By Dr. Yusef Ismail
(Newark, New Jersey) In 1939, Billie Holiday stepped to the microphone at the Café Society in New York, the room went pitch black save for a single spotlight on her face, and she sang a dirge for the American South. The song was an autopsy of the national soul, set to music — a demand that a country look plainly at the bodies of Black men left hanging in its poplar trees and name what it saw.
For this singular act of musical defiance, the United States government hunted her. Harry Anslinger, the founding commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, weaponized her struggles with addiction, relentlessly stalking her in a deliberate campaign to silence the song. When Holiday lay dying in a New York hospital bed in 1959, federal agents raided her room, handcuffed her frail body to the bed rails, and denied her vital medical care. Her tragic end was not merely a casualty of illness; it was a slow, deliberate assassination by the state. The message was unmistakable: exposing the machinery of American violence guarantees you will become a victim of it.
Nearly a century later, the trees are still bearing fruit. But the theater has changed shape.
The violence against Black bodies in America no longer needs a rope and a mob to do its work. It has learned the sterile dialects of the police report, the coroner's summary, and the phrase "perceived threat."
To understand the death of Wali Bey — a Newark man shot dead by police on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2026 — it is not enough to examine the fatal encounter itself. We have to trace the soil it grew from: two and a half centuries of a nation deciding, over and over, in courtrooms and legislatures and back yards, what a Black life is permitted to cost.
The architecture of racial terror in America did not begin with rope. It began with law.
From the earliest years of the republic, the American legal system built a scaffold under white supremacy piece by piece — fugitive slave statutes that made every Black body a potential fugitive regardless of status, Black Codes that criminalized unemployment and movement the moment slavery ended, a convict-leasing system that let Southern states re-enslave Black men through the courts almost the instant the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery everywhere except "as punishment for crime." Lynching did not operate outside this system. It operated as its enforcement arm — the violence that policed the boundaries the law had already drawn, administered not by the state directly but by mobs the state declined to prosecute.
Between the end of Reconstruction and the mid-twentieth century, thousands of Black Americans were murdered this way, most of them never brought before a court, most of the killers never facing one either.
In 1962, the journalist Ralph Ginzburg assembled the most damning record of that era in a single volume: 100 Years of Lynchings. Ginzburg's method was almost clerical in its restraint — he simply reprinted the newspaper accounts as they ran at the time, from papers large and small, Black and white, radical and conservative, and let them speak. What emerges is not just a catalogue of killings but a portrait of a press and a public that often treated them as spectacle, sometimes as sport, and almost never as crime. The book's power is that it requires no editorializing. The institutions did the indicting themselves, in real time, in their own words.
That is the inheritance this piece is written against: not simply violence, but the accompanying refusal to call it what it was, by the very institutions charged with investigating it. Ginzburg himself was continuing an older project. In 1895, the journalist Ida B. Wells published A Red Record, the first systematic attempt to document lynching in America using the killers' own newspapers and statistics against them.
This February, the civil-rights organization JULIAN — the Justice for Julius Action Network, founded by attorney Jill Collen Jefferson — released the direct descendant of that work: A Crimson Record, a seven-state analysis of what the report calls modern-day lynchings between 2000 and 2025. Investigators identified more than 70 suspected cases across Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas — Mississippi alone accounting for 20 — and catalogued more than 150 total fatal hate crimes and suspicious deaths targeting Black, Brown, immigrant, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ people across that same span and region.
The end of lynching's most visible era did not end the underlying arrangement. Redlining rebuilt residential segregation through federal housing policy rather than mob violence. The war on drugs rebuilt convict leasing's logic through mandatory minimums and disparate enforcement. Voter suppression rebuilt disenfranchisement through purge lists and ID laws rather than poll taxes and literacy tests. Each successor system did quietly, through paperwork, what the rope had done publicly, through spectacle. The throughline is not that America has failed to change. It is that America has repeatedly changed the instrument while preserving the function.
Which brings us to a harder, more recent question: what happens when a Black body is still found hanging from a tree, in this century, and the state's answer is a shrug?
