Crusader for Justice: Jill Collen Jefferson and the Legal Battle Against Modern-Day Lynchings

By Stephanie Gadlin

There is no statute of limitations on murder. That legal principle guides attorney Jill Collen Jefferson, a Harvard-trained civil rights lawyer who has turned her life into a mission to expose and challenge modern-day lynching, racially suspicious hangings and deaths often ruled suicides before full investigations occur.

Jefferson leads JULIAN, a civil and human rights nonprofit she founded and named in honor of her mentor Julian Bond. Her work bridges the moral courage of the 1960s and today’s legal strategy to compel America to confront how racial violence against African Americans persists through institutional neglect and data that tell a chilling story: hate crimes are rising, and justice often lags behind.

Jefferson’s main work centers around reopening lynching cold cases and working with families in southern states in the pursuit of criminal prosecution and convictions in cases where loved ones were lynched or their hanging, drowning or suspicious deaths were ruled as suicides, with little to no investigation.

“These modern-day lynchings are hate crimes that must be solved,” Jefferson told the Crusader. “ I am not one of those press conference attorneys. The families speak for themselves. I am there to help them get justice in these murders. All of these cases are egregious and present a pattern—lynchings have never stopped in America.”

In the history of racial terror in the United States, Mississippi stands out for the sheer frequency and brutality of lynchings of African Americans. These extralegal killings were not isolated outbursts of violence, according to scholars and activists, but functioned as sustained instruments of social control, reinforcing white supremacy and suppressing Black civic, economic, and personal freedoms.

Jefferson’s pursuit of justice in defiance of anti-Black hatred began long before her first courtroom victory or confrontation with inadequate or racially biased law enforcement and judicial systems. Growing up in Hebron, Mississippi, in the mid-1990s, Jefferson says she first encountered racism at the age of five when she was forbidden from playing with the granddaughter of a white judge whom her grandmother worked for as a maid.

“She told me, ‘Jill don’t go back in the house unless you’re with me or I ask you to go in and clean something,’” Jefferson said. “So, I’d wait outside for Aubrey to come out to play and she never did. I didn’t know why I could no longer play with my friend. I was five, and I had been called the n-word in kindergarten by a little white boy, and though I didn’t know what it meant, the way he said it, I knew it was something bad.”

One of four children and the only girl, Jefferson’s mother worked as a schoolteacher, and her father labored as a handyman and managed the family’s land and livestock. They grew crops and the family worked together in the fields under the hot Delta sun.

“I knew about the terror of living in the Deep South and the terror of lynchings,” Jefferson said of her childhood. “There was this place called the ‘Crackers’ Neck.’ It was given the nickname by white people. They called it that because it meant that (area) was their neck of the woods, so to speak, and Black people needed to stay away from there.

“So, when I was growing up, if I was annoying my brothers, they would tell me that they were going to take me to Cracker’s Neck and drop me off,” she recalled. “And basically, what that meant was that the white people were going to get me. So that was a fear for me early on—a fear of being lynched.”

As a teenager, Jill, an exceptionally bright student, attended a predominantly white, public high school. When she told her high school guidance counselor she wanted to attend Harvard Law School, the counselor laughed. She was later excluded from ACT prep meetings, despite being among the school’s top students, and had teachers change her grades in an attempt to lower her grade point average.

“There were certain accomplishments I wouldn’t get that I was a shoo-in for,” she recalled. “I even had teachers change my grades. It was a lot, but I was determined. I was inspired by people like Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley, and one of my aunts who was an attorney.”

That humiliation and racism became fuel. Jefferson graduated from Virginia State University with a degree in English and French. It was there that she met her mentor Julian Bond, who was teaching a course on the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1940 in Nashville and raised in Pennsylvania, Bond co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965 and later served as chairman of the NAACP from 1998 to 2010.

“He told me it was my responsibility to use my education to continue the work of justice for our people,” Jefferson said. “I was inspired by him, our conversations, and the life lessons he taught. It helped me define my purpose.”

