"But when two unidentified men placed a noose around the bronze neck of James Meredith this week..."

"... and left behind a flag with the Confederate battle emblem, it set into motion a new round of soul-searching in a place where past and present still restlessly coexist."

The second paragraph of a NYT article title "Racist Episodes Continue to Stir Ole Miss Campus," which does eventually get around to gesturing at the problem that incidents like this can be hoaxes, but only in the form of quoting a lawyer-blogger who also wouldn't take the incident seriously if it was done by white racists:

“It’s a mistake to base any decision on this, whether it was done by white racists or whether it was a hoax,” said Frank M. Hurdle, an Oxford lawyer and blogger. “Now, if you can show me that several hundred students got together in a meeting and did this, then I will be the first one to say that we need to have some systemic changes made. But we all know that’s not what happened.”

ADDED: Why doesn't Ole Miss have a surveillance camera on that James Meredith statue? Would-be protesters of all mindsets should be deterred from leveraging their opinions this way.

ALSO: "A national fraternity indefinitely suspended its chapter at the University of Mississippi after three members were suspected of hanging a noose around a statue of the school's first black student."