South Will Rise Again Say Yes to the Dress
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At the entrance of the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford, the statue of a white marble man sits amongst the magnolia and oak trees. The gift from the Daughters of the Confederacy, a soldier, his arm in salute, a rifle at his side, has presided over passersby entering the university since 1906. He is perched atop a matching white marble spire then that the tip of his hat reaches toward the treetops. A plaque at the base of the monument, revised in 2016 as office of a historical contextualization project, allows that the statue was ane in a series of memorials that "were oft used to promote an ideology known as the 'Lost Cause,' which claimed that the Confederacy had been established to defend states' rights and that slavery was non the principal cause of the Civil War."
Still, information technology stands.
Only now, after more than than a century, the anonymous soldier volition finally be ousted from his premier spot—a motility that's the direct result of a sustained entrada led by Academy of Mississippi students. "Nosotros all the same accept a long way to go, merely information technology'south still a victory, and I think we are allowed to celebrate it," Arielle Hudson, a recent graduate and the university's first Black female Rhodes scholar, tells me.
But it wasn't easy to get here. More a year agone, the Associated Pupil Body Senate for inclusion and cross-cultural engagement unanimously passed a resolution that stated, "Confederate ideology directly violates the tenets of the academy creed that supports fairness, civility, and respect for the dignity of each person." While plans were made with the university to motility the statue, the Mississippi Institutions of College Learning stepped in, declaring that the marble soldier falls under its purview and putting the plans on indefinite pause.
Only in this moment of broader racial reckoning spurred by the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, the already thinning tolerance for mitt-wringing over such symbols has largely evaporated. In mid-June, the IHL agreed to movement the statue to a less-prestigious placement, keeping sentry over the dead in a Amalgamated cemetery in an area with less foot traffic, behind an old coliseum that's no longer in regular use.
Undoubtedly the ultra-bourgeois IHL relaxing its grip is an important step. Persuading the academy five years ago to discontinue the employ of the Mississippi state flag—which, until Gov. Tate Reeves signed a law to retire it this week, was the final land flag to feature the Confederate battle flag design—was a similarly important one. So was the academy'south pledge, merely last calendar month, to review its "admissions and judicial review policies and protocols" to deal with prospective students whose social media pages include racist posts.
Nonetheless, each step abroad from the school'south "One-time South" image ultimately seems marked by ambivalence. Soon after the announcement that the entrance's Amalgamated statue would be moved, plans surfaced to renovate the cemetery to create a sort of "shrine" effect (though the university says the pattern is not final). And while it is unclear what exactly will change for its admissions and judicial review policies, the university's stance has long been that information technology is unwilling to courtroom costly Starting time Amendment lawsuits, fifty-fifty as schools like the Academy of Alabama have expelled students over racist social media posts.
And, crucially, no matter what happens with these measures, there remains an implicit tribute to white supremacy on campus that has proven tougher to bewitch, ane many people don't even realize is in that location. The "Ole Miss" moniker has long informed the core of the institution's identity and the surrounding community, not to mention its powerful brand. But this is not merely a convenient abridgement of the long official name. It'southward a phrase that'south long haunted Black students, faculty, and staff equally a lingering nod to the days when it seemed unthinkable that a identify like the university would ever take them simply because of their skin.
While statues all over the country come up down, and the United States reckons with its racist past, it is time to confront the more than insidious forms of white supremacy—peculiarly those so easy to take for granted that it becomes harder and harder to recognize them for what they actually are. They are not monuments or flags, only they are hidden in our language and our customs, their origins masked by fourth dimension and intent.
When Zaire Love was accepted into the University of Mississippi's documentary program to pursue her MFA, she was thrilled. In July 2018, she posted a photo to share the news that she would attend her dream school on total scholarship, no less; she looks uncertain simply triumphant. Under a camo jacket draped perfectly off her shoulders, her white T-shirt is ane she made herself: navy blue scripted letters sing "Ole Miss Mane."
"I thought I was putting my Blackness and my Black season on it," she says. She didn't know just what it meant at the time, but she remembers her bitter disappointment the day she constitute out.
That summer, Honey left her abode in Memphis to mentor teenagers on campus through the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. She was eager to get involved in a new community, and the program seemed like the perfect way to jumpstart a new chapter in her life. While she was in that location, the origin story of the name "Ole Miss" came upward.