After graduating, and with a recommendation from Julian Bond, Jefferson landed a coveted internship in the office of Georgia Congressman John Lewis—an experience that deepened her understanding of the civil rights movement.

During that time, she met award-winning Mississippi Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project and journalist Benjamin Greenberg. Together, they began investigating the February 1964 murder of Clifton (Clifford) Walker, a Black man lynched in Woodville, Mississippi. A husband and father, Walker was ambushed by members of the Ku Klux Klan while driving home from his job at the International Paper plant. They opened fire on his car along a dirt road, riddling him with bullets and leaving him to die.

“We wanted to get the FBI to reopen the case and solve it and bring justice to his surviving children,” Jefferson said. “After we got involved and had really great leads, the FBI closed the case around 2010, saying the suspect had died and there was nowhere further to go.

“I really got to see the FBI at work and some of the gaps they have in their approach because a lot of times they were coming to us for information instead of them investigating themselves,” she said. “That helped me later on when looking at FBI files, when looking at modern-day lynchings, knowing (the records) aren’t going to be perfect.”

Jefferson later secured a role in President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign as a speechwriter based in Chicago. She continued working odd jobs while she saved enough for law school. She enrolled in Harvard Law School and, after graduation, returned to the South determined to finish the work she had started on lynching cold cases.

On August 15, 2015, Bond died at the age of 75 of complications from vascular disease. Three years later, Jefferson graduated from law school, passed the bar exam and secured work at a law firm in Washington, D.C. In mid-April 2020, just weeks before the police strangulation of George Floyd in Minneapolis, she officially launched JULIAN.

The nonprofit, operating in Hattiesburg, MS, investigates suspicious deaths, trains volunteers to document crime scenes, and files civil suits when prosecutors decline to act. Though its work has primarily centered on incidents involving African Americans, JULIAN has also investigated death cases related to Trans individuals.

“Our job is to force recognition where denial has become policy,” Jefferson said. “In a lot of these cases, you have coroners who are not medically trained and are not required in Mississippi to have any medical or investigative training ruling these deaths as suicides—even when there’s glaring contradictions.

“There’s also a very low bar to become a county sheriff in Mississippi as well,” she explained. “All any of them have to do is take a test (or get elected) and they literally are the deciding factor in whether families of lynching victims will receive justice. Many have little training at all. It’s just easier for them to say it’s a ‘suicide’ than to call it what it is.”

One such recent case of “lynching by suicide” was that of Demartravion “Trey” Reed, a 21-year-old computer science major at Delta State University, found hanging from a tree on campus in September 2025. Local authorities ruled it a suicide within 48 hours, and before a thorough police investigation. Reed’s family, represented by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, demanded an independent investigation and a federal review, saying the man had no history of depression or mental illness. A family-commissioned autopsy, according to a Crusader source with direct knowledge of the findings, alleges blunt force trauma to the back of his head, but it has yet to be publicly released.

For Jefferson, the Reed case was reminiscent of too many before it—young Black men found hanging, families insisting on deeper inquiries, and local law enforcement quick to close the file. “I’ve seen them rule a case a suicide if the victim had any hint of emotional or mental distress in any part of their past,” she said. “(A ruling) could be based on hearsay or their own speculation. In nearly all of those cases, no psychological autopsy was completed to support the findings of suicide at all.”

She has also documented scores of such cases since 2000 and is preparing a report on modern-day lynchings. The work is not without danger, the attorney and activist has received threats, been followed and was nearly ran off the road while driving. Jefferson said she remains “undeterred,” adding, “My mother worries,” she said, “But I’m not afraid. This work must be done.”

JULIAN’s legal work is shepherded by Jefferson with the assistance of pro bono law firms, investigators, and others. In 2021, she filed a civil suit on behalf of the family of Willie Andrew Jones Jr., another Black man found hanging in the front yard of an allegedly known Mississippi white supremacist, which resulted in an $11.3 million judgment. That rare legal victory offered both vindication and warning: justice may come through civil courts when criminal prosecutors refuse to move.

