In 2025, reviews surfaced of two Black males’s our bodies, Trey Reed and Tory Medley, being discovered hanging from bushes in Wisconsin and Mississippi. And because the households proceed to combat for solutions surrounding their family members’ deaths, a brand new report printed by JULIAN reveals that the speculations of their deaths being potential lynchings just isn’t that far-fetched.
Impressed by Ida B. Wells’ historic “A Purple Document,” which documented lynchings within the nineteenth century, Julian’s “Crimson Document” affords an in-depth evaluation of modern-day lynchings from 2000 to 2025. Difficult reviews that the final lynching within the US happened in 1981, the civil rights group’s evaluation “reveals recurring patterns of violence, systemic neglect, and legislation enforcement misconduct that echo the racial terror of earlier eras.”
“A Crimson Document exposes the long-buried fact about modern-day lynchings, calling these crimes precisely what they’re regardless of systemic makes an attempt to erase and deny them,” mentioned JULIAN founder Jill Collen Jefferson. “Lynching has by no means disappeared — it has tailored, hidden behind silence and indifference.”
“As we speak, as up to now, it survives within the shadows. If we’re to finish this brutality and safe justice for the victims, their households, and the communities left to hold the ache, we should confront it overtly and communicate its identify with out worry,” she added.
Because the examine notes, lynching is “one of many hardest hate crimes to show,” and is commonly dominated as a suicide initially. A sample many people noticed in reviews about Reed, the 25-year-old whose physique was discovered hanging from a tree at Delta State College in Mississippi. The examine defines a modern-day lynching (MDL) as “a a number of perpetrator murder, focusing on a gaggle or particular person, pushed by race, gender identification, or different bias with the intent of inflicting neighborhood terror or finishing up an extrajudicial murder for a perceived menace or wrongdoing.”
Over the past 25 years, the examine recognized over 70 modern-day lynchings throughout the seven states, Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama—with Mississippi reporting the very best quantity, 20, a rising pattern consultants first flagged in 2021. Amongst the rising variety of lynchings, the examine highlights the circumstances of individuals like Trevontae Shubert-Helton, 29, who was discovered hanging from a tree in a 90% white city in North Georgia in 2024, Willie Andrew Jones Jr., a 21-year-old Black man who was discovered hanging from a tree in 2018, and extra.
“These circumstances pressure us to confront an uncomfortable fact: supremacy remains to be enforced in our communities by means of terror — not as a relic of the previous, however as a residing, evolving observe,” Jefferson famous. “Many would fairly confine this violence to historical past books, however that denial is precisely what permits it to proceed. The extraordinary effort to obscure modern-day lynchings — greater than different acts of hate — reveals a deeper worry: that naming them would expose how deeply this violence is rooted in our current.”
Describing the examine as a mixture of documentation, defiance, and testimony, JULIAN emphasizes that these modern-day lynchings should not “historic echoes” however fairly “residing patterns” of one in every of America’s oldest types of racial violence.
“[MDLs] thrive in silence—within the gaps between coroner’s reviews and fact, between official explanations and the lived expertise of grieving households. What was as soon as a public ritual of white supremacy has turn into a quieter equipment of neglect, working by means of misclassification, insufficient investigation, and the failure to see Black, Brown, LGBTQIA+, indigenous, and bodily impaired lives as totally grievable,” the examine reads. “ This report is each a warning and a requirement. It requires the braveness to call what is occurring, the rigor to analyze with out bias, and the need to reform methods that also shield perpetrators over victims.”
