Another day, another horrifying video going viral on Twitter and Facebook. This video was shot at a Kampgrounds of America property in Starkville, Mississippi, and involves Jessica Richardson and her husband, a black couple who wanted to enjoy Memorial Day weekend in nature; their dog; and a white property manager with a gun telling them to leave.
By the way: Richardson’s husband is an Army National Guard sergeant, and has just returned from a nine-month deployment in the Middle East.
Jessica Richardson, who filmed the interaction, explained that she and her husband wanted to spend the holiday weekend picnicking and hanging out in nature. They chose this Kampgrounds of America location because it was a close drive. Makes sense.
Upon arrival, the couple says, they asked at reception if they needed to stay at the campsite in order to access the lake. They say they were told lake access wasn’t for guests only. Awesome! All should have been well.
According to Richardson, however, things took a seriously scary turn when they actually started walking toward the lake. An elderly white woman, who was wearing a Kampgrounds of America T-shirt, reportedly pulled up beside the couple in her truck and told them to leave after hearing they didn’t have a reservation.
First of all, that’s confusing and contradictory to what they’d just been told. But the scary part? She had a gun out while she said this and approached them. The video, embedded below, is from Jessica’s Facebook.
“She jumped out and the gun was pointed at me, my husband, and our dog. It was just pointing at us. One finger was on the trigger and one finger was on the lever of the revolver,” Richardson told North Mississippi CBS affiliate WCBI. That’s when she says she took out her phone and began recording.
“This lady just pulled a gun because we [are] out here and don't have reservations,” Richardson can be heard saying in the video. “The only thing you had to tell us was to leave, we would have left. You didn't have to pull a gun."
“Well I'm just telling you you need to leave because it's under private ownership,” the woman said. “You can't be out here.”
Whether they were accidentally trespassing or not is still unclear. However, what is perfectly clear is that, according to Kampgrounds of America, this white woman’s behavior is not OK.
In an interview, Kampgrounds of America spokesman Mike Gast said that the employee has been fired. He noted that the company “does not condone the use of a firearm in any manner.”
“Time stopped. Everything stopped. I was confused as to what was going on. It’s not like we posed a threat to anybody out there walking our dog. There’s nothing harmful about that,” Richardson told WCBI. “The fact that she used ‘get, get’ like we were a dog. You say get, get to a stray dog that’s on your porch. That ‘get, get’ got to me more than ‘you don’t belong here.'”
“You can feel the intent behind it. I felt it. I felt the heat from it. I felt it in her eyes. I knew exactly what it was,” said Richardson. And the “it” she’s referring to is, of course, racism. Do you think there’s any chance this would have happened to a white couple?