Boy's hanging raises spectre of America's old South

WASHINGTON - With prayers and chanting, the veteran American civil rights leader, the Rev Jesse Jackson, led off a highly charged two-day march from the Mississippi town of Kokomo on Saturday to demand the reopening of an investigation into the death of a local teenager.

Raynard Johnson, aged 17, had been found hanging from a pecan tree in the front garden of his home on the evening of June 16, leaving an image that brought to the surface all the old fears and tensions of the segregationist South.

The police and medical authorities said that Raynard's death was suicide. But his distressed family and local people firmly believe otherwise.

They maintain that he was lynched in a racist killing for consorting with local white girls. If that could be proved, it would be the first documented lynching in Mississippi for 40 years.

Several hundred marchers, including black leaders not just from Mississippi but from neighbouring Southern states, gathered in the steamy southern heat of Kokomo to process to the tree where Raynard Johnson was found.

Yesterday, they were to continue on to the county seat of Columbia for a rally and march to the courthouse.

The purpose of the march, said Rev Jackson, was to "expose the racist underbelly of Mississippi. "There appears to be a bounding fear in Kokomo," he said, announcing the protest. "There was an ugly epithet on a bridge near Johnson's home that stated 'Kill All Niggers'. That slur remained for weeks before Raynard's death - it was recently removed, but its sentiment still lingers in Kokomo."

Everyone involved in the case is well aware of its sensitivity, and the march will be knocking to an extent on a door that is already open.

The Governor of Mississippi has already promised a full investigation, and the Justice Department in Washington is involved.

That such conflicting interpretations of one tragedy could take hold so quickly and comprehensively is a manifestation of the abiding mistrust between America's blacks and whites, even in communities where the races live side by side and appear to mix with relative ease.

It was a dark, moonless night when Jerry Johnson drove his pick-up into the driveway of his home and saw in his headlights a sight he had hoped never to see.

His youngest son, an exemplary pupil, easy socialiser and willing worker, was hanging from a tree branch. The body was still warm when it was cut down, but there was nothing that could be done - the pulse and heartbeat were already gone.

The post-mortem found that the likely cause of death was suicide.

There were no apparent injuries that would suggest a struggle; at 1.83m tall and 80kg, he would not have been easy prey for a killer.

No one had heard any sounds that could have been an attack, and there was barely half an hour between the time he slipped out of the house, where he had been watching television with one of his brothers, to when his father found him.

Family and friends write off the post-mortem as a sham and ask what could possibly have driven an apparently happy and successful 17-year-old to kill himself.

"There's no doubt in my mind what happened," says his father, who works on oil rigs, "and it wasn't suicide."

Raynard's older brother, Roger, aged 21, says he and Raynard had heard rumours that the families of two white girls they had been seeing were unhappy about the relationships - even though they did not, in the brothers' view, amount to dating.

As evidence of a racist plot, he cites the daubed slogan referred to by Jesse Jackson.

He says he had chanced upon an open-air gathering of white men in the vicinity just a few days before. And two days before, another relative said the family had been woken by dogs barking and noises outside the house, but had found nothing.

While flimsy and circumstantial to outsiders, to Southern blacks such indications are the familiar hallmarks of racist killings that were habitually hushed up by the white authorities.

Jesse Jackson wants an investigation not just into Raynard's death, but into as many as 20 "rather mysterious deaths called suicides, some by gunshot, some by hanging."

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