Mark McMillan left his small hometown, situated just across the border in Tennessee, early Sunday morning headed toward Oxford. He says what he saw later that morning changed his life.
McMillan, owner of Coastal Insulation, is contracted out by The University of Mississippi and working on the J.D. Williams Library’s cooling tower. Wanting to get ahead on some work for the week, he pulled his black Ford Ranger pickup into the Circle just before 6:45 Sunday morning. When he passed the Croft building, he noticed two young men walking down the sidewalk. One, in particular, was wearing camouflage pants.
“It was pretty early, and something just caught my eye about them,” he recalled. “I shrugged it off and kept driving.”
He parked his truck on the road just south of the James Meredith statue around 6:45 a.m. The cooling tower he is working on is directly south of the library, next to the George Street House. When he exited his truck, he walked west down the sidewalk toward the library loading dock, where a Porta-John is located for the contractors working at the tower.
About 10 minutes later, still near the library loading dock, he saw the two young men for the second time walking west toward Martindale and Bishop.
“They were eyeing me all funny when they saw me, and I immediately knew they were the two I saw when I was driving in,” McMillan said. “(They) were yelling ‘white power’ and ‘f— n—–s’ on my way back over towards the statue.”
When he rounded the corner of the George Street House, he froze. There was a rope tied like a noose around the James Meredith statue’s neck and a former Georgia state flag draped around the statue’s shoulders and back like a scarf.
“Seeing that sent chills down my back,” he said. “I’m a 64-year-old white man that grew up in rural, backwoods Mississippi. I’ve always been a little prejudiced at times, but this changed my life. I’ll never be the same person I was, and something came over me. It’s hard to talk about my feelings, but I feel like a completely different person. This was some messed-up shit.”
McMillan said he believed the young men must have practiced the vandalism before.
“It was a tight noose around the neck of the statue, like the ones you see in all the old movies,” he said. “The flag was hanging on the statue in a ‘V’ pattern, like they had practiced folding it or something. I wanted to run over and take it all off, but I was honestly scared to death.”
Not wanting to tamper with evidence or be implicated in the incident, he got his cell phone out and started to call the police department. As he was looking for the number to call, a black Ole Miss Landscape Services employee approached him. After explaining the situation, McMillan and the man called the police.
“I can’t speak for how (the landscaping employee) felt, but I wanted to make sure he was alright and let him know that not everyone could possibly think like that,” McMillan said. “I was just sick to my stomach.”
According to the UPD crime log, officers responded to the scene at 7:09 a.m., about 24 minutes after McMillan arrived. UPD Police Chief Calvin Sellers could only share limited information from the incident report, but he did confirm there was “some rope and a pre-2003 Georgia state flag on the statue.” Sellers said Monday there were no suspects, but the department will be looking at surveillance tape footage for a better look at the two young men.
“I obviously didn’t see those two young men do it, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they did it,” McMillan said. “I wish I could have done more. If I would have seen what they did before I lost sight of them, I may have tried to hold one of them down. I hope and pray that they find whoever did this. I know I could identify them if I saw them again.”
— Adam Ganucheau
dmeditor@gmail.com
