No Ifs, No Buts: This was a Mississippi Lynching in 2022

Clare Xanthos, PhD
9 min readMay 7, 2023

Rasheem Carter, a young Black man, was found decapitated and dismembered after reporting that his employer wanted him dead. Seven months later, no arrests have been made.

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

“Me and the owner of this company are not seeing eye to eye Mama … But if anything happen to me, he’s responsible for it … I’m too smart Mama, he got these guys wanting to kill me.”

The 2022 murder of Rasheem Ryelle Carter, 25, in rural Mississippi, is one of the ugliest, most sadistic, nauseating crimes that has been reported in the 21st century. Indeed, the sheer barbarity of what happened to Carter seems like it belongs in another era, but it happened a mere seven months ago.

On Oct. 1, Rasheem phoned his mother in distress, telling her that he was being followed by three truckloads of white men in Taylorsville, a small town in Mississippi. He reported that the men were hurling racial slurs at him. One month later, Carter’s skeletonized remains were found in a wooded area near Taylorsville; he had been decapitated and dismembered. But despite this grisly scenario — reeking of an old-fashioned…

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Clare Xanthos, PhD

RESEARCHER. AUTHOR. WRITER. Interests: racial equity, social justice, cultural identity. Co-Editor: "Social Determinants of Health among African-American Men."