The Mcmillian Campaign / Reuters

Marco McMillian, 34, a candidate for mayor of the Mississippi Delta city of Clarksdale, is shown in this undated campaign photograph released to Reuters on February 27, 2013. McMillan, considered to be among Mississippi's first viable political candidates and who was openly gay, was found dead on Wednesday morning, officials said, the victim of an apparent homicide.

JACKSON, Mississippi - A gay, black mayoral candidate killed last week in Mississippi was beaten, dragged and set on fire before his body was dumped near a river, according to his family.

In a statement issued late on Sunday, the family of Marco McMillian said a coroner who performed an autopsy on his body told them about the gruesome manner of death.

"We feel this was not a random act of violence based on the condition of the body when it was found," said the McMillian family. "Marco, nor anyone, should have their lives end in this manner."

But the Coahoma County Sheriff's Department, which is leading the investigation, has released few details about the killing or a possible motive. Law enforcement officials say the killing is not being treated as a hate crime.

Coahoma County Coroner Scotty Meredith declined to comment on the family's statement that McMillian was beaten and burned.

The body of McMillian, a 33-year-old candidate for mayor of Clarksdale, Mississippi, was found on Wednesday. A day later, law enforcement officials arrested a 22-year-old man, Lawrence Reed, who is also black, and charged him with murder in connection with the case.

McMillian was one of the first viable openly gay candidates to run for office in Mississippi, according to the Victory Fund, a national organization that supports homosexual candidates.

Autopsy results are not expected to be released until toxicology tests are complete, which could take two or three weeks, Meredith said.

McMillian had been missing since February 25 when his sport-utility vehicle was involved in a head-on collision in a rural part of Coahoma County in the Mississippi Delta. McMillian was not in the vehicle at the time of the accident.

McMillian recently moved from Memphis back to his hometown of Clarksdale to run for mayor as a Democrat. He had faced state Representative Chuck Espy, a Democrat, and former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Luckett, an attorney, along with two other candidates.

McMillian's campaign focused on reducing crime and unemployment in Clarksdale, a city of roughly 18,000 people, said campaign spokesman Jarod Keith.

A once-booming agricultural community, the city has steadily bled residents and jobs over the years and now faces high levels of violence and unemployment.

Another Democratic candidate for mayor, Doris Haynes Miller, said she recently was robbed at gunpoint in the town.

Handout / Reuters

Marco McMillian, 34, a candidate for mayor of the Mississippi Delta city of Clarksdale, is shown in an undated campaign photograph.

Marco McMillian, a black and gay man from Mississippi, announced in January that he would run for mayor of his hometown of Clarksdale. Six weeks later, the 34-year-old was found dead by police on the Mississippi River levee outside the town of 20,000 people.

Residents are still reeling, McMillian’s childhood friend and Clarksdale resident Tony Jackson told the Clarion Ledger, a local newspaper. “I heard what had happened, and I didn’t even know who they was talking about,” said Jackson, a truck driver and former city police officer. “When it came to me that it was him, that was a shock.”

Everybody knew about McMillian’s sexual preference growing up, but “it didn’t matter,” Jackson told the paper.

Another childhood friend said that McMillian’s death had been “dramatic” for people in Clarksdale, a crime-plagued town best known as a birthplace of the blues.

“It’s just terrifying to everybody that knew him personally because you ask, ‘Why?’” Sissiretta Melton, 33, told The Associated Press. “He knew this town needed him. Kids here have nothing. We don’t even have a decent movie theater. He wanted to bring those things here.”

Investigators charged Lawrence Reed, 22, with McMillian’s murder on Thursday. Reed was hospitalized on Tuesday after he got into a crash while driving McMillian’s car, police said. McMillian was not in the vehicle at the time, and police started their search for the missing man. His body was found Wednesday.

That the promising young man – a college graduate who had worked at Alabama A&M University and Jackson State University – was the latest victim of crime in the city saddened but did not surprise residents of Clarksdale.

“You know things are bad when someone like that is killed and you’re not even surprised,” Jackson said. “There’s too much of this going on here. It seems like someone’s dying every two weeks.”

McMillian cited “increased crime” in a press release announcing his candidacy, saying that he would work to make the Police Department more transparent and partner with community organizations to provide services to at-risk individuals.