Law and Its Limits

The passage of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in 2022 was hailed as a historic triumph. After more than 200 failed attempts across 120 years, the law finally made lynching a federal hate crime, punishable by up to 30 years in prison when prosecutors can prove a conspiracy to commit a hate-based offense leading to death or serious injury.

But Jefferson remains cautious. The act’s symbolism, she argues, outpaces its enforcement. “Naming the crime doesn’t guarantee pursuit,” she said. “Until racially suspicious deaths are presumed hate crimes unless proven otherwise, this law is still aspirational. There is no enforcement in the law—and it still deals with lynching as if it is a thing of the past.”

Legal scholars agree. According to the Congressional Research Service, the statute’s requirement to prove “conspiracy” makes it difficult to apply to individual or ambiguous cases, including hangings ruled as suicides. Without automatic federal review, families remain dependent on local officials—sometimes the very institutions with histories of bias.

Jefferson’s concerns are rooted in data, not sentiment. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, law enforcement agencies reported 11,679 hate crime incidents and 13,683 related offenses in 2024, the second-highest total in more than 30 years of federal recordkeeping. More than 53 percent of single-bias incidents targeted victims because of race, ethnicity, or ancestry—half of them Black.

In Illinois, hate crimes surged from 98 incidents in 2021 to 347 in 2023, with 54.5 percent motivated by race or ancestry, 21.6 percent by religion, and 19.6 percent by sexual orientation, according to the Justice Department’s state-level data. African Americans remain the most targeted group for hate crimes. In April of this year, the Anti-Defamation League published a report indicating that in 2020 and 2024, Illinois recorded about 1,054 incidents of hate, extremism, terrorism, and antisemitism.

In Chicago, the Chicago Police Department recorded 239 hate crimes in 2024, a 21 percent decline from 303 cases in 2023. Yet some categories increased: anti-Jewish crimes rose 58 percent, and anti-gay male attacks rose 25 percent, according to the 2024 Chicago Police Annual Hate Crimes Report. Despite the modest dip, Chicago still recorded one of the highest city-level totals in the nation.

Civil rights researchers say these numbers mirror the national atmosphere—anti-Black rhetoric, anti-immigrant sentiment, and extremist narratives bleeding into mainstream politics. Jefferson’s work sits on the fault line between history and the present.

Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,400 African Americans were killed in “racial terror lynchings” in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, according to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). The project maintains the nation’s most comprehensive database of racial killings. It noted that more than 300 additional African Americans were lynched in documented acts of racial terrorism in states outside the Deep South.

Mississippi, where Jefferson practices, recorded some of the highest totals. That history, Jefferson warns, is not past tense. “Lynching didn’t end—it evolved,” she told a Jackson audience this year. “It adapted to systems that call themselves modern.”

Jefferson and fellow advocates are pressing for three key reforms in state and federal law involving such cases: Automatic DOJ review for any hanging death involving racial or historical-terror indicators; state-level independent review boards with subpoena power for suspicious deaths; and improved hate-crime reporting standards to ensure consistency and transparency across jurisdictions.

Illinois law already allows victims to pursue both criminal penalties and civil damages in hate-crime cases, but Jefferson argues that classification and enforcement gaps remain wide. “We have the right laws on paper,” she said. “What we don’t have is equal application or enforcement.”

Jefferson’s crusade is rooted in the idea that justice begins with memory. “When officials rush to label a death a suicide, they don’t just close a case—they close a story,” she said. “Our work is reopening those stories.”

Black newspapers and community media, she insists, are central to that process. From Ida B. Wells’ “Red Record” in the 1890s to the Crusader’s recent investigation in recent suspicious suicide rulings, the Black press has been the archive of accountability. Jefferson’s call to journalists is urgent: treat each suspicious death not as an isolated tragedy but as part of an unbroken chain stretching from Emmett Till to Trey Reed.

“There is no statute of limitations on murder,” Jefferson, a true Crusader for justice, reminds. “And there can be no expiration date on truth.”