Oxford confab

Gathering explores massive resistance to civil rights at state schools 1969-1970

This past weekend, African American professors Ralph Eubanks and Afton Thomas, and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi sponsored a three-day conference commemorating and memorializing racial events occurring at Mississippi Valley State College (today, Mississippi Valley State University), Delta State University, the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), and Jackson State University. The conference was held just off the main campus of Ole Miss on Jackson Avenue property owned by the university.

Dr. Eubanks, in his keynote address Saturday morning, set the stage by underscoring the massive resistance of Mississippi’s white population to any efforts to change race relations, that is, to destroy Jim Crow customs, laws, and behavior in Mississippi. He quoted M.M. Roberts, William Scarbrough, and Ross Barnett, among the white leaders, who led and encouraged the white resistance. He indicated, however, that it was Black southerners driving the process advancing the change.

The main points of his address were expanded upon and supported by eye-witnesses from the respective campuses or other researchers having documented the same. The events pick up after the admission of James Meredith to Ole Miss, but before the court-ordered public school desegregation (Alexander vs. Holmes). The order in which the campus crises occur is as follows: Delta State College, Mississippi Valley State College, the University of Mississippi, and Jackson State College, with Delta State being in March of 1969 and the others in the Spring of 1970.

The civil rights or racial crisis created at Delta State occurred as Black students, who numbered only 52 out of a student body of several thousand and who were just the second class of Black students enrolled, demanded Black history be included in the required curriculum, Black teachers be hired, and racially-biased grading be ended. Then to support those demands, the students sat-in at the administration building and refused to move until they were addressed. For that action they were arrested and sent to the state penitentiary until a trial could be held. Once the trial was held, all charges were eventually dropped, exonerating the students. (It was pointed out that the initial protest surfaced after most of the Black students feared going to the dining hall and after one of them had been seriously hurt in a racial attack in the dining hall.) The crisis came and went, but the account of the crisis lay hidden in the library for decades. Ms. Maggie Daily Crawford and Ms. Lula Orsby Jones presented the Delta State story, assisted by a documentary produced by Michelle Johnson. 

The crisis at Mississippi Valley State College occurred as students demanded their curriculum be made more relevant, responding to the ideology of Black power and after Fannie Lou Hamer had called upon President J.H. White to resign or be fired. To press their demands, the students, led by the Student Government Association (SGA), occupied several campus spaces for several days. In response to their actions, President White fired several faculty and staff supporters, including the SGA advisor. Additionally, in cooperation with state and federal authorities, he had the student meetings secretly monitored. Many students were expelled, and nearly 1,000 were arrested and sent to Parchman. This remains the largest such arrest in American history. That crisis too passed and remained out of sight and out of mind for years. Dr. Mamie Osborne and Dr. Roy Hudson presented the MVSC story.

The crisis at the University of Mississippi occurred as Black students became fed-up with racist symbols, slurs, and treatment. It culminated in a protest during an “Up with People” presentation in Fulton Chapel wherein 27 demands were made. Among other things, the students demanded the removal of racist symbols, structures, and language from university-owned or sponsored material and property; the hiring of Black administrators, faculty, and staff; and the inclusion of Black history in the required curriculum. The efforts engaged in by the group of 89 included and had the support of the Black Student Union. Their protest had been preceded days earlier by a document entitled “Several Black Students’ Memo,” which had expressed similar sentiments. The administration responded to the demands by allowing the matter to die over time. Further, just as was the case of the MVSC students and other Black leaders in the larger society, the Black Ole Miss student leaders were surveilled by the FBI and narratives of their protest hidden. The Ole Miss story was presented by professors Amirhea Bishop, Janeen Talbott, and Ralph Eubanks. 

The crisis at Jackson State was one totally created by white leaders, including law-enforcement personnel. There had been no protest on campus nor any list of demands. Instead, the white officials were perhaps responding to the fact that for several years there had been tension as white drivers travelling Lynch Street, which ran through the middle of the campus, would heckle Black students and in return be sprayed with pebbles and that a dump truck had been burned near the campus the previous day. Therefore, white city and state officials had, on the evening of May 14th, ordered the police and highway patrol to Lynch Street where they opened fire on the students who were enjoying the festivities in front of the main female dormitory, Alexander Hall. National investigating bodies placed the blame for the massacre squarely on the officials, but the officials were not held liable when they were sued in state court. Jackson State University’s story was told by professor Angela Stewart and oral historian Alissa Rae Funderburk.

In each case, one is able to see a crisis was created by white state officials acting in ways reflecting their determination to maintain the culture of Jim Crow and Black subservience on their campuses. Together the eye-witnesses and the researchers illustrated that truth and how it transpired, campus by campus. A second point stressed by the presenters was that stories such as these must not be allowed to die or remain hidden. A third point was that the present and future generations must be enabled to connect the dots in order to avoid future mistakes and to advance in the matter of civil rights and human rights.