After a young adult’s death, a tiny Mississippi city confronts certainly one of 
racism’s taboos that is oldest.
- By Scott Baldauf Staff author of The Christian Science Track
By all reports, Raynard Johnson ended up being an excellent kid: a straight-A pupil, a skilled soccer player, a church-going son who constantly wore a grin.
Then when the twelfth grade junior ended up being discovered hanging from the pecan tree, simply actions from their entry way, this mixed-race community in rural Mississippi discovered it self confronted by uncomfortable concerns: Did Raynard commit committing committing suicide, as a coroner’s report shows? Or was he lynched by a person who disapproved of his dating girls that are white?
«He would not hang himself, for me,» claims Curtis Johnson, a cousin, sitting at a picnic dining table in the shady front side garden. «He ended up being life that is enjoying well.»
With Raynard’s family members doubting the formal report — along with the NAACP investing in a personal detective to look to the child’s death — the problems of battle and interracial relationship are abruptly looming big in a city where white and black colored real time side by side and work, worship, and seafood together.
«You go into the supermarket, and individuals state, ‘How ya doin’?’ whether you are black or white,» claims Craig Robbins, superintendent of this neighborhood school region. «If someone has difficulty on your way — I do not care just exactly exactly what competition it really is — people stop which help them.»
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However in Marion County, like in many rural corners of America, interracial relationship nevertheless appears to engender some resistance.
«this is actually the final bogeyman that is great the final great taboo,» claims Mark Potok associated with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-group watchdog in Montgomery, Ala. The Ku Klux Klan’s initial charter, he notes, would be to «protect white ladies’ chastity» after the emancipation of slaves.
But Mr. Potok is quick to incorporate that lingering opposition to racial mixing just isn’t unique towards the south.
Nationwide, marriages of black colored and white partners have actually increased nearly sevenfold since the 1960s, from 51,000 partners in 1960 to 340,000 in 1996. Interracial marriages now total 1.5 million, however these partners have a tendency to focus in cities more tolerant of changing social mores.
Buddies say Raynard’s easy-going color-blindness might have confronted the difficult legacy of segregation.
«People do not accept of interracial dating,» claims Eddie Conerly, a new neighbor that is african-American Kokomo, whom knew Raynard in college and today has a vehicle clean in Columbia, the county chair. «the only method it’s planning to alter occurs when the great Lord comes. Then it’s not going to be a black colored or white thing.»
Household members state Raynard ended up being dating a girl that is white few days before he passed away, but stopped as soon as the woman’s uncle arrived during the Johnson home and voiced their disapproval. Quickly later, Raynard had been discovered hanging from a tree, a baseball limit nevertheless on their head.
Their death has drawn wide, if significantly unwanted, nationwide awareness of this separated corner of southwestern Mississippi. FBI detectives and television crews from over the state have descended around town, interviewing family and friends users alike. The Rev. Jesse Jackson talked at Raynard’s funeral this morning monday.
With the concerns, tensions are increasing in this mild landscape of pine trees and red-earth rolling hills, of a drive that is two-hour of brand new Orleans. Following the 17-year-old’s death, your local paper posted a photograph of racist graffiti spray-painted on a nearby connection — really public proof that some nasty racial undercurrents persist under the placid surface of Marion County.
«This has got the potential to divide the city, and no one really wants to observe that happen,» states the Rev. Barry Dickerson, pastor for the United Methodist church in Columbia, whoever church has met along with other Methodist churches, grayscale, to help keep the lines of interaction available. «the job of this Christian is always to love. We should continue steadily to love the other person and work for justice aswell.»
After Raynard’s death, a coroner’s report found «marks in line with committing suicide but there is no proof of accidents from the fight.»
Users of the man that is young household, though, state several concerns went unanswered. They note, for example, that the gear Raynard had been discovered hanging from doesn’t participate in him, and they do not know whom it belongs to. They even keep in mind that the person whom approached Raynard about dating their niece is just a previous sheriff’s Department prison guard.
Meanwhile, regional police force is continuing to research. «I am sure the agents hear every thing, and I also cannot imagine which they would not follow through on every thing,» claims associate district attorney Hal Kittrell.
The Johnson household, meanwhile, has authorized an autopsy that is second, with the aid of civil liberties teams, has retained an attorney and an exclusive detective to be sure every lead is pursued.
Rip Daniels, section supervisor of WJZD, A african-american-owned news radio place in Gulfport, Miss., states such actions are understandable, provided Mississippi’s historic and frequently violent resistance towards the civil legal rights movement associated with 1950s and ’60s. And then he does not think it is unusual that Raynard’s human anatomy revealed no signs and symptoms of battle.
«Glance at these images,» he states, leafing through an accumulation of commemorative postcards of lynchings in James Allen’s guide, «Without Sanctuary.» Web web web Page after gruesome web web page shows photos of black colored males hanging. Some have actually their arms bound. Other people do not.
«People ask, ‘How can they be therefore docile? How comen’t they fight?’ » Mr. Daniels places the written guide down. «an individual holds a weapon to your mind, and so they threaten family Raynard had been caring for a mentally disabled relative on the night time he died, you are going to do almost anything, will not you?»
Vicki Dillistone, Raynard’s Spanish teacher, claims news of their death plus the risk of committing committing suicide surprised many instructors, because «he always had that not-a-care-in-the-world smile.»
While she understands that no community is wholly without any racism, she hopes that regardless of the results of the way it is, Marion County can come back to the peaceful, trusting, friendly city she is constantly known that it is. «I would personally hate to see that modification through specific stupidity, if as it happens to be homicide in place of committing committing suicide.»
(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Community
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