Discovery of hanged black man in Mississippi raises questions about possible lynching
Spectre of racial violence looms large in Mississippi as authorities investigate whether ex-convict committed suicide or was murdered
They found the black man's body hanging by a bedsheet from a locust tree. Claiborne County Sheriff Marvin Lucas called in everybody he could think of. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. The FBI.
By late Friday, a day after the disturbing discovery, they had identified the man as Otis Byrd, a 54-year-old riverboat worker who had been missing for more than two weeks.
At a time when violence against African-Americans - some of it at the hands of the police - has become one of the nation's most incendiary points of civic friction, reports of a black man dangling from a tree deep in the woods of rural Mississippi was bound to attract attention.
Across the US, there were 4,742 lynchings between 1882 and 1968, about 3,400 of which targeted blacks, while 1,297 involved whites - mainly allies of civil rights efforts - according to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a civil rights advocacy group. Mississippi had the most lynchings, 581.
Claiborne County has the third-highest percentage of African-American residents of any US county, an 84 per cent majority of the population.
