Ole Miss Begins Its Slow Slide Backwards Into the Security of the Comfortable Past

OXFORD, MISS.--Bullet holes still mar the tall Ionic columns in front of the Lyceum building at Ole Miss. The six white pillars have been repainted since the 1962 riot, but many of the scars are still plainly visible.

The riot, which broke out when Negro James Meredith enrolled in previously segregated Ole Miss, shook the college to its foundations. Mississippians suddenly had to get used to the idea of integration at the "white folks school." national attention forced the University out of its comfortable regionalism. Political issues became paramount: white Mississippians had to choose between moderation and a last-ditch defense of the state's traditions.

Now, however, there are signs that Ole Miss is sliding back into its old pose of quiet case. The last class that went through the Meredith experience graduated in June; already the new students have begun to re-focus on sorority-fraternity politics and the Mississippi football game. The state-pointed Board of Trustees, which has been surprisingly tolerant during the last four years, is once again making noises about clearing the "radicals" out of Ole Miss. And the liberals on the college faculty, who have fought a constant series of battles for academic freedom since the Meredith year, are tiring.

For a year after the riot, as long James Meredith was still at the University, U.S. troops remained on campus. The sight of federal troops at Ole Miss was almost as galling to white Mississippians as the presence of Meredith, for the University of Mississippi is very much the pride of the state, in everything from its football team to its law school. There are two larger schools in the state, Mississippi State and Mississippi Southern, but Ole Miss is Mississippi. The state's brightest students have always gone to Ole Miss; its political leaders, both good and bad, have always begun their rise to power at the Ole Miss Law School.

Professors Leave

In the first two years after Meredith, 58 professors left the university; most were either pressured into leaving or wanted to teach in a less volatile atmosphere. Several departments were badly weakened, and the History department was decimated.

Among those who left was James Silver, chairman of the History department and author of Mississippi: The Closed Society, an account of Mississippi's well-oiled system for stifling dissent. Although Silver was not actually fired, Governor Ross Barnett and the Board of Trustees were openly hostile to him. After the departure of Silver and some other faculty liberals, Ole Miss Chancellor J.D. Williams commented, "It's best that they go--it is best for them, it is best for us."

Meredith's year on the campus not only affected the faculty, but it shocked the students into a new view of themselves and of their University. The riot gave many of them a nation-wide perspective rare in the South.

During and after the riot, almost everyone at Ole Miss had some contact with the national press, which swarmed over the campus. Many students were recruited for on-the-spot television and radio interviews, which were subsequently edited beyond recognition to perpetuate the national image of the Mississippi anarchist-bigot. Photographers sought out the most hot-headed rednecks on campus and egged them into spouting vicious diatribes and posing for indicting pictures. National television carried shots of one student pulling down the American flag and running the Confederate flag up the University flagpole in its place. According to several who saw the whole incident, the scene was staged by a photographer who cajoled a student in committing the act.

Changes in race relations on campus have been striking. For two years after the riot, racists regularly harrassed both Negro students and those few whites, students or faculty members, who dared to associate with the Negroes. But the past two years have been marred by only a few ugly incidents.

The number of Negroes on campus has increased quietly, but steadily. There are now about 40, and, on the whole, they are left to themselves. Yet is clear that desegregation at the University has been accepted now. Whites who associate with the Negroes are no longer harrassed, though they may be ostracized by other white students. Racially mixed groups come into the cafeteria without being hissed, and Negroes use the student union grill without being particularly noticed. Meredith often ate at the cafeteria, but never ventured into the grill, a more informal "hangout" for a number of the close-knit cliques on campus.

Mixing Roommates

This year, the University assigned Negro and white students together as roommates. Students are given the opportunity to change roommates after the school year begins, and all of the mixed groups elected to split up. Nonetheless, it is clear that the University has adopted a policy of color-blindness, at least with respect to housing.

