>> Franklin and Jessica Richardson had planned for a relaxing Memorial Day weekend. They would spend Sunday picnicking on the sandy shores of Oktibbeha County Lake, a popular fishing destination on the outskirts of Starkville, Miss., and maybe even rent a cabin for the night.
Instead, within minutes of their arrival, the young black couple were facing down a white campground manager who pulled out a gun and told them to leave.
A spokesman for Kampgrounds of America, a chain that oversees hundreds of commercial campgrounds nationwide, told The Washington Post on Tuesday that the property manager for the Starkville location had been fired. But for the Richardsons, the experience was made all the more harrowing — and somewhat ironic — by the fact that Franklin, a sergeant in the Army National Guard, had recently returned from a nine-month deployment in the Middle East, according to
WCBI.
“It’s kind of crazy,” he told the station. “You go over there and don’t have a gun pointed at you, and you come back home and the first thing that happens is you have a gun pointed at you.”
The incident appears to have stemmed from confusion over whether the picnic spots by the lakefront were public or private property. To Jessica Richardson, who documented a snippet of the confrontation in a 39-second
video that had been viewed more than 500,000 times on Facebook as of early Wednesday, the manager’s response proved that racism was “alive and well.”
“You can feel the intent behind it,” she told
WCBI. “I felt it. I felt the heat from it. I felt it in her eyes. I knew exactly what it was.”
... Less than five minutes after they arrived, Richardson wrote, “a truck pulls up and a white lady screams at us.”
The woman, who identified herself as the property manager, jumped out of the black Dodge Ram and kept one finger on the trigger as she pointed a gun at them, Richardson told
WCBI.
“She was just like, ‘
Get, get, you don’t belong here, you don’t belong here, you don’t belong here,'” Richardson said.
.... The woman can be heard telling the couple that they should have checked in with the campground’s office.
“We didn’t know,” Richardson said in the video. “The only thing you had to tell us was to leave, we would have left. You did not have to pull a gun.”
The woman tucked the gun back into the pocket of her denim shorts.
“Well, I’m just telling you, you need to leave because it’s under private ownership,” the property manager replied. “Y’all just can’t be out here. KOA won’t let you.”
The couple left, Richardson wrote. On their way out, they stopped by the campground’s office. There, they met another property manager, who happened to be the woman’s husband. Confusingly,
he contradicted what his wife had told them.
“I get out and start talking to him,” Franklin Richardson
told WCBI. “The first thing he says is, ‘Oh, you don’t need a reservation for the lake.’
Then, she pulls up flying, hops out of the car, then proceeded to yell at my wife, ‘Get in the car, you need to get back in the car,’ just cussing her out and she’s not even saying anything.”
... The incident is the latest to call attention to the way that black people engaging in everyday activities are
treated with suspicion, resulting in aggressive questioning or phone calls to the police. Parks and outdoor recreation areas, in particular, have a long history of racial discrimination: In the early 20th century, the administrators of national parks
discouragedAfrican Americans from visiting, and camping facilities were strictly segregated. Visitors to those parks remain
predominantly white, despite the efforts of groups that aim to encourage more people of color to explore the outdoors.
Researchers have
found that parks are still widely perceived as places where African Americans will face unwelcoming, or downright hostile, treatment. The experience that the Richardsons described would seem to confirm that. To Jessica, the most shocking part of Sunday’s confrontation was hearing the campground manager say, “Get, get” to her and her husband, making her feel that they were
being treated like animals.
“You say ‘Get, get’ to a stray dog that’s on your porch,” she told WCBI. “That ‘Get, get’ got to me more than ‘You don’t belong here.’ ” <<