Mississippi, Still Bearing Its Southern Cross

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Ole Miss

The University of Mississippi had hoped hosting the first presidential debate would cast a new light on the school. Now, the campus waits for news on whether the debate will be held Friday after all.

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Not everyone, though, has been bowled over. Hoopla is one thing, but commerce is another. John Welty, owner of Mississippi Madness, a store in town that sells pottery and other Mississippi products, was expecting a bigger boon. That's what he had been led to believe. "My store has been slower than normal," said Welty, who is on the local tourism board.

Just landing the debate took "work, work, work," said Khayat. He credits veteran journalists Tom Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie (an Ole Miss faculty member) with planting the idea more than four years ago. Khayat knew the university had a good space for a debate, with its performing arts center, and once he got a commitment of $1.5 million from the Robert M. Hearin Foundation, Khayat felt the university had enough financial backing to submit a proposal. In November 2007 the university found out it had been selected, and Khayat started calling companies for additional support, 14 in all.

The total price tag for the debate, he estimates, is $5.5 million.

"It's an honor that they chose Ole Miss," said Tyler Bigham, a senior music major and member of the Pride of the South university band. "There's been a lot of controversial past. There are still some bad seeds. But there are a lot of good people here."

Ole Miss has its own sordid past that it has had to reckon with. In 1962, James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, triggering violent riots that required federal troops and left two dead and many injured. Donald Cole remembers watching the scene on television in his Jackson home as a young boy and seeing the angry faces and thinking he would never go to Ole Miss.

But six years after Meredith enrolled, Cole did, too. He had visited schools around the state and fell in love with Ole Miss. But once there, he realized that integration still had a long way to go. Vast pockets of the campus, students and faculty alike, had no experience dealing with black students, who numbered little more than 100. "It wasn't a comfortable place," he says. There were confrontations, and he recalls young white female students shaking miniature Rebel flags at him as he went by.

So black students decided that they would take their grievances to university administrators. "We somehow thought that black professors ought to be somewhere on campus, that black administrators ought to be somewhere, that black athletes ought to play on some team," Cole said.

After asking, then demanding, they decided to protest, an action that resulted in eight of them being expelled, including Cole. He would end up graduating at Tougaloo College in the state, going off to get his master's degree elsewhere and returning to Ole Miss for a doctorate. In 1993, Cole returned to Ole Miss as an administrator and faculty member, teaching mathematics.

Today, he has an office near Khayat's, serving as assistant provost and assistant to the chancellor for multicultural affairs.

"If we look back on the racial history of the institution, it would say that my existence here is an impossibility," said Cole. "But I am here. And that means something has happened to make my presence possible. Some change has taken place."

Certainly not all, he said. But hosting the debate at least provides an opportunity. "We get a chance to redefine people's preconceived notions," Cole said. "I know that there are many who have not visited us, even in their minds, since the '60s."

Mississippi can never shake that decade for good. There is still white flight in some communities, and some of the private academies created to avoid integration still exist. But more kids are going to school with each other, and that interaction is changing the notions of what is possible. Mississippi is at the top of a lot of bad categories, but it also ranks consistently at the top in charitable giving -- an indication, some residents say, of the warm hearts of Mississippians.

"Mississippi is not fixed," said Richard Howorth, Oxford's mayor and owner of the renowned independent bookstore Square Books. "No place in America is in that regard. But I think we've come farther than most places."

The state now has more black elected officials than any state in the country, including more than a quarter of the state legislators.. But there has yet to be an African American to win statewide office, and those who have tried have been victims of race-baiting politics, according to some black politicians. It is quite the irony that while Barack Obama carried Mississippi in the Democratic primary -- and some Democrats believe he can be competitive, if not win, in the general election -- black politicians in the state have had a difficult time winning white votes.

One of those who have succeeded is state Sen. Eric Powell, who represents a district that is 92 percent white. He says Obama has provided a road map for the politics of the future. "He's got white and black young people coming together," said Powell. "They've learned how to live with one another and accept one another's cultures."

They are too young to have lived through the shameful past, and so the ghosts of Mississippi don't bother with them.