“There’s a lot of people upset about it,” resident Dennis Thomas, 33, told the AP. “Why would somebody want to do something like that to somebody of that caliber? He was a highly respected person in town. He’s been in the community helping out a lot.”

Authorities have said that they do not think racial or sexual bias played a role in McMillian’s death, and that it is not being investigated as a hate crime. If elected, he would have been among the state’s most prominent openly gay public officials.

“Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Marco McMillian, one of the 1st viable openly #LGBT candidates in Mississippi,” the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a gay rights political action committee, tweeted on Wednesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Related: 

• Murder charge filed in death of Mississippi mayoral candidate
• Mississippi mayoral candidate found dead; person taken into custody

marcomcmillian.com

Marco Millian, 34, was widely noted as one of the first openly gay candidates for public office in Mississippi.

Authorities charged a Mississippi man with murder Thursday, a day after the body of a candidate for mayor of Clarksdale, Miss., was found.

Authorities had been searching for Marco McMillian, 34, since Tuesday morning, when his sport-utility vehicle was involved in a head-on collision in Coahoma County.

Coahoma County, Miss., Sheriff's Office

Lawrence Reed, 22, of Shelby, Miss., was charged Thursday, Feb. 28, with murder.

McMillian, however, wasn't in the car. His body was found Wednesday near a Mississippi River levee between the rural towns of Sherard and Lena, said Coahoma County Coroner Scotty Meredith.

The driver of the car, identified as Lawrence Reed, 22, of nearby Shelby, was airlifted to a hospital in Memphis, Tenn., where he was listed in good condition.

In a one-sentence statement Thursday, the Coahoma County Sheriff's Office said it had charged Reed with murder. It gave no further details, but the most likely next step would be for Mississippi officials to seek Reed's extradition from Tennessee once he is released from the hospital.

McMillian — who was chief executive of MWM & Associates, a consultant to nonprofit organizations — was widely noted as one of the first openly gay candidates for public office in Mississippi.

His campaign spokesman, Jarod Keith, told the Clarion-Ledger newspaper of Jackson that McMillian's sexuality was never an issue in the campaign.

In a statement Wednesday, McMillian's campaign said: "Words cannot describe our grief at the loss of our dear friend, Marco McMillian. The shocking news of Marco's death is beyond difficult for us to process."

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A Confederate battle flag flew atop a state building in Mississippi for a couple hours after workers mistakenly bought it, a state spokeswoman told the Clarion-Ledger newspaper.

The flag was put up on the state Supreme Court building in Jackson about 2 p.m. Friday and taken down by 4 p.m.

Kym Wiggins, public information officer for the state Department of Finance and Administration, gave this account, the Clarion-Ledger said:

Workers went to a local vendor to buy new flags to replace a state flag that was torn. They were given two boxes labeled "Mississippi State Flag" -- but the flags inside were Confederate battle flags. A maintenance worker then put up the flag, and the mistake wasn't noticed for a couple of hours.

Wiggins described the incident as "highly unusual."

A professor emeritus of political science at the University of Southern Mississippi gave the Clarion-Ledger a different take. "Have we seceded already?" said Joseph Parker. “The execution is faster than I thought.”

JACKSON, Miss. -- When state officials here tried last year to recruit a for-profit company to manage schools in rural Tate County, the community outcry was swift. Concerned residents spoke out in the media, argued their case to lawmakers and circulated a petition against the “privatization” of Tate County Schools.

Patricia Johnson, whose son attends a public high school in the county, described the proposal as “crazy.” For-profit companies, she said, shouldn’t be “getting paid” to run things when parents are having to buy copy paper for teachers in cash-strapped schools.

At first glance, Mississippi would seem an unlikely source of resistance to school privatization. But this year, a coalition of lawmakers and community groups is fighting vigorously against the prospect of for-profit companies opening up charter schools.

“I think people have been astounded that anyone can make money off of public education,” said Nancy Loome, executive director of The Parents’ Campaign, which lobbies for public education in Mississippi. “Our schools struggle to make it on the resources they are provided. If (for-profit management is) trying to make a profit and pay shareholders, they aren’t going to be investing very much in educating children.”

This fierce resistance in Mississippi is but the latest example of waning interest in for-profit school managers across the country. Charter schools of all types continue to spread rapidly. But schools managed by for-profit companies make up a smaller share than they did just a few years ago.

