Danye Jones’ Death Is Being Investigated as a Suicide. But His Mother, a Ferguson Activist, Says It’s a Lynching

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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November 1, 2018

By: Anne Branigin, Theroot

A rally and news conference have been organized today by the family of Danye Jones, a 24-year-old man who was found dead, hanging from a tree on his family’s property, earlier this month. St. Louis County says they are investigating Jones’ death as a suicide. But his mother, Melissa McKinnies, a prominent protester who helped organize demonstrators during the Ferguson Uprising in 2014, says her son was lynched in retaliation for her activist work.

“She insisted he was upbeat, not suicidal, and did not know how to tie the types of knots used in the ligature. The sheet used did not match the family’s sheets. And he had packed an overnight bag, which had been left on the patio, a suggestion that he trusted and had planned to leave the house with the person who killed him, she said.”

McKinnies told the Post-Dispatch and KMOV-TV that she and her family have received death threats related to her work organizing protests following the killing of Michael Brown in 2014. Those threats, which were delivered through social media, appeared to have escalated in the last two months. McKinnies said she would elaborate on the death threats she and her family received at a news conference scheduled for Thursday.

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