“I have to stay busy not to lose my mind,” Blackburn said. “My husband says, ‘Count peas.’ ”
An ambitious homecoming
Clarksdale, Mississippi is situated 100 miles east of Little Rock, Ark., and 70 miles south of Memphis, Tenn. The 2010 population was just under 18,000.
McMillian’s bid for mayor was an audacious move. He had lived away from Clarksdale for 10 years, graduating from Jackson State University, working as the executive assistant to the president at Alabama A&M University and until 2011, serving as the executive director of Phi Beta Sigma, the black fraternal organization headquartered in Washington. The job paid $93,000 a year and allowed him access to the halls of Congress and trips to Nigeria and Japan. He lived on Charles Street in Baltimore. People back home shared the photo of a smiling McMillian standing with President Obama.
Perhaps readying himself for a future in politics, McMillian signed up for every civic organization and nonprofit to which he could attach himself. His resume is stuffed with affiliations: National Young Leaders Conference, NAACP, Arms of Love National Project, Community Bridge Builders. He served on the board of the William E. Doar Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts in Washington. According to Jimmy Hammock, president of Phi Beta Sigma, the fraternity offered McMillian a new three-year contract, but he wanted to start doing consulting work.
He moved back to Clarksdale late last year. Known as the birthplace of the blues, the city of 18,000 has a 38 percent poverty rate. Tourists from around the world pour in to visit Muddy Waters’s shack and listen to the music of Pinetop Perkins. But black Clarksdale has existed in a separate realm from the New Bohemian South the city wants to be.
From traveling the world, McMillian moved back in with his mother in the Brickyard neighborhood. He officially entered the mayor’s race in January. He was walking house to house, standing in carports, visiting churches.
His sexuality was a detail he left out of the conversations. Still, anyone following him on Twitter would have an idea — “I’ve decided to be me, like it or not,” he posted.
His campaign photo captured the youthfulness of his vision. There was McMillian standing in a cotton field with folk-art-painted sharecropper shacks behind him, a repudiation of the past.
Disppearance and search
McMillian was commuting to Memphis four days a week, employed by New Leaders, a nonprofit organization that identifies and trains teachers to become principals, but the campaign was occupying more of his time.
McMillian’s strange disappearance on Feb. 25 began when he announced to his mother that he was going outside to move some cars. He was supposed to drive to Memphis in the morning. It was around 10 p.m., and his mother, Patricia Unger, a special ed teacher in the Quitman County School District, said she didn’t think much of it. An hour later, her husband, Amos, a custodian, noticed that McMillian had not come back inside the house. They said they never saw their son alive again.
Little of what happened that night is known. On Tuesday morning, on a rural highway out near the Tallahatchie County line, McMillian’s sport-utility vehicle was involved in a collision with another vehicle. A distraught Lawrence Reed was driving the SUV alone.
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