I have held off weighing in on the story of the murder of gay Clarksdale, Mississippi mayoral candidate Marco McMillian (pictured above) whose body was found late last week near a levee after being reportedly dragged, beaten, and burned. The alleged killer is another young black man, 22-year-old named Lawrence Reed, who is in police custody. Some reports indicate that Lawrence may use a "gay panic" defense, but something just doesn't seem to add up in the whole sad story. As a result, the FBI is monitoring the situation. Having lived in Alabama and seen small rural towns in both Alabama and Mississippi first hand, when a young black man, especially one who s openly gay, is murdered, it is hard not to wonder what the real story might be and whether Lawrence is telling the truth. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the unfolding story. Here are highlights:
In Clarksdale, Miss. — When Marco McMillian decided to move back to his home town and run for mayor, the 33-year-old aspiring candidate knew he needed the blessing of the silver-haired oligarchy that ruled quietly from church pews. It was familiar turf for McMillian, who grew up singing in the choir at New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church a half-mile from his small house near the railroad tracks in this grindingly poor city in the Mississippi Delta.
A week and a half after McMillian’s body was found in the mud on an isolated stretch of levee outside Clarksdale, his death remains a mystery. It has roiled old suspicions and fears from Mississippi’s dark history of racial brutality, although both McMillian and the man charged with his murder are African American. McMillian was also gay, adding fire to demands by civil rights groups for the killing to be investigated as a hate crime. The FBI said this week that it is “monitoring” the investigation.
The Coahoma County Sheriff’s Department has charged Lawrence Reed, 22, in the crime. He told police that he killed McMillian and where to look for the body, according to two people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its early findings.
Reed’s family has yet to address publicly the allegations against him. The sheriff’s department has released almost no information on the case, adding to conspiracy theories and guessing over what exactly happened the night McMillian and Reed, who worked at Domino’s Pizza, were together.
McMillian’s bid for mayor was an audacious move. He had lived away from Clarksdale for 10 years, graduating from Jackson State University, working as the executive assistant to the president at Alabama A&M University and until 2011, serving as the executive director of Phi Beta Sigma, the black fraternal organization headquartered in Washington.
He moved back to Clarksdale late last year. Known as the birthplace of the blues, the city of 18,000 has a 38 percent poverty rate. Tourists from around the world pour in to visit Muddy Waters’s shack and listen to the music of Pinetop Perkins. But black Clarksdale has existed in a separate realm from the New Bohemian South the city wants to be.
Little of what happened that night is known. On Tuesday morning, on a rural highway out near the Tallahatchie County line, McMillian’s sport-utility vehicle was involved in a collision with another vehicle. A distraught Lawrence Reed was driving the SUV alone.
McMillian’s body was found the next morning near the levee between the communities of Sherard and Rena Lara. The spot was completely isolated. A steep embankment of pasture dropped down to the barbed-wire fence that went along the water, and that is where the body was, shoved partway under the wire.
“Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Marco McMillian, one of the 1st viable openly #LGBT candidates in Mississippi,” tweeted the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a national political action committee. It was a bombshell on top of a bombshell.
Three days later, frustrated by a lack of contact with the Coahoma Sheriff’s Department, the Ungers released a statement saying McMillian had been “beaten, dragged and burned (set afire),” and that his death could not have been a random act of violence.
There's more in the story. Hopefully, with more time answers to the swirling questions and speculation will be found.
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