Dear learned that a student, Elma Meek, proposed the proper noun in 1896 for a new yearbook that was existence created by an interfraternity group. Her inspiration reportedly came "from the language of the Ante-bellum 'Darkey,ʼ who knew the wife of his owner by no other title than 'Ole Miss,ʼ" according to the student newspaper, so chosen The Mississippian. In an interview with that paper in the 1930s, Meek said she felt the name "connoted all the admiration and reverence accorded the womanhood of the Old South." This intervention afforded Meek herself a vaunted spot in Oxford mythology; long afterward she had stopped attention classes at the university, Meek lived in a house near the campus that was built by a Confederate full general. (For a while, William Faulkner and his wife lived with her there; it's really where he wrote much of As I Lay Dying and "A Rose for Emily.") Today, the business firm is fiercely protected from any attempts at change, down to its air ducts, by the local Historic Preservation Commission. But more Meek's sentimental history, the name she proposed has stuck, so wildly outliving its origins that many, many people who pass through the Oxford campus or tailgate in the Grove or just follow the sports teams with mild interest are unaware of the horrors subconscious therein.
(The university did not respond to multiple interview requests from Mother Jones, but sent a statement from Chancellor Glenn Boyce: "Ole Miss is a term of affinity for many of our people that is intrinsic to the university's identity and carries potent, positive national and international recognition. We understand the complex history of its origins…at the aforementioned time, it is a term whose meaning has changed over time, and we are committed to living past what it means today to our students and alumni who embrace it equally an expression of caring and community." The email also included a chapter from a book titled, The Other Mississippi: A State in Conflict with Itself; written by David Sansing, the University of Mississippi'south late historian, the choice emphasizes that the term "Ole Miss" was i of "respect and endearment" used by slaves, and twice says that Meek's intention was not to "reminisce or regale" slavery, rather she only meant to "link her alma mater to those m women of the antebellum S.")
Upon learning this history, Honey was adamant not to utilize the coincidental nickname again. "I'm going to stand up up and say this is not what I desire to use," she says. But, she admits, it'southward not exactly easy to just remove yourself from something so wrapped up in campus civilisation—"It's also the lay of the state. It'due south a damned if you lot do, damned if y'all don't–type situation."
In that location are then many people—not all of them white—who do not know the university as annihilation other than "Ole Miss." It's everywhere effectually you lot in Oxford; on billboards that advertise the university as y'all bulldoze into town, on signs and on campus, on T-shirts, ball caps, stickers, school supplies, tacked onto the end of every student's and faculty member'due south e-mail accost. In that location is no University of Mississippi; there is only "Ole Miss."
For nearly of my life, I was among the oblivious. The historical context of "Ole Miss" was news to me when belatedly last yr a former loftier schoolhouse classmate of mine posted a 2019 Chronicle of College Ed article on Facebook detailing origins of the university'due south hoary nickname. I am a Southern white woman who has always spoken those words, "Ole Miss," in the context of a dearly held rivalry between the university in Oxford and Mississippi State Academy, where most of my family unit has attended schoolhouse for generations. It one time vaguely connoted dwelling house to me, recalling Thanksgivings at my grandmother's house in Tupelo, the television in the living room blaring the Egg Bowl, the annual football faceoff between the schools, as we cleaned upward the kitchen and advisedly put abroad the leftovers.
Jonathan Bachman/Getty
I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone refer to information technology as the University of Mississippi until recently, but the discovery that words that I once regarded as neutral, even mannerly, comprise a bitter connotation has inverse that. For weeks, I couldn't stop thinking virtually this new context. I quizzed anybody I encountered about the once-beloved nickname; in bars, at work, on the phone with folks back domicile—no one knew. That racism ofttimes hides in linguistic communication is not a new concept to me; I grew upward equally a white girl in the S. But that also means I hid from those realities behind my privilege and youth for an unforgivably long time. Even as a child, I frequently sensed some lingering evil when racism was dressed upwards every bit something innocuous—yet in the name "Ole Miss," for almost three decades, I heard only a folksy culling to an unwieldy schoolhouse name.
A few weeks later on reading the commodity, I wandered the campus with my cousin, struck by the depth of the school'south delivery to the branding—wondering how I went so long without knowing, becoming fixated on how the name that literally looms over everyone'southward heads affects life for students and staff of color. The student population is 76 percent white and only 13 percent Black; similarly, the kinesthesia is 78 percent white and simply 6 pct Black. "If you talk to students—and this is both students in full general, Black, white, and otherwise, but peculiarly with students of colour—they volition say that it weighs on their everyday experiences on this campus—the 'it' being the racial history of the campus," says Brian Foster, an banana professor in the sociology department, who is Black.
