2015/4/2 – Mississippi NAACP Branch President Derrick Johnson commended a federal grand jury’s indictment of a University of Mississippi student for defiling a historical Civil Rights Movement landmark.

“The people need to see that the wheels of justice do still turn, even as fundamental rights for which we have given blood are currently under fire,” Johnson said. “A court of law will now determine the next course of action, and we have yet to know the final outcome. Today, however, we stand confident that the people can be trusted to recognize when a great grievance has been committed.”

The grand jury charged student Graeme Phillip Harris with one count of conspiracy to violate civil rights and one count of using a threat of force to intimidate students because of their race or color. The charging documents claim Harris conspired with a group of others to hang a rope and an obsolete version of the Georgia state flag—containing the pro-slavery Confederate battle flag—around the neck of the statue of National Civil Rights figure James Meredith on the university campus. A press release on the charges claims Harris committed this Feb. 16, 2014 act “with the intent to threaten and intimidate African-American students and employees at the university.”

The Mississippi Division of the FBI and the University of Mississippi Police Department is conducting the investigation. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of Mississippi will be prosecuting the case.

James Meredith was the first African-American student to walk the grounds of the University of Mississippi after its combative 1962 integration. The statue represents the university’s recognition of its unfortunate participation in decades of violent racial segregation, and its continuing commitment to reversing that trend.

Johnson said that racist youth behavior, such as the statue defilement, reflects an ingrained pattern of lingering racism in society.

“Passionate young people are too often the gauge of society’s troubling undercurrents,” Johnson said. “When a young person shows this kind of racial animosity he or she is reflecting back to us all the wrong that we have shown them. This act of intimidation can’t end with a guilty verdict. It demands a wider change in society.”

Johnson pointed out, for example, that Harris had no reason to use an outdated Georgia flag when the current Mississippi flag still contains the pro-slavery rebel flag that Georgia voters rejected in a statewide referendum in 2004.

source: MS NAACP Staff