For Ole Miss, prez debate marks school's progress

Smith, a bubbly 22-year-old, grew up in Oxford. She said that when she visits other colleges in Mississippi, black students sometimes ask her if she’s scared to attend Ole Miss.

“There’s so many stereotypes about Ole Miss and I hate it,” said Smith, a senior majoring in chemistry. “I love this school.”

The school’s nickname came originally from the name slaves used for a plantation mistress — she was the “ole miss,” according to “Ever is a Long Time,” a book by one of the university’s graduates, W. Ralph Eubanks. But ask most students or alumni about the history of the phrase, and you’re likely to get a blank stare.

Meredith is now a slender, bearded 75-year-old and lives in Mississippi’s capital city of Jackson. The cancer survivor makes occasional public appearances to call for the eradication of poverty and the development of a national policy to fight AIDS.

Meredith will do interviews about his Ole Miss experience only if journalists sign an agreement to either use or avoid certain language to characterize what happened. The Associated Press declined to sign such an agreement.

Sansing, who has written a history of Ole Miss, notes that the late Mississippi author Willie Morris referred to the events of September and October 1962 as “the last battle of the Civil War.”

Ross Barnett, then Mississippi’s stridently segregationist governor, declared to thousands of Confederate flag-waving Ole Miss fans at a football game in Jackson on Sept. 29, 1962, that integration would never take place on his watch.

Privately, though, Barnett negotiated with President John F. Kennedy. While they spoke by telephone, violence escalated as angry whites streamed into Oxford, some from hundreds of miles away, to defend what they considered the southern way of life.

Kennedy ordered the National Guard and U.S. marshals to escort Meredith onto campus. Two people — a French journalist and a worker from Oxford — were killed and about 200 were injured.

Meredith himself was unharmed. He graduated in August 1963 with a degree in political science.

William D. Scott III is a chemistry professor nearing retirement at Ole Miss. In autumn 1962, he was a student at historically black Rust College in nearby Holly Springs. He still remembers standing with other Rust students and cheering the federal vehicles escorting Meredith to campus.

Scott gives the university credit for its efforts to recruit and retain minority students.

“It’s hard to live that history down,” he said.

George Monroe, an attorney and youth court judge in east central Mississippi, was a student living on campus in 1962.

He remembers the sound of tear gas canisters popping, one of them lobbed into his dorm.

“I didn’t want him in there,” Monroe said of Meredith. “I was like most Mississippians. But we were wrong.”

Monroe said his change in feelings came through a gradual process of maturing.

“We all change,” Monroe said. “That’s the good thing about it.”

(Associated Press)

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