The honest answer is more complicated than the myth of the modern lynching allows, and the complication is itself the story. It is also, as of this writing, an accelerating one: advocates and journalists tracking these cases count at least ten Black people found hanging under suspicious circumstances in 2026 alone, in states as far apart as Mississippi, Michigan, and New York.
But we must ask a devastating question: what is the functional difference between a state that looks at a lynched Black man and calls it a suicide, and a state that looks at an unarmed, slaughtered Black man and calls it justifiable?
If the modern hanging represents the state's violence by omission—the averted gaze, the hasty coroner, the closed file—then the police shooting is its violence by commission. The lynch mob did not vanish; it simply put on a uniform and learned the language of the penal code. Whether a Black body is left suspended from a poplar branch in Mississippi or bleeding out on the asphalt in Newark, the underlying transaction remains identical: the destruction of Black life, followed immediately by the state's self-absolution. The rope and the service weapon are merely different technologies of the same American impulse.
When we pull the lens back from the woods to the patrol cars, the agonizing ambiguity of the coroner's report gives way to the chilling, undeniable certainty of the national ledger.
In 2025, American police killed 1,314 people. Law enforcement in the United States still killed someone, on average, every seven hours in 2025 — all but six days of the year without exception. Black Americans were still 2.6 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans were. Nearly a quarter of all fatal police shootings are visited on a population that is roughly thirteen percent of the country.
We like to believe that escaping the rural South, or the reach of a hostile white sheriff, guarantees safety. We place our faith in northern geography, in Democratic governance, and in Black political leadership. Newark, New Jersey, complicates that faith more than almost anywhere in the country.
Ras Baraka has spent more than a decade cultivating a national profile as a progressive standard-bearer. He is a vocal critic of the Trump administration, a defender of immigrant communities, and a visible mourner of George Floyd. Newark is a city that is nearly half Black, led by a Black mayor, and patrolled by one of the more demographically diverse departments in the state. On paper, it is the sanctuary the Great Migration promised.
The city's own policing data tells a harder story.
According to Police Scorecard, an independent nonprofit that compiles police-violence data nationally, Newark police killed 13 people between 2013 and 2025. Sixty-nine percent of those killed were Black, in a city that is 48 percent Black. Nearly a quarter of the people killed by Newark police in that period were unarmed. The department has more police shootings per arrest than 96 percent of departments nationwide.
This is not happening in a city that has done nothing about it. Newark has operated for years under a federal consent decree, imposed after a Department of Justice investigation found a massive pattern of unconstitutional stops, excessive force, and discriminatory enforcement. This is a legacy of the department Baraka inherited, not one he built. But a consent decree is a ceiling on the worst abuses, not a floor under public trust. The killings the data describes did not stop when the decree began. They span Baraka's entire tenure, dating back to his years as South Ward councilman.
The specific tactics inside those numbers matter. They reveal a deadly, recurring willingness to fire into moving vehicles and a chaotic reliance on plainclothes units. For a decade, national policing standards have tried to ban firing into cars. Why? Because when an officer stands in the path of a moving vehicle, they are often creating the very threat they claim to be escaping.
Everett Rand, 29, was shot dead in May 2023. Pursued on foot by officers in the South Ward, police alleged he dropped and picked up a handgun. A state grand jury declined to file criminal charges.
Carl Dorsey III, 39, was killed just after midnight on New Year's Day, 2021. Plainclothes Newark Detective Rod Simpkins collided with Dorsey on foot and discharged his weapon as he was falling. Dorsey was completely unarmed. It took the state two full years to bring the case to a grand jury, which ultimately declined to indict.
Gregory Griffin, 46, was shot by Newark Officer Jovanny Crespo in 2019 after fleeing a traffic stop. Crespo left his vehicle three separate times during the pursuit to fire into the moving car, killing Griffin. In a historically rare outcome, a jury later convicted Crespo of aggravated manslaughter. It stands as proof that accountability is possible, but serves as a glaring reminder of how rare that outcome truly is.
Talif Scudder, 23, was killed in 2016 during a foot pursuit after authorities alleged he displayed a weapon. It was swiftly ruled a justifiable use of force.
