JACKSON, Miss. — About thirty of them came from as far away as California and Florida. Almost every one of them was armed. On Friday, September 11, they fell into formation on California Avenue, chambered a round on a spoken command, verified their weapons were safe, and marched through the heart of Black Jackson chanting Black Power — and exactly one journalist in the state of Mississippi thought that was worth standing in the middle of.

Me.

No camera crews showed up, and no wire service either. Clay Edwards — the local content creator who spent the week warning his followers that armed Black militants were coming for the "white neighborhoods" — certainly didn't come see for himself. He had a Facebook post to run.

I was there. I introduced myself as an activist and a journalist, because I am both, and both of those commitments pointed the same direction that day: toward a Black neighborhood where armed organizers had come to say the names Tasia Fortune, Nolan Wells, and Trey Reed — and to tell the people who live there that they are loved.

Before any of it started, I watched a mother walk her young son up to armed men he had been taught to fear, and I watched the fear leave him over the course of one conversation.

Here is what happened, from the only member of the press who saw it.

The Dead They Marched For

Tasia Fortune was 29 years old when she was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in Jackson. Five days later, the Jackson Police Department still had nothing to say. Ward 3 Councilman Kenneth Stokes called her death murder and asked federal prosecutors to step in. The department's answer to a Black woman found hanging from a tree in Mississippi's capital has been silence.

Nolan Wells was 18 — a college football player from Ocean Springs who went to Horn Island with a group of white friends on the Fourth of July and came home dead. His story still doesn't add up: his phone wiped clean while in his friends' possession, everyone lawyered up within hours, a chancery judge's stepson in the group, and an independent autopsy that refused to bless the state's tidy "no foul play" line. Ben Crump put it plainly: "This is the state where Emmett Till was lynched."

Trey Reed was 21, found hanging at Delta State University in September 2025. The state ruled it suicide. His family disputes it — and so do the questions that keep piling up. We are still digging into his case. He will get his own article, because he deserves one.

And underneath all of it, the water. Jackson's water system collapsed outright in 2022, and the capital of Mississippi has lived under boil notices and federal receivership ever since — in one of the poorest, Blackest cities in America, while the state legislature that controls its budget finds money for everything except the pipes.

The pattern is bigger than Mississippi. A 28-year-old Black man went to a music festival in Michigan in June and was found hanging from a tree two days later. At least a half-dozen other Black people have been found hanging across the country in 2026 alone. And this state — the state where the Equal Justice Initiative documented 576 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950, more than any other in America — wants everyone to believe all of them are coincidences.

Nobody at that march had to believe any one theory about any particular tree. They just had to count.

Before the March Came the Fear Campaign

The mobilization was announced on public Facebook pages. It was never a secret. What it did get, before anyone marched a single step, was a warm-up act from Clay Edwards — a Mississippi-based right-wing content creator whose post about the march is worth reading in full, because it is a masterclass in how racial panic gets manufactured from a recliner:

"The black panthers & Fred Hampton gun club (both hate hate groups), will converge on Jackson as well as the 'white neighborhoods' according to their on Facebook page, we can only imagine what that means??? All of this is because they have convinced themselves that black people are being lynched by white people in Mississippi, which if you live here you know that couldn't be further from the truth. Of course all of this could be avoided if Jackson Police Department's doctor & chief would have come out and put a wet blanket over the Tasia Fortune lie and if the only grifters would admit the Nolan Wells grift is just that, a grift. Oh well, they're calling it 'operation f' around & find out' like they're fans of mine haha."
— Clay Edwards, Facebook, September 2026 [sic]

A Black woman hangs from a tree and the police produce nothing for five days. An 18-year-old washes ashore with his phone wiped and the case produces nothing at all. The local right-wing response, instead of demanding answers from the state, was to call the grieving "grifters," warn white Jackson about an invasion of its neighborhoods, and sign off with a joke about violence he clearly finds flattering.

Note the projection, too. "Both hate hate groups," he writes with a straight face — a man who spent his week fantasizing aloud about where armed Black people might show up, calling the people who organize openly, announce their routes, and march past their own porches the danger to the community. The same state that panics over armed Black men walking down their own streets has no trouble with a network of neo-Nazi fight clubs training in plain sight a few hundred miles away, and Clay Edwards has never once posted a warning about them.

His own post admits the whole panic could have been defused if Jackson's officials had simply said something about Tasia Fortune. On that one point, accidentally, we agree. The silence is the story — five days of it after Fortune died, years of it across the pattern — and that silence is what created the space for both grief and rumor. The difference between us is that he wants the silence back.

Members of the Black Panthers Movement & Fred Hampton Gun Club prepare to march through Jackson, MS at Debos Corner. [September 11, 2026 - Jackson, MS - Edward Dawson/UnTelevised Media]

Formation at Debos Corner

The group met at Debos Corner, a small Black-owned soul food spot on Northside Drive, deep in one of the most impoverished and dilapidated stretches of Jackson — well beyond the point any racist would ever brave. I'm describing geography, not insulting anybody.

I got there ahead of the formation and introduced myself to Talib Atunde, the Fred Hampton Gun Club's national chairman. I told him what I am — a lifelong activist and a journalist, both passionate about the issues that brought them here and in solidarity with the movement as a whole — and why I had come: to document it honestly, because nobody else was going to.

