Lynching of Bernice Raspberry

Bernice Raspberry, also known as Ed Lively, was a 23-year-old African-American man killed in Leakesville, Mississippi, on May 25, 1927. According to Wikipedia's account of the case, Raspberry was initially arrested in Leakesville for an unspecified infraction. While in custody, the sheriff was informed that Raspberry was wanted in the nearby community of Bothwell in connection with an allegation described as "improper conduct with a white woman."

Raspberry was subsequently transported to Bothwell in connection with this allegation, but was then taken back to Leakesville, reportedly for his own safekeeping. Despite this, a mob of approximately 100 masked men removed him from the Leakesville jail. The mob took Raspberry to a tree, where they hanged him and shot him multiple times, killing him.

The case remains unresolved in terms of legal accountability, consistent with the pattern of extrajudicial mob violence and lynchings targeting African-Americans in the United States during this period, particularly in the American South.

No second independent citation corroborating these details has been located; researchers should treat the account as provisional pending additional sourcing from contemporaneous newspaper archives, historical societies, or academic lynching databases such as those maintained by the Equal Justice Initiative or Tuskegee University, which document lynchings of this era.