WIGGINS, Miss. (AP) - Stone High School's football team was making a name for itself as the Tomcats turned around years of mediocrity with a winning season under the school's first-year coach.
However, now the south Mississippi school's football program is known for something else - a black junior varsity player who said as many as four white students put a noose around his neck during an Oct. 13 football practice.
At a Monday news conference, the Mississippi NAACP demanded a federal hate crime investigation.
"No child should be walking down the hall or in a locker room and be accosted with a noose around their neck," state NAACP President Derrick Johnson said during a news conference in Wiggins. "This is 2016, not 1916. This is America. This is a place where children should go to school and feel safe in their environment."
Hollis and Stacey Payton, parents of the alleged victim, attended the news conference but didn't speak. Their son, an unnamed sophomore, wasn't present.
The NAACP said the incident happened during a break in football practice and the noose was "yanked backward" while on the student's neck.
Johnson wouldn't say whether the noose left marks. State NAACP spokeswoman Ayana Kinnel said the family indicated the student returned to practice after the incident.
Stone High has approximately 800 students, about a quarter of whom are black, according to state figures. The school is the only public high school in the 18,000-resident county.
Mississippi has struggled with a history of racial division. It is the last state that still incorporates the Confederate battle emblem in its state flag. In 2014, two out-of-state students at the University of Mississippi placed a noose on the campus' statue of James Meredith, the black student who integrated Ole Miss in 1962. Both pleaded guilty to using a threat of force to intimidate African-American students and employees. Neither attends the school anymore.
Names of the students alleged to have assaulted the Paytons' son weren't immediately released.