Black Man’s Fatal Encounter With Police Splits Mississippi City Known for Harmony
TUPELO, Miss. — The blue lights flashed in the rearview mirror of the Ford Focus. The man behind the wheel, a 37-year-old African-American, pulled over, opened the door and sprinted into the Mississippi night. Soon, a white police officer was giving chase on foot, accompanied by his police dog. The officer would eventually find and fatally shoot the man, Antwun Shumpert, here on the evening of June 18, plunging this small city — famous globally as the birthplace of Elvis Presley, but known regionally as a beacon of relatively progressive racial attitudes — into what has become a tragically common…