Viral Video Shows White Campground Employee Pulling Gun On Black Couple Having A Picnic

A white campground employee in Mississippi was caught on video harassing a black family for having a picnic, at one point pulling a gun on them, Slate reports.

Facebook user Jessica Richardson, who is African American, was in Starkville, Mississippi last weekend when she and her family decided to stop by a lake to have a picnic. She admits that they were at a campground and that the lakeside picnic table was on campground property, but she says she was not sure if she was required to have a reservation, or to be a campground guest, in order to use the picnic table.

She got the answer to that question via a campground employee who pulled a gun on her.

In a Facebook post, Richardson says that she and her family had been seated for only a few minutes when a woman, apparently the wife of the campground manager, pulled up in a truck and started screaming at her. She then exited the truck, holding a gun.

Richardson captured the incident on video, which is below. In it, Richardson tries to explain to the woman that all she (the woman) had to do was calmly explain that reservations were required for using the picnic table, and that pulling the gun wasn’t necessary. As Richardson talks to the woman, she puts her gun away.

https://www.facebook.com/100013086163475/videos/656134728166060/?t=0

Speaking to Columbus, Mississippi’s WCBI-TV, Richardson said that she and her husband spoke to the campground’s manager, who is the husband of the woman who pulled the gun on her, and confirmed that there was no requirement to have a reservation in order to use the picnic table.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=631672857278914&set=a.200480143731523&type=3&permPage=1

Richardson further claims that after she returned to the picnic table, the woman came back, this time telling them to get out, using vulgar language. That incident does not appear to have been caught on video, however.

Franklin Richardson just got home from a nine-month overseas deployment with the National Guard. He says that he managed to serve in a war zone without having a gun pointed at him, only to return home to Mississippi to find himself on the wrong end of a gun, simply for using a picnic table.

A representative from Kampgrounds of America, the company that manages a chain of campgrounds that includes the Mississippi location where this incident took place, told WCBI that the woman in the video has been fired from her job.