America is still hanging its conscience from trees

From Fear to Fire

I am the granddaughter of Ellis Island immigrants — my grandfather came from Czechoslovakia, my grandmother from Serbia. They arrived in the early 1900s chasing the myth of American freedom, and even they were branded “too different” to be allowed love without punishment. The Catholic Church excommunicated my grandfather for marrying a Serbian woman. The price of re-entry? Adopting his own children, as if his bloodline wasn’t good enough.

My grandpa, Joseph Kellner, seen here with his family in front of their home in Shantytown, PA. He is holding the violin.

My mother Elaine was born into that ugliness. She had darker skin, kinky hair — and for that, her own mother denied her, told her she hadn’t birthed a “black baby.”

My mom, Elaine center, smiling with her siiblings. Her hair is up in braids.

Elaine spent her childhood being abused, not just for who she was but for what she looked like in America’s color-coded caste system. She spent a year bedridden with rheumatic fever, and still her mother’s cruelty didn’t stop. Passing as both Black and white meant she was rejected by both. And rather than rage at that injustice, she fled into conservatism — trying to be “as white as possible.”

I did the opposite.

I became a teacher, dedicating my career to serving students of color who deserved to see their histories and brilliance honored in the classroom. I buried too many of them when poverty, police brutality, gang violence, or untreated disease stole their lives. I have PTSD from the funerals of my own students. I am haunted by their faces.

Yet I refuse to be silent. Because silence is complicity.

And silence is exactly what America still offers when Black men are found hanging from trees.

In just the past year:

Javion Magee, 21,

Javion Magee, 21, found in North Carolina. Ruled a suicide. His family demanded answers until police rolled out Walmart surveillance footage showing him buying the rope himself. The fact that they had to fight so hard not to believe it was lynching tells you everything about the terror stitched into Black memory.

Dennoriss “NaNa” Richardson, 39,

in Alabama, discovered hanging in an abandoned house. Police called it suicide. His family rejected it — and for good reason: he was suing the Sheffield Police Department for abuse when he died. Eleven documented lynchings happened in that very county during Jim Crow. The FBI was called in only because of community outrage.

A 58-year-old man in Albany, New York, believed to be Earl Smith,

found hanging on a city street in June. Police said “suicide” before his name was even released. Local media barely covered it until neighbors demanded to know why nobody was talking about a Black man hanging in public in 2025.

An unidentified man in Oakland, California, hanging from a tree along a public trail. No press release. No autopsy report. Police cleared the scene and said “suicide” within hours. Activists had to flyer neighborhoods and call the FBI themselves just to get attention.

Demartravion “Trey” Reed, 21,

found hanging on his university campus in Mississippi just this month. Authorities declared no foul play. But Reed’s family hired Ben Crump, Colin Kaepernick paid for an independent autopsy, and the NAACP flat-out said: “Our people have not historically hung ourselves from trees.”

Every one of these cases is stamped suicide. Maybe some are. But the very fact that Black families, Black communities, and civil rights groups have to beg for second looks tells you the system isn’t trusted. How could it be, when America has centuries of pretending lynching was just “self-harm”? When sheriffs are coroners, when the same police departments accused of brutality are allowed to investigate their own critics’ deaths?

I come from a mother who was told she wasn’t her mother’s child because her skin was too dark. I come from a classroom where my students’ lives were cut short by bullets and poverty. I am not Black, but I know this country kills Black children in ways large and small, silent and screaming. And I will not stand by while people pretend it’s anything less than a war.

The war is waged in prisons, in schools stripped of resources, in the “suicides” that look like echoes of strange fruit. It is waged every time a case is closed before it is even opened.

We owe our children better than this. We owe every Javion, every NaNa, every Trey a full measure of justice, not a rush to bury the body and the story.

Because America is still hanging its conscience from trees. And I am here to shout until it finally cuts the rope.