The body was found Thursday morning hanging from a tree in Claiborne, Mississippi, law enforcement officials confirm. Authorities have not released the name of the victim, but the FBI has launched a probe into the incident.
The coroner was unable to identify the body due to its decomposition, Fox 40 News reported, though the local branch of the NAACP indicated the man's name was Otis Byrd.
The FBI probe is running parallel to state and local investigations.
Byrd, 54, was last seen on March 2, when a friend dropped him off at a casino hotel on the Mississippi riverfront. Police had been searching for him since he was reported missing less than a week later on March 8.
According to an FBI statement, Byrd's body was found a half-mile from his last-known residence.
The discovery of Byrd's body hanging from a tree resonated strongly with Mississippi residents and others across the country, with many posting to social media that the incident brings up a history many would rather forget.
Lynchings became a gruesome part of the post-Civil War southern US, including in Mississippi, where the practice of murdering people — particularly African-Americans — by extrajudicial mobs unhappy with the US granting constitutional rights to former black slaves became commonplace. Lynchings in the South become more common again during the 1960s Civil Rights movement, when racist groups like the KKK murdered activists and civil rights workers by hanging.
Recent data suggest that between the end of the Civil War and 1968, the year of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, around 4,000 black men, women and children were hanged in the United States.
In December 2010, the body of a 26-year-old black man was found hanged from a tree in Greenwood, Mississippi, about 135 miles northeast of Claiborne. Investigators ruled Frederick Jermaine Carter's death a suicide, while many local African Americans called it a lynching.
In North Carolina last December, the body of 17-year-old Lennon Lacy was found hanged. In that case too, authorities ruled suicide, while Lennon's family protested that his death was a lynching.
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