The horror that was lynching was called life by Black America

White woman in Mississippi claimed that a fourteen-year-old Black boy had said something suggestive to her, and then her husband and brother beat the boy, wrapped barbed wire around his neck, shot him in the head, and threw him over the bridge into the Little Tallahatchie. The image of the boy in his open casket awakened the nation to the horror of lynching. At least the White nation. The horror that was lynching was called life by Black America. The killers, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-White jury.

P. Everett, The Trees (2022), loc 954