Racism, White Supremacy & Guns: NOT Just Another "Bias Incident"

 
 

3 white college frat guys were caught-in-the-headlights by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting on March 1, 2019 when one of the students posted a photo to his private Instagram account in showing the trio in front of a roadside plaque commemorating the site where Emmett Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River.
In the past few days - 4 months later - it's all over mainstream news channels. 2 days ago ProPublica pushed the report forward into the spotlight to show the heart of darkness.
What's the story here? 2nd Amendment Right-to-Bear-Arms or Military Training Tactics gone insane?

Till’s death helped propel the modern civil rights movement in America.
This is not the first time Ole Miss fraternity students have been caught up in an incident involving an icon from the civil rights movement.

Documenting Hate

We Found Photos of Ole Miss Students Posing With Guns in Front of a Shot-Up Emmett Till Memorial. Now They Face a Possible Civil Rights Investigation.

". . . Three students were suspended from their fraternity house, Kappa Alpha, after we shared an Instagram photo one of the men posted that was taken in front of a sign commemorating the murder of the 14-year-old black youth in 1955.

by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

July 25, 1:35 p.m. EDT

. . . The 14-year-old black youth was tortured and murdered in August 1955. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted two white men accused of the slaying.

The photo, which was obtained by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, shows an Ole Miss student named Ben LeClere holding a shotgun while standing in front of the bullet-pocked sign. His Kappa Alpha fraternity brother, John Lowe, squats below the sign. A third fraternity member stands on the other side with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. The photo appears to have been taken at night, the scene illuminated by lights from a vehicle.

LeClere posted the picture on Lowe’s birthday on March 1 with the message “one of Memphis’s finest and the worst influence I’ve ever met.”

Neither LeClere nor Lowe responded to repeated attempts to contact them.

Five days after LeClere posted the photo, a person who saw it filed a bias report to the university’s Office of Student Conduct. The complaint pointed out there may have been a fourth person present, who took the picture.

“The photo is on Instagram with hundreds of ‘likes,’ and no one said a thing,” said the complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica. “I cannot tell Ole Miss what to do, I just thought it should be brought to your attention.”

The photo was removed from LeClere’s Instagram account after the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica began contacting fraternity members and friends. It had received 247 likes within a day of being posted.

Kappa Alpha suspended the trio on Wednesday, after the news organizations provided a copy of the photo to fraternity officials at Ole Miss.  .  ."

READ MORE > Pro Public

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All three students withdrew from Ole Miss, and the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity’s national headquarters shuttered its chapter on the Ole Miss campus after its own investigation, blaming the closing on behavior that included “hazing, underage drinking, alcohol abuse and failure to comply with the university and fraternity’s codes of conduct.”

Shirley L. Smith and Debbie Skipper of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and Thalia Beaty, Benjamin Hardy and Claire Perlman of ProPublica contributed to this report.

Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter for the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that seeks to hold public officials accountable and empower citizens in their communities.
Email him at Jerry.Mitchell.MCIR@gmail.com and follow him on Facebook at @JerryMitchellReporter and on Twitter at @jmitchellnews.

If you have any information about the people who took this picture or who appeared in it, please let us know at Mississippi@ProPublica.org.

Update, July 26, 2019:
University of Mississippi interim Chancellor Larry D. Sparks issued a statement Friday, which said in part: “The incident occurred off campus, did not rise to the level of a threat per federal authorities, and was not part of any university-affiliated event.