Armed Ole Miss Students Posed With an Emmett Till Memorial Sign. They Went Unpunished by the University.

A photo of University of Mississippi fraternity members holding guns and posing before a bullet-riddled Emmett Till memorial sign was deemed “offensive and hurtful” by a campus official, but the university declined to suspend or punish the students because the image did not violate Ole Miss’s code of conduct.

A spokesman for the university, Rod Guajardo, wrote in a statement that the incident had occurred off-campus and was not part of a university-affiliated event.

As originally reported by ProPublica, in partnership with the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a Kappa Alpha Order fraternity member named Ben LeClere posted the photo to his private Instagram account in March. The image, taken at night in front of a sign marking where Till’s body was found, shows LeClere holding a shotgun while another fraternity brother holds what ProPublica identified as an AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle. John Lowe squats between the two. All three are smiling.

ProPublica reported that neither of the two students it named had responded to requests for comment.

The 14-year-old Till was killed in August 1955 by two armed white men, his body left to rot in the Tallahatchie River. An all-white jury acquitted the killers, who later admitted to the crime. The memorial sign, erected in 2007, has been replaced multiple times due to vandalism and gunshot damage.

Kappa Alpha Order, which cites the Confederate general Robert E. Lee as a “spiritual founder,” suspended the three fraternity members, and Guajardo wrote that the university was “ready to assist the fraternity with educational opportunities for those members and the chapter.”

The university said it was alerted to the post in March, and it referred the matter to the campus police department, which then reported the image to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI “declined to investigate further because the photo did not pose a specific threat,” Guajardo wrote.

The university has faced several racist incidents in recent years. Ed Meek, a former Ole Miss official whose name topped the school of journalism at the time, made what many deemed a racist Facebook post last September, decrying downtown violence. “Enough, Oxford and Ole Miss leaders,” he wrote, “get on top of this before it’s too late. … We all share in the responsibility to protect the values we hold dear.” He included no photos of fights in Oxford, Miss., but rather pictures of two young black women, both students, dressed to go out.

Amid a furious backlash and criticism from Jeffrey S. Vitter, the university’s chancellor, Meek asked that his name be removed from the journalism school.

Two years earlier, in September 2016, a Mississippi student made a Facebook comment advocating the lynching of African-American protesters in Charlotte, N.C. Vitter drew criticism for a lack of action over the post, which led dozens of students to stage a sit-in at the main administrative building. The student, a senior majoring in risk management, voluntarily withdrew from Mississippi weeks later.

In 2015 another Mississippi student, a former member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, pleaded guilty to using a threat of force to intimidate African-American students and employees, and spent six months in prison, after tying a noose around the campus statue of James Meredith, the university’s first black student. The fraternity chapter was later shut down by its national organization.

In an email to ProPublica, Taylor Anderson, the Kappa Alpha Order chapter’s president, wrote that the photo was “inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable. It does not represent our chapter.”

Correction (7/25/2019, 8:32 p.m.): This article originally stated that John Lowe held a semiautomatic rifle in the photo posted on Instagram. He was the person squatting on the ground in front, ProPublica later said. An unidentified fraternity member held the weapon. The article has been updated to reflect that correction.

Will Jarvis is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @willyfrederick, or email him at will.jarvis@chronicle.com.