The one integrated campus organization, the Young Democrats, is generally considered the University's most radical. Aligned with the national Democratic Party rather than with the state's dixiecrats, the YD's have invited such controversial speakers to Ole Miss as Richmond Flowers of Alabama, and Robert Kennedy.

The President of the Young Dems is a 29-year-old ex-marine, a third-year law student named Don Allen. Allen, born in Florida, has come under attack for his "radical" politics and for his out-of-state background. A warm, straightforward person, he makes no effort to conceal his views. Although he would be classified as a middle-of-the-roader in national politics, Don Allen is definitely on the political left at Ole Miss.

Law School Recruiting

Allen was one of the out-of-staters attracted two years ago when the Law School began a program to improve the quality and variety of its teaching. Law Dean J.B. Morse recruited some of the best lawyers in the state to teach at Ole Miss. The Ford Foundation gave the Law School a $5 million grant to turn an already good school into the intellectual center of the state. Last year, Morse arranged to have a team of Harvard Law professors fly down to Ole Miss and teach, each for a two-week stretch. This fall, he hired five of the seven Yale Law School graduates who decided to go directly into teaching.

The newly-established dialogue at Ole Miss is most encouragingly illustrated at the Law School. As only a Southerner could, Dean Morse has been able to bring a group of students and teachers with an incredibly diverse range of opinions into an uneasy truce.

With an enrollment of only about 450, the Law School is housed in a single building. A coffee pot is kept brewing in the ground floor hall, and there is an easy Southern friendliness even between political opposites. Professor make themselves readily accessible, and do not hesitate to speak candidly.

Aaron Henry, a state NAACP leader, and Marion Wright, one of the six Negro lawyers in Mississippi, have both spoken at the Law School this year. A few years ago, they never would have been invited. In contrast, Medford Evans, a long-time representative of the White Citizen's Council, spoke at the Law School this fall, but his reception was substantially less favorable than in the past. Evans was pressed, as Don Allen recounts it, and inconsistencies in his views were sharply attacked.

A Basis for Dialogue

Tension still exists at the Law School, and there is a tendency to avoid the explosive issue of race. But as one of the Law School professors puts it, "There's a real basis for dialogue here. Just scratch the surface, and you find people directly caught up in the most important problem of this century."

Though the Law School has nine Negroes, it also still has its die-hard segregationists. But most of them are clearly on the defensive. In the last few months, Dave Clark, a freshman, has become the standard bearer in a small-scale campaign to return segregation and conservatism to the Law School. Complaining of the "Yale invasion," he has written a number of letters to the editor of the Mississippian, the University daily, attacking Dean Morse and the "leftists" that are "leading the Law School down the road of liberalism."

Sitting Separate

When Aaron Henry and Marion Wright spoke in a Law course on "Political and Civil Rights," Clark sat in a chair outside the lecture room, refusing to sit in on any lecture given by a Negro. But even Dave Clark's questions from outside the room have added to the potential for creative dialogue.

If the Ole Miss Law School, over the next two years can encourage Dave Clark, and others like him, to reconsider the ideas by which they were raised, then it will have contributed more to Mississippi than all of the civil rights workers in the state combined.

But it may not get the chance.

Just two weeks ago, the Board of Trustees passed a resolution aimed at preventing professors, particularly certain Law professors, from engaging in any kind of civil rights activity.

Next year, the original Ford grant will expire. If the Ford Foundation does not renew the grant, or if the Board Trustees forces Dean Morse to refuse it, the Law School will be crippled. As one Law professor put it, "It would be much worse if the Ford grant were cut off than if we'd never gotten it in the first place. It'd be difficult to have to give up the extra secretaries, the xerox machines, to think back after we've expanded so much." More importantly, it would be difficult to reconstruct the creative dialogue without the funds to keep attracting top-notch teachers.

Don Allen sums up the difference between the atmosphere of the Law School and that of the undergraduate college very simply: "At the Law School you can say anything you want."

Though the college, too, has made progress since the Meredith year, the characterization of Ole Miss as a "Greek country club" still fits pretty well. Sororities and fraternities have an inordinate amount of power. Education, for most of the undergraduates, is still of secondary concern.

