The photo of the smiling Kappa Alpha members was the subject of a bias complaint filed with the university in March, according to Rod Guajardo, a spokesman for the university, which is commonly referred to as Ole Miss. He said he did not have a copy of the complaint and was unsure if it was a public record.
Guajardo said in an email on Thursday that the photo was referred to campus police and the FBI, which declined to investigate the matter further because it did not pose a specific threat. The university said it took no disciplinary action because, while offensive, what the students did was not a violation of the school’s code of conduct.
But the Ole Miss chapter of Kappa Alpha, which the three students are members of, said in a statement on Thursday that it took swift action after it learned of the photo on Tuesday.
“The photo is inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable,” the fraternity chapter said. “It does not represent our chapter.”
William C. Lamar, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi, turned the photo over to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, according to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, which first obtained and reported on the image. The center is part of the Local Reporting Network of ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization.
Lamar did not respond to requests for comment Thursday, and a Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.
Emmett, who was 14 when he was killed in 1955, would have turned 78 on Thursday. The sign, which has been replaced multiple times after being vandalized, marks the spot along the Tallahatchie River where Emmett’s body was found after he was tortured and lynched. He had been accused of whistling at a white woman behind the counter of the grocery store where he went to buy candy. Last year, the cold case was quietly reopened by the Justice Department after the woman recanted parts of her story.
“To me, that’s sacred ground,” Deborah Watts, Emmett’s cousin and the co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, said in an interview Thursday. “Emmett’s body was dumped here. He was brutally murdered. He was lynched. What sense of pride does that represent for you?”
The photo was posted to a private Instagram account in March and has since been deleted, according to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. The center identified two of the students in the photo as Ben Leclere and John Lowe in a report published Thursday.
Leclere was holding a shotgun on the left side of the photo, and Lowe was holding an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle on the right, the report said. The report did not identify the third student, who was crouching down and did not appear to be holding anything.
It was unclear if the bullet holes were made by the students or if they were remnants of previous vandalism.
Efforts to reach Leclere and Lowe on Thursday were unsuccessful. Phone messages left at their parents’ numbers were not immediately returned.
The Ole Miss chapter of Kappa Alpha, a national fraternity whose “spiritual founder” was Robert E. Lee, the Confederate Civil War general, did not elaborate on the length or the nature of the suspensions. Neither did the national fraternity.
“We support the chapter and the actions they are taking,” the national Kappa Alpha order said through a spokesman.
Ole Miss defended its handling of the episode.
“This image and the actions portrayed in the photo of this off-campus incident are offensive and hurtful,” Guajardo said Thursday. “While the image is offensive, it did not present a violation of university code of conduct. It occurred off campus and was not part of a university-affiliated event. We stand ready to assist the fraternity with educational opportunities for those members and the chapter.”
“The University of Mississippi will continue to build programs that engage our students in deliberate, honest and candid conversations while making clear that we unequivocally reject attitudes that do not respect the dignity of each individual in our community,” Guajardo added.
Ole Miss has previously grappled with controversial symbols of the state’s past. In 2003, the Oxford, Mississippi, school retired its longtime sports mascot, Colonel Reb, a white-goateed, cane-toting Southern plantation owner that many had criticized as racist and anachronistic.
Emmett’s family said Thursday that their resolve was even stronger after the episode.
“This is still an open murder case,” Watts said. “Damaging that sign is not going to deter me or other members of our family that are continuing to pursue justice.”
Watts said she would leave it to law enforcement and prosecutors to determine whether a hate crime was committed by the three students in the photo.
“It’s like an assault on our humanity,” she said. “If somebody shot up Robert E. Lee’s statue, what would they feel about it?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.