By Derek Hawkins October 25


Derrick Johnson, left, president of the Mississippi NAACP, speaks at a news conference on behalf of Stacey and Hollis Payton, right, the parents of a high school student, in front of the Stone County Courthouse in Wiggins, Miss., on Monday. (Max Becherer/AP)

A group of white high school students in Mississippi placed a noose around a black student’s neck and “yanked backward,” according to an NAACP leader, who described the incident Monday and demanded that federal authorities treat it as a hate crime.

The black student, a sophomore football player at Stone High School in Wiggins, Miss., was in a locker room on Oct. 13 when as many as four white students tossed a rope around his neck and pulled it tight, Mississippi NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a news conference Monday.

“No child should be walking down the hall or in a locker room and be accosted with a noose around their neck,” Johnson said. “This is 2016, not 1916. This is America. This is a place where children should go to school and feel safe in their environment.”

The student’s parents, Hollis and Stacey Payton, stood with Johnson in front of the Stone County Courthouse but did not speak.

The incident is the latest in a series of racially charged attacks — many verbal, some physical — that have grabbed national attention at a time when racial tensions in the United States have reached a boiling point.

Mississippi, a state with a long history of racial segregation and violence against African Americans, has been the site of multiple controversies recently. Earlier this year, a former University of Mississippi student admitted to tying a noose and a Confederate flag around the neck of a statue of James Meredith, the black student who became a civil rights legend when he integrated the university in 1962. The state has also been embroiled in a fight over whether to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. It is the only state in the country with a flag that incorporates such imagery.

[Mississippi flag’s Confederate imagery incites ‘acts of racial viol...]

Athletes around the country — and football players in particular — have been the target of slurs and death threats in the weeks since San Francisco 49ers took a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality. When a youth football team in Texas did the same last month, people threatened to shoot and lynch the 12- and 13-year-old players.

In Mississippi, white students used a real noose on their black teammate, Johnson said. The student was not injured but felt “terrified,” he told ESPN.