In Mississippi, the debate comes as lawmakers are poised to approve a major expansion of charter schools later this month. At the same time, renewed attention to the state’s lagging test scores and overall woeful performance in education is fueling debate about alternative ways of running schools.

Rick Hess, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said states should at least consider the potential benefits of for-profits. “I think it’s crazy to discriminate against companies because they want to pay taxes,” he said. “The bemoaning of for-profits is one reason we wind up with a system that has enormous difficulty trimming costs, and growth of even successful schools moves at a snail’s pace.”

Charter schools can be divided into two broad groups: ones that are freestanding and ones that are part of larger networks or chains. In 2007, about half of all network or chain charter schools were managed by for-profit companies. Just three years later, that figure had dropped to about 37 percent, according to the most recent data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Some states, including New York, have banned for-profit companies from running charter schools. In other cases, companies such as EdisonLearning, which used to focus primarily on managing schools, have shifted away from management after struggling to turn a profit or raise enough investment capital.

The number of for-profit companies has declined modestly, and the number of schools they operate has hit a plateau, said Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University who studies charter schools. (At the same time, some of the schools’ enrollment continues to increase, Miron said, and the number of virtual schools is exploding.)

Education leaders say there are two main reasons for the increased wariness toward for-profit operators: philosophical objections to mixing public education and profit, particularly in low-income communities, and mounting skepticism over their record in some cities and states.

“The biases are deeply ingrained, especially in low-income neighborhoods where the notion of profit-making is not welcome and there’s this sense that competition and markets have not benefited these communities,” said Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Rees said there is nothing inherently wrong with for-profit operators. She pointed to the National Heritage Academies, based in Michigan, which she said has managed to expand relatively successfully; the network now operates about 75 schools in states including Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina, according to its website. Meanwhile, a number of nonprofit operators have performed abysmally. 

“The bottom line ought to be quality,” Rees said.

Advocacy groups find a role
But in Tate County, where nearly two-thirds of public-school students live in poverty, the specter of for-profit management has been greeted mostly with skepticism.

“When you draw off funding … it can cause some great concern. It’s basically taking money we don’t have,” said Steve Hale, a Democratic state senator from the county who fielded residents’ concerns about for-profits last year. (Mississippi has only fully funded its K-12 system twice in the last decade.)

In the end, bids from management companies came in two and three times higher than what the state wanted to spend on Tate County’s schools. All were declined, and the state continues to oversee the Tate district through an appointed “conservator” -- a public employee.

But Hale’s concerns haven’t gone away, and two charter-school bills are circulating. One would allow for-profits; the other would ban them. For-profit education providers K-12 Inc., Connections Education and E2020 spent $250,000 on Mississippi lobbyists in 2011 and 2012, with more spending expected this year. That doesn’t include money from numerous advocacy groups (such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy) that have a track record of promoting school choice, including vouchers and charters.

In some cases, advocacy groups are funded directly by for-profits. K-12 Inc. and E2020 contributed to Republican former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, a group that over the past year has worked to craft education policy with Mississippi lawmakers and the Mississippi Department of Education.

Proponents say for-profit management of schools could actually save money. Republican John L. Moore, chairman of the House Education Committee in Mississippi, said privatization has led to cost savings in other governmental sectors.

“We have a system in place within our prison system where for-profit institutions actually have to do it for 10 percent less than the government is doing it,” Moore said.

But in a sign of just how controversial the issue has become, even Moore has compromised on for-profit charter-school managers -- voting in favor of an amendment offered this session to forbid them.

Lessons from Louisiana
Nationally, for-profit school management companies -- as with charter schools more broadly -- have a mixed track record, but limited evidence suggests they perform worse, on average, than their nonprofit counterparts.

One 2012 study from the National Education Policy Center found that nonprofit school operators outperformed for-profits on at least one measure: 48 percent of schools operated by for-profits met minimal expectations for academic growth, compared with 56 percent of those managed by nonprofits. But even Miron, a co-author of the study, said the growth targets (officially known as making “adequate yearly progress”) are a “crude” basis for comparison since they capture only part of a school’s relative success or failure.

New Orleans has become a prime example of how for-profit charter operators’ reach and influence have waned. Eighty percent of the city’s public-school students attend charter schools, the highest proportion in the country.

When public schools in the city reopened during the two years after Hurricane Katrina, for-profit companies were hired to manage five new charters. As of this school year, however, all of the for-profits managers had left the city. Some were fired or left in disgrace.

