HENDERSON, N.C.– The body of 21-year-old Javion Magee was discovered on Wednesday, Sept. 11 with his back against a tree, and a rope, connected to a tree branch, tied eleven times around his neck. Magee was a newly licensed truck driver reportedly pleased about his newly acquired credentials.
While Vance County Sheriff Curtis R. Brame has been quick to point out that there were no initial signs of foul play and that Magee’s death was most likely suicide, others are noting that given North Carolina’s sordid history of lynchings of Black Americans, law enforcement shouldn’t be so quick to rule out a possible homicide.
What started as a delivery run of goods to the Walmart Distribution Center for his first job as a truck driver would, unfortunately, end in tragedy. Officials reported that Magee was found in a “seated position with his legs extended out and his left foot crossed over his right foot.” The rope tied around his neck would later be identified as the rope he purchased from the local Walmart the day before.
While giving a statement to the press, Sheriff Brame asserted that internet theories surrounding Magee’s death being a lynching and that law enforcement wasn’t being transparent with the family were false.
“I understand there’s over 1,000 hits on TikTok [accusing] the sheriff’s office of not being transparent, not providing information to the family, and that is not true,” Brame said. “There’s been information put out there that there’s a lynching in Vance County. There is not a lynching in Vance County. The young man was not dangling from a tree. He was not swinging from a tree,” the sheriff remarked. “The rope was wrapped around his neck. It was not a noose. There was not a knot in the rope, so therefore, it was not a lynching here in Vance County.”
Pushing back against Sheriff Brame’s use of semantics in defining what an actual lynching is, the Magee family lawyer, Harry Daniels, noted during a press conference that they were seeking “justice for Javion” and that the sheriff’s categorizing Magee’s death as a suicide is “grossly premature.”
“This is an absolute tragedy no matter how it panned out. You got a 21-year-old, bright rising star, independent young Black man from Chicago, Illinois, who has taken a path to be independent of his parents,” Daniels explained. “The facts are still [being worked] out, but we do know that he was found hanging from a tree. Now, I know there have been some statements from the sheriff concerning what’s considered a lynching or hanging, but I’ll show you the pictures that we saw very clearly that he was hanging. Not in the matter which you may [have] seen in the 60s and the 20s and 30s, but it was [hanging]… We are here for one reason, and that [is to] get justice for Javion and the Magee family…Let me be very clear that the main cause of the death of Javion has not been determined at this time. For anybody, stating that it was a suicide would be grossly premature.”
Daniels’s reference to the lynchings of the past, particularly in connection to North Carolina, is hard to ignore. Throughout the history of the United States, lynching has been used as a form of violence often aimed at Black Americans as a means to intimidate and strike fear in the community.
A narrow view of lynching
While some have a narrow view of what constitutes a lynching––a hanging by a noose from a tree––many researchers, like Trichita M. Chestnut, who wrote an article in the National Archives on the history of lynchings, note that this form of racialized terror goes beyond small specifics.
In her article, Chestnut writes, “What constitutes a lynching? Although most people think only of hanging, lynching means much more. Lynching is the killing of African Americans who were tortured, mutilated, burned, shot, dragged, or hanged, accused of an alleged crime by a white mob, and deprived of their life without due process and equal protection of the law.”
According to a report by Tuskegee University, 4,745 lynchings occurred between 1882 and 1968, of which it was noted that 3,446 involved Black victims. Regarding North Carolina, researchers say the numbers could be between one hundred and three hundred.
The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, published a 2014 report that counted 123 lynchings of Black Americans in North Carolina between the years 1877 and 1950. In 2015, the University of North Carolina started a project called A Red Record, aiming to document lynchings in the American South, beginning with North Carolina.
The trailblazing work of the Black American journalist Ida B. Wells inspires the project’s name. Wells documented lynching in the United States in articles and pamphlets such as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases and The Red Record as a means to bring attention to the racial terrorism Black people experienced in the United States, along with pushing back against the false narrative that all victims of lynchings were guilty criminals receiving mob-justice.
Thus far, the project has been able to document and map 173 lynchings between the 1860s and 1940s, of which 141 victims were Black.
After the Civil War, when racial slavery was abolished in the United States, forms of anti-Black violence were carried out as a means to maintain the hierarchical status quo of white supremacy that was no longer judicially imposed. The history of lynching in North Carolina, as in many other states, reflects the systemic racism and social tensions of the time, and one can argue they have not entirely gone away.
In 1900, Rep. George Henry White of North Carolina––who was the only Black member of Congress at the time––introduced a bill to outlaw lynchings. His bill did not progress beyond the committee stage.
Later, in 1922 and 1937, the legislation failed again. It was only in 2022––when President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act––that lynching was made a federal hate crime after 120 years of pushback.
It is within this context that Javion Magee’s death must be viewed. Not because it completely rules out the possibility of suicide but because when seeking justice and accountability, the history of the state––and the country as a whole––must be acknowledged to ensure a thorough investigation.
Daniels noted during the family press conference, “Wherever that evidence may lead, then that’s something that they [the family] can deal with. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that we are here, that you are here, to ensure transparency moving forward.”
The preliminary autopsy conducted by the North Carolina Chief Medical Examiner’s Office concluded Magee did not have defensive wounds, and there were no signs of physical assault. He did have hemorrhaging around the soft tissue of the neck. Since toxicology results are still pending, autopsy results for the cause of death are not complete at this time.
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