Oxford, Mississippi -- As the ball carrier sprints across the goal line for a touchdown, thousands of University of Mississippi students erupt in cheers.
They thrust their arms to the sky, many holding flags aloft, as the band breaks into a stirring song. Backs are slapped, high fives exchanged. It is one of those magical moments that bring classmates together and unify a community.
But not one of the university’s 700 black undergraduates is seated among the thousands in the students’ section. Most blacks say they don’t feel at home there, in part because the flags the students are waving are those of the Confederacy, and the song is the Southern anthem, “Dixie.”
Much has changed here since 1962, when the university and the state gained national notoriety for resisting James Meredith’s attempts to enroll as the institution’s first black student. Blacks are now integrated into most aspects of daily life on the campus.
But the progress is obscured, and even undermined, by an enduring battle over the university’s continued use of its Old South symbols, official and informal. The debate ignited again last spring when three black members of the band refused to play “Dixie,” saying the song should not be performed at university-sponsored events because it offends black students.
Most white students and alumni insist -- no, more than that, they practically swear -- that there is nothing racist in their use of the symbols. Whatever link the flag and song might once have had with slavery and the South’s segregationist past, they argue, has been supplanted in their hearts and minds by an association with the university they love. Waving the flag and cheering the playing of “Dixie” evince Southern heritage, they say, not bigotry.
“They just represent Ole Miss to us,” says Lettye Williams, a retired schoolteacher who picnicked with her husband and fellow alumni before a football game last month. “We do not see these as racist symbols. Just because you’re proud to be a Southerner doesn’t mean you don’t like blacks. They’re our friends. We work with them. We live with them.”
Black students don’t believe that everyone who waves the Confederate battle flag or claps along to “Dixie” is racist. But history, most of them agree, has forever tainted the flag and the song, making them inappropriate symbols for an institution that is supposed to represent all of Mississippi’s citizens. The flag and “Dixie” were adopted by the university only in the late 1940’s, embraced defiantly by students opposed to integration. Mississippians who violently protested Mr. Meredith’s admission also rallied around the flag and “Dixie,” facts not easily forgotten by many blacks here.
They, along with many faculty members, believe Mississippi must cast off the vestiges of its Old South past if it is to thrive in the New South. Symbols, they argue, should unite, not divide, especially at a public institution in a state with a black population of 35 per cent.
“No matter how much things have changed, African Americans will always remember why all of this was brought here -- to keep us out,” says Jesse Holland, a black senior who edits the Daily Mississippian, the student newspaper.
Many critics of “Dixie” want the university’s chancellor, R. Gerald Turner, to stop or at least discourage the band from playing the song, just as the university officially dissociated itself from the Confederate flag a decade ago.
Many white alumni and students vow to fight such a move, and some alums say they will halt their financial support if Mississippi abandons “Dixie.” Some professors also complain that banning the song by fiat would be a form of censorship.
Mr. Turner has been grappling with this issue on and off since he got here in 1983, and has won praise from many quarters for his efforts to improve race relations. The chancellor is under pressure from all sides, but is asking for patience. Mississippi, he believes, must at some point formally review the appropriateness of all its symbols, but he says the time is not yet right for such a study.
When that discussion does take place, Mr. Turner and others say, it will focus on a broader question raised by the dispute over Dixie: Is it possible for an institution to shed its Confederate roots, yet remain fervently, profoundly Southern?
The university is not alone in facing that dilemma. Georgia, for instance, is bitterly divided over whether to strip the Confederate battle flag from its state banner. And just this month, the University of Alabama stirred protests when it adopted an Old South theme for its football homecoming. But few institutions have been identified so closely with the Old South legacy, good and bad, as this one.
“If this university isn’t Southern,” Mr. Turner says, “it’s not anything.”
That’s true partly because of its location and history. The main administration building was a hospital for Civil War soldiers, over 700 of whom are buried in a graveyard here. And the university and Oxford have been home to Southern writers who have shaped the country’s perceptions of the region, from William Faulkner to Eudora Welty.
The university has also cultivated that image, carving out a niche among other public universities in the region as a bastion of the Old South. It has done that largely through its use of symbols, which extend well beyond the flag and “Dixie,” which is neither fight song nor alma mater, but a popular, unofficial theme song.
The sports teams are called the Rebels, and the mascot is Colonel Reb, a caricature of an Old South plantation owner. Even the university’s nickname, Ole Miss, has antebellum origins. It isn’t short for Old Mississippi, as most people think, but rather is what some slaves called the wives of their owners.
The institution’s image attracts students who yearn as much for its conservative, traditional nature as for the beauty of its campus and the quality of its education. But Mississippi has had trouble distancing itself from the negative aspects of what the Old South stood for, despite its advances.
Signs of those advances are plentiful. This summer Mr. Turner hired the university’s first black vice-chancellor; its basketball coach also is black. This year’s group of 701 black undergraduates (8 per cent of the 10,369 total) is its largest in history, and two white fraternities became integrated last year for the first time.
“You see white and black students together here today in ways that never before were possible,” says William Ferris, director of the university’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. “That gives you hope. There is a new order here.”
That’s not so obvious on Saturdays during football season.
