Pro-Confederate demonstrators on Saturday gathered around a Confederate monument that sits on the campus of the U. of Mississippi.Beth J. Harpaz, AP Images
Eight players on the University of Mississippi men’s basketball team knelt on Saturday while the national anthem played and Confederate sympathizers rallied outside. The moment has shined a spotlight on an institution that’s still wedded to a certain Confederate icon — and has prompted the question of whether administrators have done enough to distance the university from Confederate iconography.
As “The Star Spangled Banner” resounded in Ole Miss’s Pavilion, one player, identified by the student newspaper as Devontae Shuler, took a knee. He was joined by seven teammates, according to a video published by ESPN.
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Pro-Confederate demonstrators on Saturday gathered around a Confederate monument that sits on the campus of the U. of Mississippi.Beth J. Harpaz, AP Images
Eight players on the University of Mississippi men’s basketball team knelt on Saturday while the national anthem played and Confederate sympathizers rallied outside. The moment has shined a spotlight on an institution that’s still wedded to a certain Confederate icon — and has prompted the question of whether administrators have done enough to distance the university from Confederate iconography.
As “The Star Spangled Banner” resounded in Ole Miss’s Pavilion, one player, identified by the student newspaper as Devontae Shuler, took a knee. He was joined by seven teammates, according to a video published by ESPN.
Meanwhile, two groups — the Confederate 901 and the Hiwaymen — hoisted Rebel flags and marched in Oxford, Miss., The Clarion-Ledger reported. The demonstration ended with people convening around a monument to an unnamed Confederate soldier that sits on the Ole Miss campus.
The rally was held to protest the university’s decision to drop the Colonel Reb mascot and other efforts to distance itself from Confederate symbols, the newspaper reported. The university’s marching band has stopped playing the song “Dixie” during sporting events, and in 2015 the institution removed the state flag, which includes a Confederate battle emblem, from its campus.
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After the game, Breein Tyree, a junior and a guard on the team, said on Twitter that he and his teammates had “meant no disrespect” to military veterans. “But we had to take a stand to the negative things that went on today on our campus,” he said.
Both the athletics director and the head basketball coach threw their support behind the players. Kneeling “had nothing to do with the anthem,” Ross Bjork, the athletics director, said in a written statement. “It had nothing to do with anything beyond, ‘You know what? We don’t want those people here. They’re protesting during our game, and that’s not right because that’s not the Ole Miss that I know.’”
“We support them,” Bjork said of the players. “We don’t want those people here either,” he said, referring to the Confederacy supporters.
Kermit Davis, the head coach, said in a written statement that his players had made an “emotional decision to show these people they’re not welcome on our campus. We respect our players’ freedom and ability to choose that.”
Davis’s views seem to have shifted since he took over as head coach. In March, Davis told reporters that his players were going to be a team that “respects the flag and the national anthem,” presumably referring to the trend among athletes to protest racial injustice by kneeling during the anthem’s performance. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.)
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‘The Stuff of Fascist States’
Tension had been mounting at Ole Miss as people prepared for Saturday’s rally. Administrators regarded the impending march partly as a free-speech issue. Though the university “condemns racism, bigotry, and hatred,” Larry D. Sparks, the interim chancellor, and Noel E. Wilkin, the provost, said in a campuswide email, the U.S. Constitution “gives people the right to express their views, within the limits of the law, even if we find their views offensive and contrary to our pursuits.”
Unsatisfied faculty members, staff, and students signed an open letter criticizing what they called the administration’s “lack of transparency” in the days and weeks leading up to the rally. Confederate organizers had made their intentions clear, the letter said. They hoped to “intimidate students who have protested the presence of these symbols, as well as institutional racism, sexism, and homophobia, on our campus.”
The letter also raised concerns about the Confederate protesters’ ability, and expressed willingness, to bring guns onto campus. Ray A. Hawkins, the university’s police chief, said in a campuswide email days before the rally that firearms are banned at Ole Miss unless people have what’s called an enhanced concealed-carry permit. People with such a permit may bring concealed firearms to public spaces on the campus.
“While the protection of free speech and academic freedom is at the core of the university’s mission,” the open letter said, “speech backed by firearms and munitions is the stuff of fascist states and has no place on our campus or any other institution of higher education.”
Before Saturday, the campus climate was “scary” for students, said Jarrius Adams, a senior and president of the university’s gospel choir. Students of color have been concerned for their safety, he said. Adams and other student leaders led a march on Thursday to protest the Confederate statue.
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Jarrius Adams, a senior at the U. of Mississippi, speaks at a Thursday rally protesting a Confederate statue on the campus.Christian Johnson, The Daily Mississippian
Later on Thursday, Adams said that he and the other gospel-choir members had decided to raise their fists while singing the word “brave” during the national anthem at an Ole Miss women’s basketball game. It was a spontaneous decision that felt right, Adams said. He added that he had been “thrilled” to see the men’s basketball players make themselves heard in a similar way at Saturday’s game.
Ole Miss made it through the weekend, Adams said, but the work isn’t over. People need to ask why Confederate supporters are drawn to a place like Ole Miss, he said. Part of the reason, he suggested, is that a statue to the Confederacy still stands in a prominent place. “I don’t think that’s fair,” he said.
For Jarvis Benson, the statue is a “rallying call for an ideology that glorifies a false narrative of triumph, and a false narrative of glory, that just isn’t true.” Benson, a senior and president of the university’s Black Student Union, said he was glad the administration had denounced bigotry. He thought officials had done the best they could to keep students safe and respect free-speech rights.
Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier, dominated the main entrance of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than a century, despite decades of protests. But suddenly, in August 2018, the statue was yanked down by protesters. And in January 2019 the campus’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, removed the statue’s pedestal and other remnants. Here’s how Silent Sam moved from dominance to disappearance.
But the Confederate monument’s presence, especially in front of the university’s most important administrative building, the Lyceum, shows “who actually has the power here,” Benson said, and whose status still needs to be fought for.
Charles K. Ross, a professor of history and director of the program in African-American studies, said the administration had tried to pick and choose some Confederate icons to eschew, like the Colonel Rebel mascot, while allowing others to continue, like the Confederate statue. That tactic isn’t consistent, the professor said. The university is trying to denounce Confederate supporters without dealing with why they come to Ole Miss in the first place, Ross said.
(Sparks, the interim chancellor, and Wilkin, the provost, were not made available for a phone interview on Monday. The university has previously said that it condemns bigotry and hatred.)
A pressing question has been, and is, what will Ole Miss do about the Confederate statue, Ross said. The University of Texas at Austin already proved it’s possible to remove such a thing, Ross said. If Texas can do it, he said, Ole Miss can, too. Faculty members and students have already been saying as much for a while, he said.
“We don’t need more rhetoric,” Ross said. “We need leadership.”
EmmaPettit is a senior reporter at The Chronicle who covers the ways people within higher ed work and live — whether strange, funny, harmful, or hopeful. She’s also interested in political interference on campus, as well as overlooked crevices of academe, such as a scrappy puppetry program at an R1 university and a charmed football team at a Kansas community college. Follow her on Twitter at @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.
