It’s hard for Charles K. Ross to shake his first image of the University of Mississippi. He was watching a televised football game, and the Ole Miss stadium was a sea of Confederate-flag-waving fans.
Mr. Ross, who was completing a doctorate on African-Americans in sports at Ohio State University, was appalled.
“To see that many flags waving — it felt like very hostile territory,” he recalls.
That was in 1994, two years before he took a job at the university, where he is now an associate professor of history and director of the program in African-American studies.
Today, when he walks across the campus, the signs he sees are far more welcoming.
The statue of a Confederate soldier still stands at a prominent circle, but now, nearby, there’s also a bronze likeness of James H. Meredith, the university’s first black student. Mr. Meredith was admitted by federal order amid rioting that left two people dead.
Waving the Confederate flag has died off at football games, and the Colonel Reb mascot, the white-haired old man who bore a striking resemblance to a plantation owner, has been retired. Confederate Drive is now Chapel Lane, and another street was renamed for a beloved black football player who was paralyzed in a game and later died.
Mr. Ross’s email address, with its @olemiss.edu tag, still stings because of its ties to the antebellum past, but over all, he believes, the symbols and signs that have become flashpoints in a national conversation today are starting to point in a more positive direction on his campus.
Distancing itself from its Confederate past has been a long, painful, and continuing struggle for Ole Miss.
Perceptions of the historic campus, in Oxford, Miss., before and after the changes provide a glimpse at how statues, symbols, and relics of the past can affect a college’s racial climate. The setbacks the university has experienced along the way — like the noose that appeared one day on the statue of Mr. Meredith — illustrate the limits of what can be accomplished by erecting a new monument or banning a tradition.
It’s a debate that gained greater urgency on many Southern campuses with last week’s murders of nine people in a historic black church in Charleston, S.C.
Photographs of the alleged killer posing with Confederate flags have helped persuade politicians across the Deep South, including South Carolina’s governor, Nikki R. Haley, to call for the flags’ removal from state grounds.
In Mississippi the university’s acting chancellor, Morris H. Stocks, added his voice on Tuesday to those calling for removing the Confederate emblem from the state flag. The university long ago decided that that image didn’t reflect the institution’s values, he said.
The Power of Symbols
In 1996, when enrollment was suffering, the university’s chancellor at the time, Robert C. Khayat, commissioned a study of public perceptions about the university, including the Confederate flag and other symbols of the Old South. He found that the racially divisive symbols were hurting the university’s efforts to recruit and retain minority students and were harming its national reputation.
The following year, the university banned the longstanding tradition of waving Confederate flags during football games. Angry alumni and students accused the university of caving in to political correctness, and Mr. Khayat received death threats, which he said came from outside the state. Still, he doesn’t regret the decision.
“For years, we were burdened by the Confederate flag,” Mr. Khayat said in an interview this week. “It was much loved by many people and much despised by many people, and we spent a lot of years trying to condition people to understand that it was a thing of the past and it was harmful to Ole Miss and the state.”
A flurry of changes since then have made the campus a more welcoming and inclusive place, he said.
From 2008 to 2014, the number of freshman applications to the Oxford campus doubled, to 16,101. The number of black students doubled from 2001 to 2014, to 2,880, increasing from 12.5 percent to 14.3 percent of the enrollment.
Changing a university’s culture takes years, even generations, said Marvin P. King Jr., an associate professor of political science and African-American studies at Ole Miss.
But at the same time, “cultures and attitudes rally around symbols,” he said, and when those symbols are inclusive, rather than exclusive, the university benefits.
As that shift has occurred in Mississippi, Mr. King said, “the university has become a bigger and better school.”
Even after the university banned Confederate flags at football games and ditched its longtime mascot, outbreaks of racism erupted.
Last year vandals hung a noose and an old version of a Georgia flag adorned with the Confederate emblem on the statue of Mr. Meredith.
Three members of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity were expelled from the campus chapter, and this month a former student pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of threatening force to intimidate African-American students and employees at the university.
The incident illustrates that, “despite all of our progress, some people are going to resist or remain ignorant, and we still have work to do,” said Mr. Ross.
‘A Welcoming Environment’
In August, six months after the noose incident, the then chancellor, Daniel W. Jones, released an action plan for racial healing that drew on the work of a Sensitivity and Respect Committee. It also included recommendations of outside consultants, including Edward L. Ayers, a Civil War historian who is stepping down this month as president of the University of Richmond.
The consultants recommended placing plaques on racially sensitive symbols, like the Confederate statue, rather than removing them. The plaques would provide historical context.
Last fall the university opened a Center for Inclusion and Cross Cultural Engagement to provide programs and services that bring people together.
“We strive to provide a welcoming environment, and if we have symbols that are exclusive, we have a responsibility to change them,” said the center’s director, Shawnboda Mead.
Other campuses are struggling to come up with their own solutions as the pressure to remove Confederate symbols intensifies.
The University of Texas at Austin was already debating a proposal to move a statue of Jefferson Davis, who was president of the Confederacy, from its prominent place on a central mall to a museum when the Charleston massacre occurred.
Several days later the statues of three Confederate leaders were spray-painted with the words “Black Lives Matter” as a petition circulated by the student government was gathering more than 2,800 signatures of people calling for the statues’ removal.
The university’s new president, Gregory L. Fenves, has appointed a task force to consider options. It will be headed by Gregory J. Vincent, the Austin campus’s vice president for diversity and community engagement.
Mr. Vincent was a consultant to the University of Mississippi when it was scrutinizing its Confederate imagery as part of its effort to improve race relations. Although he was focusing on the university’s administrative structure, he saw how racially divisive symbols were hurting the university’s prestige.
“The symbols were a very tragic and candidly racist part of the history, and in order for the university to move forward it had to move away from that,” Mr. Vincent said in an interview on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the Board of Visitors of the Citadel, a public military college in Charleston, voted 9 to 3 this week to move a Confederate naval flag that hangs in a chapel to another location on the campus. Moving the flag would require the approval of the state’s Legislature but was the right thing to do, the institution’s president explained.
Other colleges that have struggled with their past include Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Va., where protests by black law students helped persuade the university to move Confederate flag replicas from a campus chapel to a museum, and Sewanee: the University of the South. In the mid-1990s, Sewanee took down flags from Southern states, some of which had Confederate imagery.
Removing such images is “a step in the right direction,” said Justavian Tillman, president of the University of Mississippi’s Black Student Union.
“It will definitely take more than the removal of mere symbolism,” he added. The inevitable backlash that occurs “serves as a great learning opportunity on how doing what is right is not always popular, and it certainly won’t always be easy.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
