The New Lynching of Michael Jackson: Dan Reed’s Leaving Neverland May, In Fact, Leave Blood on Many Hands

By: Linda-Raven Woods

America has a long and sordid history of lynching or unfairly convicting African-American men based on the false allegations of white accusers. The names known to history echo loud and long — Robin White, Emmett Till, Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Andrew and Leroy Wright, Olen Montgomery, Willie Anderson, Haywood Patterson, Eugene Williams (the latter nine known collectively as “The Scottsboro Boys”) to contemporary names such as Vincent Patton, still serving time in Angola Prison despite the fact that his white accuser later confessed that “all black men look alike” to her and therefore she could not even say with certainty that Patton had raped her. And these cases do not even begin to include the many whose names have long been lost to history; those who paid the ultimate price for the paranoid fears of a Jim Crow-era America. “We currently live in a world of fake news and alternative facts,” wrote Martinzie Johnson in an excellent think piece titled “Being Black in a World Where White Lies Matter.” Martinzie then states, “white lies have tangible consequences.”

Martinizie wrote this piece a few days after a bombshell confession by Carolyn Bryant, the young white woman whose accusation of Emmett Till fifty-two years prior resulted in the 14-year-old boy being kidnapped…