Evans Harrington, a novelist and member of the English department, taught at Ole Miss throughout the Meredith affair. Harrington is one of the leaders of the Ole Miss chapter of the Association of American University Professors, which has fought a series of battles for academic freedom for the last four years. Just this summer, the AAUP got the courts to throw out the clause of the Mississippi loyalty oath which requires teachers in state schools to list all the organizations they have belonged to or contributed to in the last five years. The court case was surprisingly simple to win, but preparing the case, Harrington explains, took all the spare time he, and several other Ole Miss professors had for most of a semester. The AAUP, Harrington says, simply does not have the energy it did during and just after the Meredith crisis. Many of the professors who left Ole Miss were AAUP members, and those who have stayed just don't have the time or drive for very many more fights.

Censorship

In the last week, there has been another indication that Ole Miss and Mississippi society will not tolerate the kind of academic freedom commonplace at most other state universities. During a faculty art show last week, Robert L. Tettleson, chairman of the Art Department, personally took down a painting by Jairo Amaris, an assistant professor of Art. Amaris had been hired under an agreement stipulating that none of his work would ever be censored. When his painting was romoved, Amaris took all the rest of his works out of the show. The AAUP will consider whether or not to defend Amaris's freedom from censorship. If it does, the fight will be a long one, and Amaris's nine-month contract will probably be allowed to expire in the meantime. Amaris was generally considered one of the most exciting teachers in the Art department. If he leaves, or is forced to leave Ole Miss, the closed society will once more have asserted and defended itself at the cost of excellence.

Little Reaction

After the Meredith riot, another member of the Art department had his works censored. Members of the Art department and others in the University vehemently protested the censorship.

The national press picked up the issue, and charges against the professor were dropped.

This time, however, the censorship has gotten very little notice. The Mississippian reported the event only by printing a letter to the editor. More significantly, the University has learned how to handle such cased more delicately. Tettleson has cancelled Amaris's graduate art seminar for the rest of the year, and may even close the faculty art show to avoid having to deal further with the censorship issue.

Harrington is clearly discouraged. "We are all just getting tired," he explains. "It used to be exciting to fight for clear-cut rights, but things have gotten to be more tiring then exciting now."

"Some of the others have just about come to the breaking point," he says of other faculty liberals. Many of the liberals are in either History or Political Science, and have to deal constantly with the race problem. "At least I can get away from it in my work," Harrington remarks. "Still, it's in my blood. All four of my novels have turned out to be mostly diatribes, complete with stereotyped Mississippi characters."

Who's Silver?

Among the students, the same sort of back sliding is clearly occurring. Last week, when historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38 spoke at Ole Miss, he said he wished that his friend James Silver could have been there. After the speech, a number of the students asked who Silver was. As one amazed faculty member put it, "Most of them seemed to think he was some New York Jew." The central figure in the post-riot struggle against the closed society has largely been forgotten.

The post-riot changes were perhaps most clear last spring when more than 6000 people jammed the Ole Miss coliseum to hear Bobby Kennedy. They gave him two standing ovations, and there was little, if any, overt harrassment. In 1962, only four years before, the two Kennedys had been bitterly resented in Mississippi, and at Ole Miss. Bumper stickers were circulated reading. "The Castro Brothers Are in the White House," and "Mississippi: Kennedy's Hungary."

It would be ridicuously inccurate to see any significant swing to the Left at Ole Miss. Liberalism has been tolerated in the last few years. There has never been a place at Ole Miss for any real rebellion, but in the past, the students have consistently elected liberals and moderates as editors of the Mississippi. Even the Mississippian's temporary summer editor. Bob Boyd, criticized the Oxford school system for failing to observe federal desegregation guidelines. Boyd also attacked Representative Jamie Whitten (D.-Miss.), a conservative segregationist from Oxford's congressional district.

Conservative Editor

This fall, however, it quickly be came clear that the Mississippian had