Lennon Lacy was a student attending West Bladen High School, in Bladenboro, North Carolina. On August 29, 2014, at age 17, he was found dead, hanging from the frame of a swing set in the center of a mobile home community. [1] The death was initially declared a suicide by North Carolina's Chief Medical Examiner, but Lacy's family believed that he had been lynched. [1] Lacy, who was black, had been dating a white woman, who also believed Lacy had been murdered, and who claimed neighbors had warned her that their interracial relationship was "not right". [2] In December 2014, the FBI announced it would investigate. [1] In June 2016, the conclusion of the FBI investigation was announced, having found "no evidence to pursue federal criminal civil rights charges". [3]
The death of Lacy is the central event in a documentary on lynching in America, Always in Season, shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2019, where it won the special jury award for moral urgency. Ed Pilkington wrote in The Guardian that the film "is both a homage to Lennon Lacy and a critique of America’s rotten racial core, weaving the two together through an exploration of blurred memory, denial, obfuscation, betrayal and loss." [4]
Twin Peaks is an American mystery serial drama television series created by Mark Frost and David Lynch. It premiered on ABC on April 8, 1990, and originally ran for two seasons until its cancellation in 1991. The show returned in 2017 for a third season on Showtime.
MOVE, originally the Christian Movement for Life, is a communal organization that advocates for nature laws and natural living, founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, by John Africa. The name, styled in all capital letters, is not an acronym. MOVE lived in a communal setting in West Philadelphia, abiding by philosophies of anarcho-primitivism. The group combined revolutionary ideology, similar to that of the Black Panthers, with work for animal rights.
Bladenboro is a town in Bladen County, North Carolina, United States. As of the 2010 census, the town population was 1,750.
Emmett Louis Till was an African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the acquittal of his killers drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.
A noose is a loop at the end of a rope in which the knot tightens under load and can be loosened without untying the knot. The knot can be used to secure a rope to a post, pole, or animal but only where the end is in a position that the loop can be passed over.
Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and ended during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimised ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, as the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states.
Jon Wiener is an American historian and journalist based in Los Angeles, California. His most recent book is Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a Los Angeles Times bestseller co-authored by Mike Davis. He waged a 25-year legal battle to win the release of the FBI's files on John Lennon. Wiener played a key role in efforts to expose the surveillance, as well as the behind-the-scenes battling between the government and the former Beatle, and is an expert on the FBI-versus-Lennon controversy. A professor emeritus of United States history at the University of California, Irvine and host of The Nation's weekly podcast, Start Making Sense, he is also a contributing editor to the progressive political weekly magazine The Nation. He also hosts a weekly radio program in Los Angeles.
Kirsten Marina Costas was an American high school student who was murdered by her classmate Bernadette Protti in June 1984.
Loretta Elizabeth Lynch is an American lawyer who served as the 83rd attorney general of the United States from 2015 to 2017. She was appointed by President Barack Obama to succeed Eric Holder and previously served as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York under Presidents Bill Clinton (1999–2001), George W Bush (2001) and Obama (2010–2015). As a U.S. attorney, Lynch oversaw federal prosecutions in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island.
Benjamin Lloyd Crump is an American attorney who specializes in civil rights and catastrophic personal injury cases such as wrongful death lawsuits. His practice has focused on cases such as those of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Keenan Anderson, Randy Cox, and Tyre Nichols, people affected by the Flint water crisis, the estate of Henrietta Lacks, and the plaintiffs behind the 2019 Johnson & Johnson baby powder lawsuit alleging the company's talcum powder product led to ovarian cancer diagnoses. Crump is also founder of the firm Ben Crump Law of Tallahassee, Florida.
Rhiannon Giddens is an American musician known for her eclectic folk music. She is a founding member of the country, blues, and old-time music band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, where she was the lead singer, fiddle player, and banjo player.
Audrie Taylor Pott was a 15-year-old student at Saratoga High School in Saratoga, California, who died by suicide. She had been sexually assaulted at a party eight days earlier by three 16-year-old boys she knew, and nude pictures of her were posted online with accompanying bullying.
Shaun Assael is an American author and award-winning investigative journalist. He is the author of four books that deal with sports, crime and culture.
Shedrick Thompson was an African-American man from Fauquier County, Virginia, who was accused of crimes against his white employers in 1932. He was later found dead, hanging from a tree. Upon discovery, his body was mutilated and burned. While an official verdict declared it a suicide, others maintained that he was lynched. He was 39.
On August 10, 2019, guards found the American financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein unresponsive in his Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York, jail cell, where he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. After prison guards performed CPR, he was transported in cardiac arrest to the New York Downtown Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:39 am. The New York City medical examiner and the Justice Department Inspector General ruled that Epstein's death was a suicide by hanging. Epstein's lawyers challenged the medical examiner's conclusion and opened their own investigation, hiring pathologist Michael Baden.
Robert L. Fuller was a 24-year-old African-American man who was found hanging from a tree in front of the City Hall in Palmdale, California. His death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. City officials announced that they supported an independent investigation into his death. On July 9, 2020, the LA County Sheriff's office held a news conference announcing that the death was correctly determined a suicide and provided more supporting details from the investigation, including evidence that Fuller had purchased the rope used to hang himself on May 14, almost a month prior. There is video evidence of Fuller using the same EBT card for other purchases subsequent to the purchase of the rope.