"EVERYBODY KNOWS ABOUT MISSISSIPPI"

 “EVERYBODY KNOWS ABOUT MISSISSIPPI”

I continue to sort through my files and papers to send them on to the Presbyterian Historical Society for archiving.  One would think that I would have finished by now, but you know how preachers are.  One of my good friends, Inez Giles, once gave a painted rock to her dad, an AME Presiding bishop, and the same one to me.  It said:  “Preachers never die – they just go on and on and on and on…..” I’ve had that feeling in continuing to sort through all my files!

This week I came across a program from the Ole Miss/Kentucky football game of Saturday, September 29, 1962.  Growing up as a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, I had sports memorabilia from them (including the aforementioned autographed photo of Stan Musial), but I have given most of that to our son David.  I found the Ole Miss program in a different folder – a political one.  I had saved that program because I had attended that football game with my cousin Brown (and, yes the same Brown of the Stan Musial story) and his dad in Jackson, Mississippi.  It was the game where Governor Ross Barnett made an impassioned defense of his refusing to allow a Mississippi citizen to attend the University of Mississippi.  

That citizen was named James Meredith, born and bred in Mississippi, and he was an Air Force veteran who had finally been accepted into Ole Miss.  This week marks the 60th anniversary of that series of events, including a white race riot on the campus.  At the football game on September 29, Governor Barnett vowed never to yield to the “integrationists” of the federal government, and he demanded that the crowd stand and sing “Go, Mississippi.”  Brown and I were segregationists at this point in our lives, but to teenagers – we were starting our junior years in high school – this seemed like an embarrassing thing to do.  Yet, when the entire white crowd at the football game stood and belted out the song, we did too.

James Meredith had started applying to enter the University of Mississippi in Oxford on the day after JFK was inaugurated as President in 1961.  The Board of Directors twice rejected his application.  Meredith decided to take his case to federal court, and it worked its way up to the Fifth Circuit, which ordered the University of Mississippi to accept James Meredith to the college.  The state appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court, and in an emergency order, SCOTUS ordered that Meredith be admitted.  The state legislature met quickly to pass a law to try to manufacture a criminal charge against Meredith to keep him from being accepted as a student at Ole Miss.  Again, the federal courts threw that out, and Meredith was on track to enter Ole Miss in September, 1962.  

Governor Barnett twice refused to admit him, but in secret phone deals with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he agreed to allow Meredith to enroll if Barnett could save face by continuing to rant against “integrationists.”  Even as he cajoled us to sing “Go, Mississippi” at the football game and proclaiming that he would never allow Meredith to enter, he had already made the deal.  The white supremacists gathering at Oxford, however, thought that Barnett was sincere. On that same football weekend, they began a riot on the Ole Miss campus, and after three days, it was finally brought under control by federal marshals, the National Guard, and US Army troops.  Two people were killed in the riot, and three hundred people were arrested, but Meredith was admitted.  He was guarded 24 hours a day by federal marshals and reserve troops, and he graduated in August, 1963.

It would be convenient to blame this on the state of Mississippi, because as Nina Simone sang, “everybody knows about Mississippi.”  The inconvenient truth, however, is that this story is part of a much larger stream in American history.  One of the fundamental truths of our history is that racism and white supremacy have been part of the narrative since the European beginnings of the country.  Neo-slavery ended only in 1965, and we have continued to struggle with this powerful force in the 57 years since then.  The rising tide of white supremacy, called out by Trumpism, is not a new thing in our history.  It seems to always be with us, sometimes overt and menacing and oppressive, sometimes driven underground by the power of the idea of equality, but always lurking nearby, awaiting the call from the likes of Ross Barnett and Donald Trump.  Each of us - and all of us – are called to find our place and make our stand in this historic struggle between equality and white supremacy.  Where’s my place? Where’s yours?

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