The aftermath of the 1908 Race Riot in Springfield gave rise to the formation of the NAACP. Dr. Wesley Robinson-McNeese recalled a scene where he was swimming with some Air Force buddies in the waters off Biloxi Beach in Mississippi in the late 1960s. A stranger pulled up in a pickup truck and, producing a shotgun and hurling epithets, promised that he was going to "blow away" McNeese, who is Black, if he didn't get out of the water. "My friends said, 'Wes, you’re a soldier, you don’t have to do that,'" McNeese remembered. "I said, 'He’s not aiming the shotgun at you guys. He’s aiming it at me.'"