Interviews with students add farther dimensions to Foster's assessment. While Love is conscientious to point out that as a graduate student she is not on campus as ofttimes as undergraduates are, she notes, "Our ancestors already paid the price. We don't need to add together tax by continuing to have those symbols of oppression at the University of Mississippi."
For her office, Yasmine Malone, a rising senior at the university, likes the nickname itself, stripped of its origins, but it bothers her that she feels similar the schoolhouse is less than clear about where it comes from. A classmate, Isabel Spafford, says she heard the claim on a campus tour that the name is taken from a train that supposedly ran through the state from Memphis.
Malone notes that despite efforts to movement forward, there is likewise yet an undeniable blueprint of racism in beliefs at the University of Mississippi—whether it's the Black fraternity business firm that was burned to the ground in 1988 or the Confederate rally held on campus in February 2019 or the powerful quondam Southern families who donate to the university on the condition that the Confederate imagery remain intact and undisturbed. "I would like for us to prefer a mindset that nosotros no longer want this to represent who nosotros are," Malone says. "But the fact of it is, that is exactly who we are. The political, economical, and social forces that guide decisions effectually Ole Miss are all very much still racist."
She clarifies that she's beingness more candid with me than she feels she can more often than not exist in her life on campus.
While the University of Mississippi has grappled with its Confederate history for decades, wrestling with these demons never makes for a straightforward fight. And in the broader context of the state of Mississippi, where strains of white supremacy persist from the non-so-distant past, it has been even more than fraught.
In 1848, the academy was "very explicitly founded as an institution where slaveholder sons can attend rather than going to those fanatical colleges and universities in the north where they might imbibe anti-slavery ideology, and come back hostile to the establishment," says Anne Twitty, an associate history professor at the University of Mississippi. "The overwhelming majority of the University of Mississippi's first students came from slaveholding families."
Equally Twitty points out in a recent piece for the Atlantic, when the various monuments and memorials to the Confederacy began to appear on campus in the late 1800s and early on 1900s, they were synthetic non in grief for lives that had been lost, but rather in celebration for the ability structure preserved through Jim Crow.
The academy did not have its get-go Black pupil, James Meredith, until 1962, and Meredith'southward acceptance came merely after a lengthy legal battle. Vehement protests ensued; two died and some 300 more were injured.
"It's a practical matter," Foster says. "If Black folks accept only been allowed to exist here, either as students, as faculty, as administrators, for a fraction of the university's history, it just follows that they will be underrepresented in those spaces to which they haven't historically had access."
He adds, "Why would we expect this to be a habitable place? Why would we expect this to be a welcoming and vibrant place?"
In 2006, a statue of Meredith was erected on campus. In 2014, three fraternity brothers flung a noose over its neck.
The academy has fabricated attempts to tackle some of the most glaring representations of this racism, merely its official actions don't ever interpret to the broader culture on campus. For the better role of the 20th century, for case, the school's mascot was Colonel Reb, a mustachioed caricature of a plantation owner who wears a haughty expression, leaning heavily on a pikestaff. He is sometimes depicted against a properties of a Confederate flag. The university officially retired him in 2003—only the image is far from defunct. Independent groups attend sporting events with stuffed Colonel Rebs for children; men apparel equally the former mascot and pose with sorority girls and fraternity boys.
Mark Humphrey/AP
In 2009, one-time Chancellor Dan Jones asked the academy'south ring, known equally the Pride of the South, to stop playing "From Dixie With Love," which blended the Battle Hymn of the Republic with Dixie that builds toward a chant: "The South will ascent again." In 2016, they were asked to terminate playing any variation on the unofficial anthem of the Confederate States of America. Similar the mascot, both songs take disappeared officially, but that does not terminate tailgaters from clarion the canticle from booming speakers in oversize pickups anyway.
Fifty-fifty though the school banned the Mississippi flag on campus because of the Confederate symbolism prominently displayed therein, there's still the Our Land Flag Foundation, a group of people pissed that the university no longer flies it. The Facebook group, which hovers around 25,000 members, is a forum where angry white people bemoan diversity and inclusion efforts on their best days and assail specific people of color in the academy community on their worst. They have a booth in the Grove on game days.
