University of Mississippi senior Chris Baxley wears the costume of school mascot Colonel Reb during the Kentucky-Mississippi basketball game in Memphis on March 8, Like the mascot, both songs have disappeared officially, but that does not stop tailgaters from blaring the anthem from booming speakers in oversize pickups anyway. The Facebook group, which hovers around 25, members, is a forum where angry white people bemoan diversity and inclusion efforts on their best days and attack specific people of color in the university community on their worst.
They have a booth in the Grove on game days. The way the university has dealt with the name has been even more opaque. In , a Sensitivity and Respect Committee, comprised of administrators and other faculty, and a handful of students, aimed to make the campus more diverse and inclusive, releasing a report that alludes to the moniker but avoids addressing its racist history directly.
It held specific instructions for clarifying the history of the Confederate iconography on campus—everything from the names of buildings to the foot-tall Tiffany stained-glass window depicting the University Greys, the students who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War all of whom were killed or wounded in combat.
It was, in many ways, a massive victory for the Black students and faculty who had long been fighting for a more inclusive, reflective campus. In , the school expanded Vaught-Hemingway Stadium to hold 64, football fans; it is now the largest stadium in Mississippi.
Still, grassroots efforts to change the name have come in small fits and starts over the years, though the overall conversation has lacked the urgency that has toppled other Confederate symbols. And when it has come up, it has typically inspired only lukewarm response. Nevertheless, such swag is hard to come by; when I searched for anything like that online, I came up only with beauty pageant references.
From changing the school mascot to governing bodies voting to move the Confederate statue to contextualizing many buildings on campus, Ole Miss has lost its identity. It ripples through the campus and an extended community of mostly white fans and alumni in all sorts of forms. Alumnus Jon Rawl, co-founder of the Colonel Reb Foundation, lobbies the university to bring back the mascot from the early aughts. What once was partially buried under decades of careful erasure is now stark and exposed.
I cannot look away from racism, especially where it flourishes in my home. Harm is difficult to quantify, which in turn makes it a tricky defense against the thing that harms. When people who have been actively disempowered are those being harmed, it makes those voices harder to hear, or maybe easier for those in power to ignore.
Before Foster was a sociology professor, he came to study at the University of Mississippi as a student.
He tells me it was the first time he feared for his safety based on his identity. Oxford was the first place he was ever called the n-word by a white person. They had drawn the ire of the group for their activism to remove the state flag from campus. There are 69 comments below. Marion White says the officer remains on the force. My conversations with students echo these experiences. Most of the men and women I interviewed also mentioned a photo that went viral in July of three white fraternity brothers, wearing broad smiles and posing in front of the bullet-ridden sign memorializing Emmett Till, the Black year-old who was tortured and lynched in after a white woman falsely accused him of whistling at her.
Two of the boys in the photo held guns. They were suspended from their fraternity, but ultimately allowed to remain enrolled as students. This incident reveals a bright line for these individuals on campus, where all the changes made so far seem to stumble short of addressing a larger cultural problem. The university has put a significant amount of time and money into trying to leave the past behind, but it cannot truly overcome its legacy when it chooses to retain an identity that romanticizes a time when Black people were considered so subhuman that they could not address a white woman directly.
A name that is so intertwined with the identity of a place is tough to disentangle. Some of the students who make a conscious effort to use the full name of the university would slip up in our conversations; I have promised myself to make the same effort and sometimes my tongue still catches on it. To stay vigilant enough to thwart the connection between your eyes and your ears and your mouth and your mind requires a kind of prickly awareness that feels uncomfortable at first, but soon, it dissolves into normalcy.
Moving statues, contextualizing symbols, building committees, and scheduling programming toward a more inclusive and diverse campus are all good and important. But that work feels dwarfed by the name of the place, when the words on the lips of everyone in that community are an homage to the antebellum South.
Look around. With time, few will remember what they once were. The New York Times article detailed the recent incident at the campus when someone placed a noose on the statue of James Meredith, the university's first known black student. Susan Glisson, executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation and a member of the advisory committee for the action plan, acknowledged the chancellor had a tough job in creating the plan.
Some students and alumni, though aware of the term's meaning, feel that the name is an integral part of the school's culture. To contact Kate Royals, call or email kroyals gannett. Follow KRRoyals on Twitter. Mississippi governor signs bill to retire flag with Confederate emblem. Kinzinger describes what Republicans say privately to him about January 6.
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Legal analyst reacts to judge rejecting Trump's attempt to withhold documents. The University of Mississippi is facing a fight over its very identity.
Like other universities, the state's flagship campus in Oxford is not generally addressed by its full name. For more than a century, it's been called Ole Miss. It sounds like folksy shorthand for Old Mississippi. The term's actual origin is more unsettling. In , a fraternity-backed council asked students to name the new school yearbook. Student Elma Meek proffered Ole Miss. Read More. She borrowed it from the vernacular of the antebellum "darkey," who used it as a term of reverence for the slave master's wife, Meek told the university newspaper in The story, which explains how the term became "the valued possession" of the university at large, ran under the headline: "Ole Miss takes its name from darky dialect, not abbreviation of state.
Plenty of students and alum say the name has evolved to embody all that's good about the northwest Mississippi school and its traditions. Others -- including many Black students, who make up She felt the term was a tribute to Southern women, the paper reported. To be clear, this isn't breaking news. The Ole Miss origin story is an open secret. Two sources, with something less than conviction, offered an alternate theory -- about a train that ran from Memphis to New Orleans -- but the tale doesn't withstand academic or journalistic rigor.
On its own website, the university explains Elma Meek Hall , which houses the art department, is named for "the student who submitted the name Ole Miss for the name of the annual yearbook; Ole Miss subsequently became synonymous with the University of Mississippi.
A Confederate statue on campus is lowered as part of relocation process earlier this month. The university declined CNN's requests to discuss the matter with the chancellor or provost, saying, "Our leadership is absorbed with Covid planning as we prepare to resume on-campus operations safely. In , then-Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter tamped down concern about the university retiring Ole Miss or its mascot , the Rebels, saying the university would continue to use them because they're popular and have taken on new meanings.
A Rebel was no longer a Confederate; she or he was now "someone who bucks the status quo," he wrote. UM has been here before. Lee statues , but on a campus with so many remnants of the Confederacy in an era of increasing intolerance for the tributes, it could be next. Traditionalists have been steeling themselves for it, gathering on social media to preemptively defend Ole Miss' honor. They see what's happened across the nation since Floyd's death. His killing ignited a simmering movement to redefine the legacies of Confederates and other historic figures -- and statues have dropped like bowling pins since.
Tributes to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis have already fallen. Military bases with Confederate namesakes , such as Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, are in the crosshairs.
Vice President John Calhoun's name was stripped from buildings Clemson.
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