At Ole Miss: Echoes of a Civil War’s Last Battle

Twenty years ago this week, the campus of the University of Mississippi was shattered by riots protesting the admission of the first black student. TIME asked Mississippian Willie Morris, the author (North Toward Home, Terrains of the Heart) and former editor of Harper’s magazine, to examine changes at Ole Miss since then.

As one strolls across this hauntingly lovely campus in the beginnings of the great Southern autumn, it is difficult to conceive the chaos and mayhem of Sept. 30, 1962—the gunshots and burning vehicles, the bricks and tear-gas canisters, the federal marshals and National Guardsmen and airborne troops confronting the mob. Two people died, and scores were injured. It was the last battle of the Civil War, the last direct constitutional crisis between national and state authority. James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran, was enrolled as an Ole Miss student the next day. As a native Mississippian, I think of the lines of Yeats:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

One of the sadnesses was that many Mississippians believed the assurances of their leaders that defiance could succeed. A close friend of impeccable Mississippi lineage (his great-grandfather was wounded in the charge at Gettysburg) was captain of a National Guard unit that was federalized. The other day we were standing on the back porch of my bungalow on the fringes of the campus. He gazed out toward a beautiful wooded terrain. “This was where we dug in,” he said. “This was the left flank of our perimeter. We went all the way up to the law school.” What impressed him the most, he said, was that the country boys under his command were against everything Meredith was trying to do, yet they were completely loyal to the American flag. He said, tenderly almost, “I guess it must’ve been the discipline they’d learned in the military.”

This is the 20th anniversary not only of Meredith, but of the death of William Faulkner. He died less than three months before the crisis; he lies now under a towering oak in the town cemetery up the way. The events of that September would likely have broken his heart, as they did the hearts of many Mississippians. “The white people have already lost their heads,” he said of those years. “It depends on whether the Negroes can keep theirs.” Between then and now there was to be more suffering.

There will be an anniversary observance at Ole Miss this week, and this suggests much about the transfigurations here. The Ole Miss magazine, sponsored by the student newspaper, is devoting a special issue to the lessons of that catastrophe. There will be a ceremony under the auspices of the university not far from the Lyceum Building, where one may still see the bullet holes in the façades. It has been organized by Lucius Williams, a black vice chancellor. Awards will be presented to distinguished black graduates. Porter Fortune, the chancellor, a Chapel Hill man who since he came here in 1968 has worked toward making all students feel a part of Ole Miss, will give the welcome. Governor William Winter, a graduate of Ole Miss and one of our most splendid hopes, will attend, and so will Robert Harrison, a black from my home town, Yazoo City, who has just become president of Mississippi’s board of trustees for institutions of higher learning. The keynote speaker will be Margaret Walker Alexander, the black novelist and teacher. Meredith, now a businessman in Jackson, has been invited to speak.

The ironies of Mississippi have forever baffled the outsider, as they should. Two and a half years after Meredith’s admission, Governor Ross Barnett’s principal antagonist of that time, Bobby Kennedy, gave the commencement address at Ole Miss. He was introduced by Senator Jim Eastland and received a standing ovation. Twelve years after the event, Ben Williams, also of Yazoo City, the first black football player at Ole Miss, was elected Colonel Rebel by the student body, the highest honor for a male student. (He is now with the Buffalo Bills.) More recently, Mississippi’s Leontyne Price was named honorary alumna, and for weeks an exhibit depicting her life was displayed in the library. John Slaughter, the black physicist, was the commencement speaker last spring.

In the broader context, Mississippi’s black population of 37% is the highest for any state. Mississippi is also, of course, the poorest state; its poverty exacerbates every issue. Alone in America, it has no state-supported system of kindergartens, and earlier this year the legislature defeated Governor Winter’s kindergarten bill, which would mainly have benefited poor black children. Conversely, the congressional race this fall in the Second District, which mostly comprises the Delta, strikes into the very core of everything Mississippi and the South could become. A black man, Robert Clark, an influential legislator, won the Democratic nomination this summer with substantial white support and faces a Reagan Republican in November. He could become the first black Congressman from Mississippi since Reconstruction. The integration of the public schools, which took place in 1970, is working beyond one’s most sanguine hopes in those areas where the black population is less than 50%; it is a different story in the counties of the Delta. Mississippi today is a blend of the relentless and the abiding.

