Three University of Mississippi students were suspended from their fraternity and now face a potential Justice Department investigation after a photo surfaced of them posing for a picture in front of a bullet-riddled sign commemorating the site where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, according to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica.
The Kappa Alpha fraternity suspended the trio Wednesday after the picture made headlines and news organizations sent a copy to the fraternity chapter’s leaders.
“The photo is inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable. It does not represent our chapter,” Taylor Anderson, president of Ole Miss’ Kappa Alpha Order, wrote in an email to ProPublica. “We have and will continue to be in communication with our national organization and the University.”
The photo was posted to Ole Miss student and Kappa Alpha member Ben LeClere’s Instagram account in March. It appears to show LeClere holding a shotgun, posing next to the shot-up sign alongside two of his fraternity brothers, one of whom is holding an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. One of the students is believed to be Ole Miss student John Lowe.
“One of Memphis’s finest and the worst influence I’ve ever met,” LeClere wrote on the since-deleted Instagram post on Lowe’s birthday.
It is unknown if the fraternity brothers shot the sign or if they just took the picture in front of it. LeClere removed the Instagram post after ProPublica reached out to the fraternity.
The photo was reported to the Ole Miss Office of Student Conduct five days after it was first posted after a student filed a complaint.
“The photo is on Instagram with hundreds of ‘likes,’ and no one said a thing,” the complaint read, which ProPublica reviewed. “I cannot tell Ole Miss what to do, I just thought it should be brought to your attention.”
The Emmett Till memorial sign has been vandalized and replaced numerous times. It was first built in 2008 and has since been thrown into the river and destroyed by bullet holes twice.
Till, a major figure of the Civil Rights era, was lynched when he was just 14 years old in August 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The sign was placed at the site where his body was dragged out of the Tallahatchie River. His killers were acquitted by an all-white jury.
Chad Lamar, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi in Oxford, told ProPublica the case had been referred to DOJ’s Civil Rights Division for further investigation and that he would be “working with them closely.”