“Their track record in Louisiana is at best mediocre, and that’s probably being kind,” said Leslie Jacobs, a former state board of education member and charter-school advocate in New Orleans.

Jacobs said that the companies, which usually ask for between 10 and 15 percent of a school’s revenue, struggle to turn a profit while also offering a quality education program with limited funding. In New Orleans, average teacher salaries have gone up considerably since Katrina, adding to schools’ costs.

The for-profits themselves disagree. Michael Serpe of EdisonLearning, one of the largest for-profits in the country, said that requiring management fees while demanding quality isn’t problematic.

“Your bottom line is frankly the outcome and performance of the children in the school,” Serpe said.

The fees could be an even bigger issue in Mississippi, where per-pupil spending is lower than in Louisiana.

But the greatest weakness of for-profits has been a failure to understand local needs, said Matt Candler, the founder of 4.0 Schools, a nonprofit group that works to address a broad array of educational challenges in New Orleans.

“The behaviors of a few for-profits suggested that they were more interested in getting contracts than serving a community,” he said. Candler added that some for-profit companies, including the Michigan-based Leona Group, applied to manage several charter schools right after Katrina. “To even suggest you can take over seven schools in the wake of a disaster so large without anyone on the ground … sends a message about gaining market share over understanding your customer,” he said.

Leona ultimately took the reins at two charter schools. One closed down in 2009, and the board of directors at the second severed relations with the company.

Charter advocates like Candler and Jacobs say it’s not necessary to outlaw for-profit operators as long as there is a rigorous charter authorization process and they can be fired quickly if they perform poorly. In Louisiana, for-profit companies cannot win charter contracts on their own; a nonprofit board gets the contract and then hires the company as a manager. That would probably be the case in Mississippi as well if the for-profit provision goes through. And many charter critics view the debate over for-profit vs. nonprofit as relatively meaningless since they believe all charter schools represent privatization of what should be a government-run enterprise.

If Mississippi decides to allow for-profits to manage charters, Miron said, he’ll worry that the state will attract only the weakest companies because of its low per-pupil spending.

“The bottom-feeders will go into any state,” he said. “They don’t have any problem with compromising their model because of limited funding.”

This story, "New skepticism of for-profit companies managing public schools," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Southern Education Desk, a consortium of public media stations reporting on education issues in the South. Read the Southern Education Desk's version of this story here.

More from The Hechinger Report

• Districts face roadblocks in developing teacher evaluations
• High schools may have to pay for unprepared graduates

A man on a long list of people pardoned by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour in 2012 is a suspect in a shootout that left another man dead, the Jackson Free Press reported Friday.

Wayne "Honkey" Harris, who was one of 203 people pardoned during Barbour’s last week in office — touching off a storm of controversy and a legal battle — was attending a “friendly cookout,” on Thursday when he got into an argument that escalated into a gunfight, the Calhoun County Journal reported.

In the melee, Chris McGonagill was shot multiple times, allegedly by Harris, and died later at the hospital. Harris was shot twice, allegedly by McGonagill, and was hospitalized with a shattered femur and a bullet lodged in his side,  according to the Journal. Harris was due for surgery Friday afternoon, the report said.

Harris, whose gun was allegedly used in the shootout, was permitted to own a gun because of the 2012 pardon had wiped his record clean of a 2001 felony conviction for selling marijuana.

Three other men were present when the shooting occurred and were being questioned as witnesses, the Jackson Free Press reported, citing Calhoun County Sheriff Greg Pollan.

Pollan told the Journal that at least 13 shots were fired, but they did not know who had fired first. No charged had been filed as of Friday evening.

Barbour pardons, many issued the day that his successor was inaugurated in January 2012, wiped the record clean for many people who had already served time for their crimes. It also granted release to some inmates and pardoned four people convicted of murder, the Christian Science Monitor reported.

Controversy over the list led to a legal challenge but the Mississippi Supreme Court in March ruled 6-3 to reaffirm the governor’s right to use his executive powers to grant clemency.

Barbour defended the pardons as well-considered acts of mercy, the Monitor reported, citing a statement he issued at the time:

"These were decisions based on repentance, rehabilitation, and redemption, leading to forgiveness and the right defined and given by the state constitution to the governor to offer such people a second chance."