There were about thirty people, nearly all from out of state — California, Florida, and everywhere in between — and nearly all armed. Every single person I spoke to was kind, respectful, and genuinely glad someone had come in support. Zero hostility toward the unannounced white man standing among them with a notebook and a phone. Clay Edwards built a week of content on the premise that these people were coming to hunt his neighborhood.

The leaders then did something you will never see Clay Edwards post about: they encouraged anyone with the means to spend money in that store, in appreciation of the neighborhood's hospitality.

The Boy Who Came Afraid

Just before the formation fell in, while the group milled around Debos Corner, a mother walked her young son up to some of the men. She had brought him to meet them. The first thing you need to know is that the boy was afraid — afraid of the guns and afraid of the Panthers, afraid, mostly, of the versions of both the media had been selling him. The screen had already told him exactly what these men were. His mother decided to let him find out for himself.

Their leader — the same voice that would call the chamber checks — was the one who talked to him. He explained the purpose of it all: the meaning, what the fight is about, what thirty armed strangers were doing on his block, and that their role is to protect people like him.

His posture shifted as it landed. His face kept contorting and re-forming — a kid doing live arithmetic on everything the screen had taught him about men like these, and finding the math doesn't work. When it was over, it ended with a hug. He walked away standing straighter, more sure of himself than when he woke up that afternoon.

It's also the scene Clay Edwards' audience never gets shown: a Black child's fear, manufactured by the media, being taken apart by hand in public, in Jackson.

BPM & FHGC in front of the home of Medgar Evers. [September 11, 2026 - Jackson, MS - Edward Dawson/UnTelevised Media]

Black Power on California Avenue

Minutes after that hug, the column fell in on California Avenue. On the order of their leader, everyone chambered one round and verified arms were safe — the same men who had just spent five minutes disarming a scared kid with nothing but the truth. That is not a mob. That is a formation. Mississippi's armed right wing has never held itself to that standard, and the Legislature has never once asked it to.

Then the chants started instantly — Black Power rolling down a residential street in a Black neighborhood. The march didn't blow past anyone. It stopped, over and over, as marchers walked up to porches and talked to residents — reminding them that they are a powerful people, and that they are loved. Several houses on the route got genuinely hyped watching thirty armed Black men and women come down their block in solidarity.

Then the group marched to the home of Medgar Evers — the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, assassinated in the driveway of that house in June 1963, his killer walking free for three decades while the state looked anywhere but at itself.

There, attorney Malik Zulu Shabazz — chairman of Black Lawyers for Justice and a former national chairman of the New Black Panther Party — addressed the group on the stages of struggle in Jackson, including his earlier mobilizations to support Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, the movement lawyer who tried to turn this city into an experiment in Black self-determination before his death in 2014.

Water break at a corner store. [September 11, 2026 - Jackson, MS - Edward Dawson/UnTelevised Media]

Cold Water, Cold Juice, and a Convenience Store

On the way back to Debos — by a different route, still entirely through Black Jackson — the column stopped at a convenience store. The Panthers bought cold water for everyone in the march, and cold juice for my two sons, who had come along. Kudos for thinking of the kids. I had brought my boys for close to the same reason as the mother from Debos, to show them what it really was. With that one little gesture, they were able to give my sons a similar lesson.

This was the terror operation that had Jackson's racial panic machine posting through it all week: water bottles, juice boxes, a surprise lunch rush for a soul food restaurant, and a Black neighborhood told it is loved.

No Clay, I Cannot "Imagine What That Means"

Edwards asked his followers to "only imagine" what armed Black organizers converging on the "white neighborhoods" might mean. Here is what I don't have to imagine, because I stood in it:

The march never touched a white neighborhood. It could not have stayed deeper inside Black Jackson if it tried — soul food spot, California Avenue, the Evers home, the ride back. The only white person it surprised was me, showing up unannounced, and the reception was handshakes, conversation, and gratitude that someone had come in support.

So: no, Clay. I cannot "imagine what that means." I know what it meant, because I was there and you weren't — you were somewhere dry, typing "haha" about an operation named after your own catchphrase. The distance between his Facebook post and Debos Corner is the distance between what Mississippi imagines when it hears "Black Panthers" and what actually showed up: thirty disciplined people, chamber checks, confidence for a young boy, a community shown love and some juice for children.

This Is What They Were Afraid Of

I keep thinking about who else could have been there. The mobilization was public, announced, and mapped. Any reporter in this state could have stood where I stood. None did. Mississippi's press will happily cover a Black march as a threat on the strength of one racist's Facebook post; it will not cover the march itself. Black grief, apparently, is only newsworthy when it can be framed as danger.

And the state: a city councilman had to beg federal intervention over Tasia Fortune, an independent autopsy had to leave Mississippi before anyone connected to Nolan Wells got a straight medical answer, and a family is still disputing a file cabinet's worth of certainty about Trey Reed. The water is still bad, and the silence is still the policy.

Thirty people armed themselves, formed up, and walked through the poorest blocks of Jackson, and the only thing that got hurt was a racist's narrative. The neighborhood got water, juice, and love; the store got customers; the Evers home got its honor guard. A scared kid walked away taller than the lie built about the men who hugged him.

When the state refuses to count its dead, the people will count themselves — that has been Mississippi's unwritten rule for a century. On September 11 it marched in formation through Jackson and proved, one more time, that we keep us safe.

Catch us live for day 2 tomorrow on YouTube & Facebook