It has been a month now since Frederick Jermaine Carter’s body was found on December 3, 2010 hanging from a tress in Greenwood, Mississippi. The writers and commentators on the liberal and left did not notice or, if they did, perhaps they shrugged their shoulders and accepted the unofficial “verdict” of the Mississippi sheriff: death because mentally ill, mentally ill because maybe another young Black man whistled at another white woman.

As significant as it is to inform the American public and the world about the families, villages (even while for years, gentrification in U.S. cities have displaced Black Americans), and individuals that U.S. policies of aggression maim, torture, and murder in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is equally significant to inform that same public about this “mysterious” death in Greenwood, Mississippi.

But the liberal and left media, predominantly white in this post racial era, have other matters to pursue.

What is the alternative or, as they say, progressive edge the liberal/left media have over the conservative/right-winged news media? Have the thought police succeeded with the liberal/left in creating a no-go zone around what has happened and continues to happen, right here in the U.S., to Black Americans in the last 45 years?

So when a young Black man found hanging from a tree in Mississippi cannot even generate a sigh, let alone skepticism, a question, only the obligatory silence from the liberal/left media, then you have to concede that the workings of the U.S. Empire is a larger black hole than the one into which this government has placed Black Americans.

So, too, with the young Blacks in Leflore, Mississippi who find it difficult to question the suicide, as Mississippi declares, of Frederick Jermaine Carter.

The suicide by hanging of Frederick Jermaine Carter, said Mississippi Rep. Willie James Perkins, “just doesn’t make sense” (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/victim-of-racism/2010/12/23/the-cows-w-the-lynchingsuicide-of-frederick-jermai).

“The sheriff (Ricky Banks of Leflore) never roped off the scene” before he declared the hanging a suicide.

Rep. Perkins told me by phone that he visited the scene several times after Carter’s body was removed. From his observation of the scene, it did not seem possible that “the dead wood would not have held up anything.”

Just looking at the limb he was on, looking at the length of the rope (Rep. Perkins viewed from television news footage), and his (Carter’s) height, it doesn’t look like he could have hanged himself.

…Nor would the branch have held him!

Greenwood, Mississippi where Carter’s body was found is a predominantly white town, 30 miles from the predominantly Black town of Leflore where Carter lived.

Greenwood is not far from the place where searchers found the body of Emmett Till floating 10 miles away in the Tallahatchie River - in 1955.

In 2010, some of us know, we never left this place.

But he was mentally ill! He had a history of mental illness and attempted suicide!

And Carter’s mother requested an autopsy to be performed in Nebraska because so much has changed in these last 50 plus years!

Along with Carter’s mother, Rep. Perkins is seeking an investigation into this case - from outside Mississippi. “No local FBI or sheriff’s office will get witness to come forward.”

“I don’t believe he committed suicide. I believe someone did this to him because that’s the history of this place. Whoever did this don’t need to be walking free around here,’ said Dorothy Mann of Sunflower, Miss, (The Final Call, December 23, 2010).

We never left this place because institutionalized racism has been concealed in policies supportive of corporate growth rather than in the development of human potential. We now have corporate rule offering us Brand Obama - free of racial identification and therefore free to exploit Black Americans, our history, our struggle - and a narrative extolling the U.S.’s redemption from its race-obsessed past.

But young Blacks do not follow the details.

So when Rep. Perkins is asked by Renegade if the young people in Leflore, Mississippi believe Carter hanged himself, I heard an all-too familiar comment: The young people trust the authorities!

Yes, it is suicide!

Seasoned veterans of the Struggle, Perkins said, “don’t buy it.” They know history!

But Brand Obama sells, among other things, trust in the government. Trust the corporations. They are your friends!

“No one told them anything about the Struggle, the history, and they buy into the suicide theory. They easily accept the fact that everything is fair. They don’t ask questions.” They don’t know the details, he added.

“We don’t teach history.”

Leave the history out and complicity guarantees ignorance and silence. The Brand Obama model exemplifies the look forward not backward corporate approach packaged to our children as the “new,” while veterans of the Struggle are tortured by the recognition that the “old” foundation of violence has never been buried.

“We need an independent investigation. Maybe people here with information might need some protection,” Rep. Perkins told Renegade.

Debbie Sander, the Black coroner, received from the state medical examiner a one-page statement to read at a press conference: Suicide! Perkins told Renegade that he did not think this was Sander’s opinion. “How was this conclusion arrived at?”

Haley Barbour, the lame duck governor with plans to sit in the Oval Office, as of December 29, 2010, “silenced” the Clarion Ledger.

“Other African American legislatures have not gotten involved.”

Everything comes through the legislature, Perkins explained. “Blacks have integrated into the politics of the region, but they are Blacks “who just sit at the table and who do not oppose anything.”

The State of Mississippi can then point to “good race relations.”

In turn, these same Black legislatures have been critical of Perkins speaking out and warn about “stirring up racial hatred.”

“Everything is fair. You are just stirring up racial hatred.”

If Frederick Jermaine Carter committed suicide, then the question is why? What brought this young Black man to travel 30 miles to hang himself on a tree in Greenwood, Mississippi?

…And if it is murder, will Blacks in Leflore, Mississippi serve as victims and as spectators in the hanging of their community?

In the meantime, Brand Obama reached out to NFL Quarterback, Michael Vick. According to the Washington Post, “On Monday [December 27, 2010], the buzz was about how the president had weighed in on the redemption of Michael Vick.” It seems the Philadelphia Eagles did a heck of job hiring Vick, and Vick has learned to take responsibility for his behavior.

But what about Obama himself? Did Obama take responsibility and call the mother of Frederick Jermaine Carter?

I guess not. He cannot send the appropriate message with that phone call. That would be the wrong message to convey in post racial U.S.A.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.