CLARKSDALE, Miss.—"The devil is running rampantly,” pastor Jimmy Glasper thunders. “Seeking who he may devour.”
Glasper is telling the New Jerusalem Baptist church that we live in devastating times. The congregants shout affirmations. They have recent proof.
Marco McMillian had belonged to the church, and this was the first Sunday service after police found his body in late February. The 33-year-old political consultant, who was both black and gay, had spent most of his adult life building a promising career in Washington, D.C., and Memphis, Tenn. Recently, he did what few people who leave here ever do by choice: He came back. And he decided to run for mayor.
“He moved away and had practically lived all over the world,” Glasper told me before the service. “He said God spoke to his spirit and said he should come back and be a help to his people. To go back home and help his own people climb out of poverty.”
McMillian never got the chance. On Feb. 27, sheriff’s deputies discovered his body next to a levee outside of town, where it had been dumped days earlier.
McMillian had been beaten, dragged, and set on fire, according to his family. They want his killing investigated as a hate crime. The coroner and the sheriff dispute the family’s account and say they have no reason to approach it as anything other than a typical murder.
Lawrence Reed, a 22-year-old man originally from the nearby town of Shelby, has been arrested and charged with the killing. According to investigators, Reed wrecked McMillian’s car in a head-on collision before anyone knew of the mayoral candidate’s whereabouts. Under questioning, Reed pointed police to the levee.
The rest of the story is a fog of rumor and paranoia. One take has McMillian and Reed as lovers. Another claims they were just friends, and Reed panicked after McMillian made a sexual advance. And a few people in town even think the sexual intrigue is a smokescreen for a political assassination.
None of this matters at church, where Glasper is drawing a very different lesson. Inside the chapel, the pastor is choosing which parts of McMillian’s life to hold up for public consumption (his vision to save the town), and which parts to brush aside (his sexuality).
Glasper is only doing what everyone in Clarksdale and beyond has done since McMillian’s untimely death—appropriating the parts of his life that line up with the story they want to tell. The lack of detail surrounding the crime has granted them that license. For Glasper, it is the life of a spiritual man, cut devastatingly short by a wicked crime. For the downtrodden in Clarksdale, McMillian offers the promise of a sunnier future. For civil- and gay-rights activists, it is a tale of martyrdom—of a conservative South stubbornly resistant to progress.
The problem, however, is that as the details trickle out, none of those narratives entirely hold up. In this sense, McMillian’s death was inconvenient, devoid of clarity—something that has already allowed his life to take on a quality of tabula rasa. The idea that he was about to become mayor and save the city is complicated by his relative anonymity and poor electoral chances; his status as a gay activist is muddled by the fact that few people knew about his orientation; and the discussion of a possible hate crime is made difficult by his possible sexual relationship with the black man charged in the slaying.
But because this is Clarksdale, a haunted town with an unclean past, and because McMillian was black, gay, running for office, and cut down in his prime, the speculation has run wild and fierce. The story people tell often says more about the teller than the subject.
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