The way the university has dealt with the proper name has been even more opaque. In 2014, a Sensitivity and Respect Committee, comprised of administrators and other kinesthesia, and a scattering of students, aimed to brand the campus more diverse and inclusive, releasing a report that alludes to the moniker but avoids addressing its racist history direct. While the official recommendation is, the University of Mississippi should "consider the implications of calling itself 'Ole Miss' in various contexts," most of that section of the report appears to brush the roots of the name aside: "Regardless of its origin, the vast majority of those associated with our university has a strong affection for 'Ole Miss' and practice not associate its employ with race in any way. And the vast majority of those who view u.s. from a distance associate the term 'Ole Miss' with a strong, vibrant, mod academy – and the Manning family, The Blind Side, The [sic] 2008 Presidential Contend, and great sports teams."
In June 2017, another report, this 1 from the Chancellor's Informational Committee on History and Contextualization, was released. It held specific instructions for clarifying the history of the Confederate iconography on campus—everything from the names of buildings to the 12-foot-alpine Tiffany stained-drinking 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 kinesthesia who had long been fighting for a more inclusive, reflective campus. "Ole Miss," though, was not even mentioned in this written report.
"Those efforts for change have always registered to me as symbolism, surface level, more than than tangible, textile, structural," Foster says.
Part of this may be because if the University of Mississippi is a formal name, "Ole Miss" conveys a powerful emotion—and a lucrative brand. As Hudson put it to me, "Nosotros have not moved on from [Ole Miss] because of capitalism…they're making money off of that." Forbes estimates that the annual acquirement—over an boilerplate of 3 years—brought in from the "Ole Miss" football game program alone is $84 million, making it one of the tiptop 25 most lucrative college teams in the country. In 2016, the schoolhouse expanded Vaught-Hemingway Stadium to hold 64,038 football fans; information technology is at present the largest stadium in Mississippi.
However, grassroots efforts to alter the proper 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 information technology has come up, information technology has typically inspired only lukewarm response. Torie Marion White, who serves every bit an assistant director at the Ole Miss Alumni Association, overseeing alumni relations for the Schoolhouse of Engineering science and the Schoolhouse of Engineering, besides as the Blackness Alumni Advisory Council and the Grove Society, tells Mother Jones that several of her boyfriend Black alums have taken to referring to the school equally "New Miss," she says, creating T-shirts and tumblers with their moniker featured in identify of the onetime. Nevertheless, such swag is hard to come by; when I searched for anything like that online, I came up only with beauty pageant references.
Only this year, Zach Borenstein, a white graduate student, wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper, the Daily Mississippian, calling for the death of "Ole Miss." "Linguistic communication matters, but we often get used to saying things that normalize harm," he wrote in early on February. "Certain phrases diminish or denigrate groups of people, and if not addressed, these phrases become so commonplace that those using them practise not fifty-fifty consider their origins and effects." (At the stop of May, Borenstein was arrested for defacing the Amalgamated statue at the campus entrance. He slashed his mitt with a knife to cast bloody handprints upon the white marble, framing the words "spiritual genocide," spray-painted in black.)
A week after Borenstein'southward op-ed published, some other appeared, this i by a white and so-junior named Lauren Moses. It was headlined "Let's keep saying 'Ole Miss.'": "My friends and I recently discussed the waning respect for tradition on our campus. From changing the schoolhouse mascot to governing bodies voting to movement the Amalgamated statue to contextualizing many buildings on campus, Ole Miss has lost its identity." The core of her argument is that history fades, and that those symbols are not celebrated for their origins, but in spite of them.
Her point isn't particularly novel; it is in fact all too familiar. 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. I asked him what he'd say to Blackness students and faculty who are disturbed by the Confederate imagery on campus, including the mascot. He replied simply, "Well, the Confederate stuff was there before they were."
Over the past few weeks in item, I've considered what it ways to love the South, as I securely do. What once was partially buried under decades of conscientious erasure is at present stark and exposed. I cannot look away from racism, especially where it flourishes in my home.
Impairment is hard to quantify, which in turn makes information technology a tricky defense confronting the thing that harms. When people who accept been actively disempowered are those beingness harmed, it makes those voices harder to hear, or maybe easier for those in power to ignore.
