 2025, the bodies of two Black men, Trey Reed and Tory Medley, were found hanging from trees in separate incidents in Wisconsin and Mississippi. As their families continue to question official findings, a new study argues that such cases may not be isolated tragedies, but part of a broader pattern that has persisted for decades.
“Crimson Record” Tracks Modern Day Lynchings
Inspired by Ida B. Wells’ historic 1895 publication A Red Record, the organization JULIAN has released “Crimson Record,” an analysis documenting suspected modern day lynchings between 2000 and 2025.
The study disputes claims that the last lynching in the United States occurred in 1981. Instead, it identifies more than 70 suspected modern day lynchings across seven Southern states: Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama. Mississippi recorded the highest number, with 20 reported cases. Researchers say the trend was first flagged by experts in 2021 and appears to be increasing.
JULIAN defines a modern day lynching as a multiple perpetrator homicide targeting an individual or group, driven by race, gender identity, or other bias, with the intent to terrorize a community or carry out an extrajudicial killing over a perceived threat or wrongdoing.
Cases Often Initially Ruled Suicides
According to the report, one of the most consistent patterns in these deaths is how they are classified.
Lynching, the study notes, is among the hardest hate crimes to prove. In many instances, cases are initially ruled suicides. That pattern was widely observed in reporting on Trey Reed, the 25 year old found hanging from a tree at Delta State University in Mississippi.
Among the cases highlighted are Trevontae Shubert Helton, 29, whose body was found hanging from a tree in a North Georgia town that is 90 percent white in 2024, and Willie Andrew Jones Jr., a 21 year old Black man found hanging from a tree in 2018.
The report argues that these cases reflect more than isolated incidents.
“These cases force us to confront an uncomfortable truth: supremacy is still enforced in our communities through terror, not as a relic of the past, but as a living, evolving practice,” said JULIAN founder Jill Collen Jefferson. “Many would rather confine this violence to history books, but that denial is exactly what allows it to continue.”
Jefferson added that what once operated as a public spectacle has, in her view, shifted into a quieter system of neglect and misclassification.
Systemic Neglect and Calls for Reform
Describing “Crimson Record” as a mix of documentation, defiance, and testimony, JULIAN contends that modern day lynchings are not historical echoes but living patterns of racial violence.
The report states that these deaths “thrive in silence, in the gaps between coroner’s reports and truth, between official explanations and the lived experience of grieving families.” It argues that inadequate investigations, misclassification of deaths, and systemic bias allow such cases to fade without full accountability.
“A Crimson Record exposes the long buried truth about modern day lynchings, calling these crimes exactly what they are despite systemic attempts to erase and deny them,” Jefferson said. “If we are to end this brutality and secure justice for the victims, their families, and the communities left to carry the pain, we must confront it openly and speak its name without fear.”
The study ultimately calls for unbiased investigations, institutional reform, and greater public acknowledgment of what it describes as an evolving form of one of America’s oldest racial terror tactics.
