Franklin and Jessica Richardson looked forward to a peaceful Memorial Day weekend. Their plan was to picnic on the sandy shores of Oktibbeha County Lake, a favored fishing spot near Starkville, Mississippi, and perhaps even rent a cabin for the night.
Instead, within minutes of their arrival, the young black couple were confronted by a white campground manager who pulled out a gun and told them to leave.
A spokesperson for Campgrounds of America, which manages hundreds of commercial campgrounds across the country, informed The Washington Post on Tuesday that the property manager for their Starkville location had been dismissed. 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. Jessica Richardson, who captured a part of the incident in a 39-second video that received over 500,000 views on Facebook by early Wednesday, felt that the manager’s reaction confirmed that racism is “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.”
They chose Oktibbeha County Lake, about 10 miles from Starkville, near Mississippi State University.
Richardson recounted that less than five minutes after their arrival, “a truck pulls up and a white lady screams at us.”
The woman, claiming to be the property manager, emerged from the black Dodge Ram and pointed a gun at them, keeping one finger on the trigger, Richardson reported to WCBI.