Every bit I talked to more and more people in the campus community—most of them Black—I couldn't help but feel the magnitude of all they are upwards against. Before Foster was a sociology professor, he came to written report at the University of Mississippi as a educatee. 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 due north-word past a white person. It was the kickoff place where two white boys pulled up next to him at a stoplight, rolled down the window, and asked, "Where y'all boys going this night?" like they were entitled to know. While scrolling through the Our Country Flag Foundation'south Facebook page, I came beyond a screenshot of Foster'south staff page, and my tum churned, alongside a photo of two Black female person graduates. They had fatigued the ire of the grouping for their activism to remove the state flag from campus. There are 69 comments below.
Similarly, Marion White, who runs the Black Alumni Advisory Council, says she'southward "been the only minority in a room my entire life," and still, the day came when she was manhandled by a campus police officer because she was in the parking area for elite alumni on game day. When she told him she worked for the academy, he wouldn't believe her. (Marion White says the officer remains on the force.)
My conversations with students repeat these experiences. Malone, the senior, tells me that while she'due south found a vibrant Blackness customs at the university, she has stepped back from activism and fighting dorsum against the university's Confederate symbols. It's get too much for her emotionally; she has to focus on her studies, which is a tall order in itself when attending classes means passing former slave quarters and hearing her university referred to in antebellum language.
Dearest is all the same committed to getting her MFA, but concludes, "You lot really practice accept to have a lot of forcefulness and a lot of energy to continuously put your Black or Brown trunk in these spaces and fight for those things, because it is non for the faint of heart."
Most of the men and women I interviewed likewise mentioned a photo that went viral in July 2019 of 3 white fraternity brothers, wearing broad smiles and posing in front of the bullet-ridden sign memorializing Emmett Till, the Black 14-year-onetime who was tortured and lynched in 1955 after a white woman falsely accused him of whistling at her. 2 of the boys in the photo held guns. The sign itself is so often vandalized, so frequently shot at, that it'south impossible to know if the bullet holes are from the guns clutched in the hands of the Kappa Blastoff brothers. They were suspended from their fraternity, simply ultimately allowed to remain enrolled every bit students.
"I just experience similar if those boys were Black men who shot up a Confederate sign, in that location would probably exist way more consequences, way more outrage, way more punishment for them," Beloved tells me. "You understand that the underlining thing about information technology is this deeply entrenched white privilege and to me, being a woman of color, a Blackness woman, peculiarly…it simply makes you feel powerless."
This incident reveals a vivid 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 exit the past behind, only 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 accost a white woman direct.
A name that is then intertwined with the identity of a identify is tough to disentangle. Some of the students who brand a conscious endeavor to employ the total proper name of the academy would skid upwardly 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 optics and your ears and your rima oris and your heed requires a kind of prickly awareness that feels uncomfortable at first, but before long, it dissolves into normalcy.
It is hard to imagine the University of Mississippi equally anything but "Ole Miss." It is likewise impossible to completely divorce the schoolhouse from the values held in its Amalgamated past without going all-in on moving forrard and making the alter. Moving statues, contextualizing symbols, building committees, and scheduling programming toward a more inclusive and diverse campus are all practiced and important. But that work feels dwarfed by the name of the identify, when the words on the lips of everyone in that community are an homage to the antebellum South. Language provides all sorts of nook and crannies for white supremacy to hide; can it exist truly overthrown without addressing what'due south really in a proper name?
Suzi Altman/Zuma
Names, though, even the ones then tied up in a community, in its identity, can change. Look effectually. This reckoning over what's in a name, which has played out fourth dimension and time again, and time again, is once once more doing so in the names of schools and parks and armed forces bases and even state music bands. With time, few will remember what they in one case were. Once, the Academy of Mississippi was only that. It could be that again; information technology could also be reborn equally something better.
It may non happen today or tomorrow. Just it will. It must. Of grade irresolute the proper name volition not magically dissipate centuries of systemic racism and inequality, but it is a elementary step forwards. Until and so I feel somewhat heartened thinking nearly the fight itself—which, Beloved says, "is important because information technology shows that we are here, information technology shows that we belong, and it does not validate our worth, but it does validate us being here."
"It shows that hey, nosotros're hither, we're staying. Nosotros acknowledge that these things, these symbols, hurt."
Correction: An earlier version of this article applied a term for the original Confederate States flag, in employ 1861-1863, to a later version formerly displayed in the state flag of Mississippi.
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Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/07/racism-university-mississippi-nickname-ole-miss-confederate-history-elma-meeks/
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