As many as four white Mississippi teenagers put a noose around a black teammate’s neck and “yanked backward” during a break from their high school football practice, the victim’s parents have alleged. The boys involved in the incident, which took place in a locker room, are all under 17 and students at Stone High School in Wiggins, 35 miles north of Gulfport.

Derrick Johnson, the president of the Mississippi NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People), outlined the incident during a press conference on Monday, demanding it be investigated as a hate crime. “This is 2016, not 1916,” Mr Johnson said. “This is America. This is a place where children should go to school and feel safe in their environment.”

The alleged victim’s parents, Hollis and Stacey Payton, appeared at the press conference alongside Mr Johnson. Their son, a sophomore at Stone, reportedly returned to football practice following the incident. Mr Johnson said he wanted the alleged perpetrators to be charged as adults. None of the teenagers involved has been named.

The incident was being investigated by the Stone County Sheriff's Department, which provides officers to area schools. Sheriff's Captain Ray Boggs, who is black, told the Associated Press that he expected the boys to be charged as minors, adding: “It’s probably one of the hardest cases I’ll ever handle in my career, because of the nature of it.”

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The school’s football coach, John Feaster, told ESPN that just one student was responsible for the incident, and that he had been cut from the team immediately. “It could have been the biggest superstar and he would have been gone,” said Mr Feaster, who is also black. “I don’t care who it is — if you do something like that, you can’t be part of our team.”

Around a quarter of Stone’s approximately 800 students are black, a small proportion in a state where about half of all public school students are black. Mississippi continues to grapple with its heritage as the last state in the US to include the controversial Confederate emblem in its state flag.