It sure looks like Ole Miss fans shouldn’t hold their breath in hopes of landing top Class of 2014 cornerback recruit Marlon Humphrey.
As noted by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and a handful of other sources, Humphrey fired off a series of tweets accusing the University of Mississippi of being racist. Well, not the physical buildings of the university, but the student body at the very least.
Humphrey, a rising senior at Hoover (Ala.) High, was an Under Armour All-American as a junior and is on the verge of the overall National Rivals Top 10. He’s being heavily recruited by every school in the SEC (the only non-SEC school he's even bothered expressing interest in is North Carolina), and is among a handful of athletes in next season’s senior class who could be considered a legitimate program changer on his side of the ball.
That’s not going to be happening in the Ole Miss defense, as the tweets you see below make perfectly clear.
First, Humphrey made a reference to a KKK rally that he claims was held at Ole Miss while he visited the school in a previous year when the Rebels were recruiting his brother, Maudrecus Humphrey (who eventually signed with Arkansas).
When challenged about the alleged KKK rally, Humphrey went farther, describing the people involved in addition to reinforcing his story.
According to the Clarion Ledger, Humphrey is probably exaggerating the facts a bit. The most recent official KKK rally on the Ole Miss campus occurred in 2009, when 12 KKK members marched on campus while more than 250 students and others protested the fact that they were marching.
It is possible that the younger Humphrey was there at the time, as his brother was a member of the Class of 2010 and could have been on a recruiting trip during that fateful KKK weekend in 2009.
Regardless of whether Humphrey was there at that 2009 rally, he belatedly backed away from the KKK claim, all without outright denying it.
In the process, Humphrey has probably learned a valuable lesson about social media, all while Ole Miss fans were reminded that they still are saddled with a very negative perception about their fan base, whether it’s true or not.
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