The word "lynching," seldom heard in recent years, has been used to describe the death by hanging of a 17-year-old in Mississippi. Such a charge may be groundless in this case, but those who bring it have strong, historic reasons for their fears. PNS commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of "The Disappearance of Black Leadership." His e-mail address is ehutchi344@aol.com.

The discovery of Raynard Johnson's body hanging from a pecan tree in the front yard of his Kokomo, Mississippi home stirred fears among many blacks that lynch law had again reared its ugly head.

Johnson's family openly disputed the coroner's ruling that their seventeen-year-old son was a suicide. They said he was murdered for dating a white girl.

Underlying their bitter charge was the recognition that Johnson, an African-American, had presumably violated America's oldest and most enduring taboo -- black males having sexual relations with white females.

Civil rights leaders quickly joined the clamor over his death. Jesse Jackson flatly claims it has the earmarks of a lynching. The NAACP hired a private investigator, and the Southern Poverty Law Center noted that the Klan had long used white fears of black men raping white women to terrorize blacks.

Older blacks still have vivid memories of the lynch murders of 14-year-old Emmett Till for allegedly whistling at a white woman in 1955 and Mack Charles Parker for the alleged rape of a white woman in 1959. No whites were convicted of criminal activity in connection with the killings of Till or Parker.

There is no tangible evidence that Johnson's death was anything other than a suicide.

Indeed, many found the idea that he had been lynched for dating a white girl absurd. They point to a sevenfold increase in black and white marriages have since 1960 -- there are now an estimated 1.5 million interracial marred couples. But these account for only a tiny fraction of total marriages, and the overwhelming majority live in multi-racial urban areas.

What makes it easy for many blacks to think Johnson was the victim of foul play is the country's long and sorrowful history of interracial sexual relations.

As late as the mid-1950s, interracial marriage was a felony offense in 30 states with heavy fines and prison terms. Six years after the Supreme Court struck down school desegregation in 1954, 29 states still outlawed black-white marriages. Maryland and Nevada went further banning all sexual contact between blacks and whites.

The civil rights movement and the political emergence of Asian and African nations, however, made anti-miscegenation laws a political liability and the Supreme Court in 1967 finally dumped them.

This did not sound the death knell for the taboo. Though legally unenforceable, bans on interracial marriages stayed on the books in 12 states in 1979, and a 1991 poll by the National Opinion Research Center found many Americans still frozen in time -- one in five white Americans believed interracial marriage should be illegal.

They frowned most severely on marriage between black men and white women, with two out of three opposed to a close relative marrying a black man.

Hollywood and the TV industry are still unenlightened. They avoid like the plague showing black men and white women in intimate relations for fear of offending white audiences and sponsors.

One bizarre sidelight to all this is the fact that many blacks also resent interracial marriage. That 1991 poll found two out of three blacks neither "favored nor opposed" interracial marriage and nearly one in ten thought it should be illegal. In 1996, an informal survey in Ebony magazine found 40 percent of black women and 25 percent of black men saying they would not date a person of another race.

In "Soul on Ice" Eldridge Cleaver fed the dangerous myth that black men would abandon family and community in a relentless hunt for white female flesh. He called the white woman the "reincarnation of the Virgin Mary." He seemed proud of his sexual conquests, even rapes of white women.

If Cleaver specialized in raping white women, he was the rare exception. Black men don't routinely rape white women. Nor do white men rape black women. Rape, like most crime in America, is intra-racial -- black-on-black, white-on-white, Latino-on-Latino and Asian-on-Asian. In many cases, the rape victim knows her assailant.

The idea of black men and white women in intimate sexual relationships has inflamed passions, stirred fears and ignited violence for much of the past century.

Anti-miscegenation laws may be buried, and Americans may be more tolerant toward interracial sex, so the notion that someone can be murdered for dating someone of a different race seems far-fetched. But the fact that so many blacks are instantly willing to think the worst about Johnson's death -- and so many Americans black and white still express fears about white women and black men dating and marrying -- should remind us that this oldest taboo is alive and well.