Mississippi Community In Shock After Black Student Has Noose Put Around Neck By Classmates

Story out of Wiggins, Mississippi:

The president of the Mississippi NAACP is demanding a federal hate crime investigation after the parents of a black high school student said as many as four white students put a noose around their son’s neck at school.

“No child should be walking down the hall or in a locker room and be accosted with a noose around their neck,” president Derrick Johnson said Monday during a news conference in Wiggins.

Johnson said the incident happened Oct. 13 near a locker room at Stone High School in Wiggins.

The NAACP said the incident happened during a break in football practice and that the noose was “yanked backward” while on the student’s neck.

Stone High has about 800 students, about a quarter of whom are black according to state figures. That’s not a particularly high percentage in Mississippi, where half of nearly 500,000 public school students are African-American.

The Stone County Sheriff’s Department provides officers at local schools and typically is the first to respond to incidents. Sheriff’s Capt. Ray Boggs said officials believe something close to what the Paytons described did happen and said he’s still investigating. He said all the students involved are younger than 17 and he expects any charges would be filed in youth court, where records are closed to the public.

Johnson said he wants the teenagers charged as adults. That’s allowable in certain situations for people between ages 13 and 16 in Mississippi. He cited federal prosecutions of young people from Rankin County for hate crimes following the 2011 death of a man run down in the parking lot of Jackson motel as an example of what federal involvement could bring. Most of those people were charged as adults, although there was evidence of at least one unusual federal juvenile prosecution.

Carissa Bolden of Wiggins, the mother of a middle school student, attended the NAACP news conference Monday and said white students have been flying the Mississippi flag from their vehicles. The upper left corner of the state flag used since 1894 has the Confederate battle emblem – a red field topped by a blue X with 13 white stars. Bolden said she sees a connection between the flag and the noose incident. Cont.

Story from - Global News