Kashad Ashford, 23, was killed in 2014 after a pursuit that ended with officers firing into his wrecked vehicle. A grand jury declined to indict. His case proves a terrifying point: a young Black man from Newark can be killed by these exact tactics without ever leaving the region, no matter which local police department is wearing the badge.
Then there are the unnamed—eight men whose lives faded into a statistical void between 2013 and 2022, their names shielded by institutional opacity. A man killed in a 2013 alleged robbery. Two men shot in 2015, one during a chaotic plainclothes street stop where officers claimed he drew a weapon. Two more in 2017, including one shot after reaching for his waistband—no weapon was ever recovered. Another killed in a 2018 narcotics raid. A man shot in a 2020 domestic response. And a man killed during a 2022 standoff.
Eight lives swallowed by police reports. Every single one cleared by internal reviews or silent grand juries. They are not anomalies; they are the rhythmic drumbeat of a machine functioning exactly as it was designed to.
And now, Wali Bey.
On January 19, 2026 — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — Newark Police Officer Nashid Reynolds was part of a plainclothes and uniformed detail conducting narcotics surveillance near Ross Street and Evergreen Avenue. Bey and a second man were sitting in a parked minivan.
According to community accounts that the state has not disputed on the record, several plainclothes officers approached the vehicle with weapons drawn and masks on. Bey, by his family's account, tried to drive away from what looked like an ambush. Reynolds fired through the windshield. Bey, 42, was pronounced dead at University Hospital less than an hour later. The second man survived.
The state's Office of Public Integrity and Accountability opened its inquiry immediately and released body-camera footage within weeks — a transparency step no Mississippi county sheriff in this piece ever came close to offering. But community organizers noted that months passed with "near radio silence" from the department and City Hall. Mayor Baraka's characterization of witness accounts as "a stream of misinformation" deeply wounded a family forced to watch their loved one shot through his own windshield while sitting in a parked van.
The distance between a Black man found hanging behind his own house in Missouri and Wali Bey bleeding out on the asphalt in Newark is not measured in miles or decades. It is measured in the heavy, collective exhaustion of a community that has never been granted true sanctuary.
In the hanging deaths, the state fails through omission. Investigations are closed before they truly open, evidence is swept away, and grieving families are met with the deafening silence of an averted gaze. The state's sin is the refusal to see.
In Newark, the state fails through commission. There is no averted gaze; there is only the barrel of a gun. An agent of the state fired the shot. The only question left is whether the system will answer for it, or if it will simply hide behind the badge.
Both failures are branches of the exact same tree. Omission allows the state to avoid calling a lynching a lynching. Commission allows the state to call an execution a "perceived threat" or a "reasonable use of force." In neither reality does the Black family receive what every other American family is granted by default: the right to keep their loved ones alive, or at the very least, a fast, transparent accounting of why they were stolen.
Ras Baraka cannot mourn George Floyd in the daylight while presiding over a city where Black Newarkers are dying at disproportionate rates in the dark. A Black mayor, a diverse police force, and progressive branding are not shields against anti-Black violence. When the blood hits the bricks, representation without accountability is just a different aesthetic wrapped around the exact same machinery of death. It is the profound heartbreak of finding no sanctuary, even among our own.
Wali Bey should be going home to his children today. So should Carl Dorsey. So should Danye Jones and Nolan Wells.
Until the machinery that investigates these deaths moves as fast as the machinery that produces them, the country will remain trapped in the dark room Billie Holiday sang to in 1939. The theater simply remodeled. The rope became the service weapon. The mob became the plainclothes unit. The poplar tree became the windshield of a parked minivan.
In her song, Holiday sang of the scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Today, the scent of magnolias has been replaced by the smell of burnt gunpowder and exhaust, but the bitter crop remains identical.
Recently, Representative Ayanna Pressley sent a letter to the Department of Justice, calling for independent federal audits of these deaths. "We cannot stand idly by while the strange fruit of Black bodies hang from trees across the country," she wrote.
She did not coin that phrase for the occasion. It has been sitting there, waiting for us to look at it, since 1939. The question now is not how many more names it will take before we finally cut the tree down. The question is how long this country will continue to pretend it doesn't see the blood at the root.
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