Teen's death spotlights taboo of interracial dating

RAYNARD JOHNSON'S FAMILY AND FRIENDS say his death was no suicide, as officials concluded. They think dating white women led to the high school senior's hanging.

KOKOMO, Miss. - On the night of June 16 - a moonless night that seemed particularly dark in the countryside of southern Mississippi - Jerry Johnson swung his blue pickup into the driveway of his home. For a stunned moment, he could not comprehend the scene his headlights illuminated.

There was the youngest of his five children, 17-year-old Raynard - who made good grades, grew big collard greens, helped neighbors bale hay free of charge and charmed the girls - hanging from a branch of the small pecan tree on the front lawn.

Johnson tore out of the truck and cut his son down. The body was warm, he said, but there was no pulse, no heartbeat. Rescue workers and Marion County sheriff's deputies were summoned. But within a couple of hours - before midnight had passed - they were gone, Johnson said, calling Ray nard's death a likely suicide, an assumption reportedly backed up by an official autopsy.

But the Johnson family found that conclusion unthinkable. And as word of the tragedy spread, so did many of Raynard's neighbors, school friends, teachers, fellow church members and civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson, who is leading two marches this weekend and describes the case as a racially motivated slaying. At one march yesterday, 1,000 protesters walked four miles chanting "no justice, no peace" to show support for the Johnson family.

Too many things, they say, do not add up.

Taboo of interracial dating

The mystery of Raynard (pronounced Ra-NARD) Johnson's death has seized this community, where blacks and whites long have lived alongside each other, with rumors and fears. It has drawn a spotlight to what some civil-rights activists call "the last taboo" of race relations in America: interracial dating. And it has called national attention again to troubles in Mississippi, and its brutal past of bombings, lynchings and other hate crimes.

The FBI, the Mississippi Highway Patrol and the county sheriff's department are investigating the death. Two autopsies, including one that the family is keeping private, reportedly have found the death consistent with suicide. The official autopsy showed no defensive injuries, such as broken fingernails or bruises, and the only visible mark, on the throat, appeared to match the belt that was looped around the youth's neck.

Supporters of the suicide theory question how Raynard, a strong youth who stood 6 feet tall and weighed 175 pounds, could have been overpowered so easily if he indeed was attacked. Any possible assailants, they note, had a small window of opportunity in which to ambush the youth, kill him and vanish - less than half an hour. They suggest that perhaps the Johnson family is experiencing the understandable denial whenever a bright, lively teen whose life was filled with plans takes his life.

`It wasn't suicide'

The Johnsons aren't buying it.

"There's no doubt in my mind what happened, and it wasn't suicide," said Jerry Johnson, 51, an oil-rig worker.

Leading up to his death, Ray nard and his older brother, Roger, had heard talk that relatives of two young white women with whom they were friendly were angry about the relationships. Roger Johnson, 21, said he and his brother had many friends, male and female, black and white, but says it was not their style to date anyone in particular.

"We were kind of on guard," he said, "but the worst we thought would happen was that somebody would come up and say something to our face or try to get us into a fight. We never thought anybody would go this far."

A racial epithet was spray-painted recently on a bridge about a mile from the Johnson home, and the two brothers, riding motorbikes in the nearby countryside, happened upon what looked to be a meeting of white men, Jackson said. They were told to go home.

Two days before Raynard died, an uncle of one of the young women in question, a man connected with local law enforcement who had voiced his disapproval of the friendship, dropped the girls off at the Johnson home unannounced.

That night and the next, the family and a neighbor were awakened by the barking of their hunting dogs; one of those nights, Roger took his shotgun outside and fired into the air, but saw no one.

On the Friday evening of his death, Raynard had been watching a National Basketball Association championship game at home with his cousin, "Little Joe" Johnson. Around 9:15 p.m., Raynard mentioned he was going outside to clean out his car. He was not gone long enough to alarm his cousin when his father drove up, around 9:30, and found him dead.

Jackson and the family point to other oddities: The size and weakness of the tree branch, about 3 inches in diameter, and its short height from the ground made it an unlikely spot for a hanging, they said.

Jackson speculates Raynard may have been snatched from behind, quickly smothered before he knew what was happening, then strung up on the tree, prominently situated in front of the house. There was no suicide note.

And then there was the belt around the youth's neck. The length of brown braided leather did not belong to Raynard, the family said. It did not belong to anyone they knew.

Dreamed of seeing U.S.

Maria and Jerry Johnson say they tried to teach their children to be colorblind.

"Color didn't matter," said Maria Johnson, 46, a nursing-home aide. "We all come from one God."

At West Marion High School, where he was a senior, Raynard made the honor roll; he was a whiz at algebra. He had dreams of becoming a long-distance trucker, getting away from home and seeing the country, eventually owning a fleet of trucks.

Roger Johnson, who works at a tire-distribution company, considered himself his brother's best friend. Nothing can convince him that his brother would have killed himself. "If something was bothering him, he would have told me. He was always telling me things."

The `New South'

"There's a New South today, where blacks and whites live and work together - it's a very different South. And then there's an underbelly of the culture that never moved," Jackson said. "It's not just peculiar to Mississippi. It's a mistake to use Mississippi as a scapegoat again."

The racial climate here is like that of many Southern communities, where blacks and whites live side by side, attend school together and fish together. But the line appears to be drawn at interracial dating, which is not common.

Interracial romance remains "the last great boogeyman, the last great taboo" in American race relations, said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which monitors hate crimes.

Whether the Raynard Johnson case will live forever as another example of that sort of crime is unclear at this point. Jackson notes, for what it is worth, that the two young women who were such good friends of the Johnson brothers did not attend Raynard's funeral, at which sobbing teenage mourners overflowed into the churchyard. The two women have not spoken to the media since Raynard's death.

"This doesn't suggest that they did something - it does suggest that somebody might have put pressure on them," said Jackson, who helped conduct the funeral and whose Rainbow/PUSH Coalition has put up a $10,000 reward and established a telephone hotline for information leading to arrests.

Meanwhile, area residents are hoping the community's harmony will not be shattered forever.

"People live close together around here, they grew up together and they know each other," said the Rev. Barry Dickerson, pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Columbia, who recently met with black and white ministers to air the issue. "We want to find out the truth about what happened. We want to get to the bottom of it."