The FBI are investigating the death of a black man who was found hanging from a tree in Mississippi on Thursday.
Otis Byrd, 54, was reported missing nearly 3 weeks ago. His body was found hanging from a tree in a wooded area in Claiborne County in western Mississippi, about half a mile from his home.
Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, called for a federal probe to determine if Byrd’s death was a hate crime.
“Mr. Byrd was found hung in a tree, and because of that we want to ensure it was not in fact a racial hate crime,” said Johnson.
The feds are also trying to exclude suicide as a factor in Byrd’s death.
Byrd served 25 years in prison for murdering a white woman in Mississippi.
Lynching, or extrajudicial public execution by hanging, was once a common practice in parts of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By one estimate, some 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were lynched from 1882 to 1968.
The incident comes seven months after a 17-year-old black male named Lennon Lacy was found hanging from a swing set in North Carolina, in a case local authorities initially ruled a suicide but which the FBI announced in December it was probing as suspicious. Source