Ten hours before an evening home game, alumni and students begin filling the tree-lined expanse known as “the Grove” with picnic tables and tents. For the rest of the day, they eat, reminisce, and get fired up for the game. The people are friendly, the atmosphere inviting.
But Confederate flags hang from trees and serve as centerpieces amid the fried chicken and iced tea on many a picnic table. And just as at the game, blacks are virtually invisible in the Grove -- except when the football squad, half of whose players are black, parades through the crowd en route to the stadium.
This is the old Ole Miss, the one that was in its prime when the university first embraced its Confederate trappings.
The university’s teams became known as “the Rebels” in 1936, but Confederate flags and “Dixie” did not become an exalted part of the football ritual until 1948, when dozens of Mississippi students took part in the “Dixiecrat” political convention, which was dedicated to the fight against desegregation.
“The song and the Confederate battle flag were adopted by the all-white university specifically as a gesture of white supremacy,” says Warren Steel, a music professor whose arguments helped persuade the Faculty Senate last spring to discourage the playing of “Dixie” at campus events. “People can honestly say, `I don’t think about bigotry,’ but the history is there.”
Tim Jones didn’t know that history when he joined Mississippi’s band. But after learning the origins of the university’s affiliation with “Dixie” and its other symbols, he decided he could no longer play the song in good conscience.
So at a basketball game last spring, as the band took up “Dixie,” Mr. Jones put down his drum, got to his feet, and crossed his arms in front of his chest.
“There’s a line in the song that says, `Old times there are not forgotten,’” says Mr. Jones, a senior. “When you talk about old times in the South, the only thing my people think about is slavery.”
Mr. Jones’s protest, which was backed by the Black Student Union, came 10 years after the last major flare-up over the symbols. In 1983, a black cheerleader refused to carry the Rebel flag and the alumni association discouraged its use. Saying the flag’s meaning had changed because it had been appropriated by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the university abandoned it as an official symbol.
Mississippi stopped distributing flags before games and selling them in the bookstore, and dropped the symbol from all its T-shirts and other items. The university also introduced the “Battle M” flag, a blue M with white stars on a red background, hoping it would replace the Confederate in its fans’ hearts.
That hasn’t happened. Although use of the Confederate banner waned in the mid-1980’s, Rebel flags now vastly outnumber the “Battle M” at football games. If anything, the dispute over the university’s symbols seems to make many whites more, not less, inclined to cling to the past.
“If it wasn’t so controversial, we probably wouldn’t want to wave them,” says John Kennedy, a junior. “I can understand how they feel, but we feel kind of abused. If they take `Dixie’ away, I think race relations will get worse.”
The widening gap between the two sides is evidenced by T-shirts. On the front of one is the “X” popularized by the movie Malcolm X, under the words “You wear yours ...” On the back is the Confederate flag, framed by the words “We’ll wear ours.”
“The controversy tends to polarize people and worsen race relations, and it is an escape from discussing real issues in race relations,” says Mr. Steel, the music professor. “That’s why I wish we would just resolve this now.”
Mr. Turner says the issue will be decided not by the advocates on either side but by the “middle ground,” which he says has not yet formed a consensus. The chancellor admits that people may be uneasy about the continuing debate, but he says it is necessary. Meanwhile, Mr. Turner is formulating what he calls a “framework” for the coming debate about how the university should present itself in the future.
“It is difficult to communicate how much things have changed here when you have symbols that are Confederate, not Southern,” says Mr. Turner. “Somehow we need to ferret out things that are Southern from those that are Confederate.”
Charles Reagan Wilson, a professor of history and Southern studies, argues that for Southern tradition to survive, it must be “extended,” or updated, to take recent history into account. The trick for the university, he argues, is to remain relevant to all Mississippians, black and white, without losing its distinctive character.
One alternative, he says, is to mix symbols of the Confederacy with those of the civil-rights movement, reflecting Mississippi’s “complex, tortured history by focusing on the two events that most shaped the South.”
Another option, he says, is to give new meaning to traditional symbols. Keep using the Confederate flag, Mr. Wilson says, but redefine it: “Make a new flag that shows a white and a black hand grasping the Confederate flag,” for instance. As for “Dixie,” he and others say, the band’s repertoire already includes a compromise: “From Dixie With Love,” which meshes “Dixie” with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “All My Trials,” an old spiritual, reflecting all of the factors at work in the Civil War.
A third possibility, Mr. Wilson says, is to focus on Southern cultural symbols that are “anchored in the past but are not Confederate.” A flag featuring a magnolia tree, for example, could be a “good common symbol of the South and of Mississippi.”
Whether any of those solutions would appease either side of the debate is another question.
The problem, says Charles W. Eagles, a history professor who specializes in race relations and the civil-rights movement, is that the campus houses two very different institutions: the University of Mississippi and Ole Miss.
Every time Mr. Eagles walks through the student union, he is irked by a quotation from an alumnus that adorns a wall. It says: “The University is respected, but Ole Miss is loved. The University gives a diploma and regretfully terminates tenure, but one never graduates from Ole Miss.”
“That captures this place. For some of us -- those who believe in the University of Mississippi -- the symbols prevent the university from being everything it can be. Others -- those that are faithful to Ole Miss -- think that if you took the symbols away, there wouldn’t be anything there.
“The symbols are seen as a real burden for the University of Mississippi. But they’re the backbone of Ole Miss.”