There are about 700 black students at Ole Miss out of an enrollment of 10,000, or 7%. The university actively recruits blacks and encourages their participation in extracurricular activities. The Ole Miss football team is roughly half black; the basketball team predominantly black. In a society where organized sports are more than a ritual, Ole Miss partisans cheer their black players as enthusiastically as they do the whites, and the outstanding ones are authentic campus heroes.

Like the university, Oxford has a population of 10,000. It is the fifth smallest town in the U.S. to serve as the seat of a capstone state university. There are only seven full-time undergraduate black professors; Meredith himself says he is reluctant now to praise an institution with so few black teachers and students. Money is one problem, and black professors and administrators are often lost to larger schools. The rural backdrop is another, as is the absence of a sizable middle-class black community. The Black Student Union and the Associated Student Body have recently merged. But the pervasive sorority and fraternity systems remain segregated; the blacks have their own chapters.

Many blacks complain that they do not feel they are a significant part of campus life. I was privy to this emotion in a small class I taught last semester. I had encouraged the young whites and blacks to be candid about the realities of their relationships here. What ensued was sudden and torrential. The blacks said they found it difficult to consider this their university. The whites said they were trying to understand. One white youngster was especially disarming. “I have nothing against you,” he said of the blacks. “In fact, I like you. I think if there were more of you, the situation would be better.”

I have heard other stories. In a zoology class of 36 students, mostly white sorority girls, no one chose to be the laboratory partner of the only black male student. After an embarrassing interval, a white girl who was not in a sorority volunteered. In a class that was discussing the Meredith riots, a black student argued: “Only the vocabulary has changed. How many black professors are there? How many administrators?” A white private-school graduate replied, “If things are so bad, why are you here?” During this discussion, two white sorority girls were thumbing through Vogue magazine.

It is a sensitive dialogue suffused with consequence. One young white says, “It’s like they separate themselves from us.” A graduate student argues, “The blacks on campus permit tokenism, and the whites promote it.” A black teacher observes, “For many whites and blacks, rapport is not a natural thing. People have to learn it.” And so the litany goes.

A final contention lies in the traditional symbols of the Old South. Many blacks complain of the school fight song Dixie, the mascot Colonel Rebel and the waving of the Confederate battle flag at athletic events. The university’s first black cheerleader, John Hawkins of Water Valley, Miss., attracted attention before the first football game of this season when he announced he would not carry the Confederate flag on the field. His wishes were understood by both the administration and many of the students. Hawkins, as well as Steve Sloan, the fine young Ole Miss football coach, favors a modified Rebel flag with “Ole Miss” or “U.M.” superimposed on the venerable Stars and Bars. This proposal is gaining wide favor. As for Dixie, the Ole Miss band, which has many black performers, has perfected a number, called From Dixie with Love, that is a stirring blend of Dixie and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Their rendition would touch the soul of a Massachusetts abolitionist.

It is the accumulation of such ironies, so meaningful to the native son, that makes this beautiful and tragic and bewitched state unique. It is no accident that Mississippi elicits such rage and passion and fidelity in its sons and daughters of both races, or that Northerners have always been obsessed with what takes place here, for Mississippi has always been the crucible of the national guilt. Much remains to be accomplished, although there is a tolerance of independent expression in Mississippi now that does its own deepest traditions proud. With the flourishing of that tolerance, the young whites and blacks of Ole Miss have more in common than they may for the moment think. They spring mutually from a traditional order and, more than any other young Americans, they know how to make a story and spin a tale. Public high school graduating classes last spring were the first in which whites and blacks attended all twelve grades together. After all of its pain, and the difficulty to come, this could be, in truth, the only society in America where “the great plan,” as the rest of the nation has intermittently conceived of it, could some day succeed.

Allison Brown, daughter of an old white Mississippi family, honor student, campus beauty and editor of the Meredith issue of the Ole Miss magazine, has written for her editorial: “We are of a generation in Mississippi who knows firsthand that blacks and whites can actually work together, grow up together, and share common experiences. Even at Ole Miss, where tradition hangs on until the very last thread, much progress has been made . . . Our generation can do something about it. We can work toward the inevitable changes that will make Ole Miss a better place for people of all races.”