OPINION: Meredith’s Ole Miss graduation marked a beginning, but many issues remain

By Ivory Phillips

JA Contributing Editor

Unlike his admission to the University of Mississippi in October 1962, James Meredith’s graduation in August 1963 was not widely noted. His admission had been accomplished only after a federal court order, the intervention of the U.S. Department of Justice, and a full-blown riot wherein two people were killed. The world was aware of what was happening. On the other hand, the graduation occurred in a relatively quiet summer graduation ceremony. His family celebrated, but not the world.

Perhaps one reason Meredith’s graduation went relatively unnoticed was because it occurred less than a year after his admission. Not many were expecting it that soon. What many did not realize was that he had been attending Jackson State College for several years before the Ole Miss admission. He had in fact taken reduced loads of classes in order not to graduate before the court could act on his case. In addition to that, much publicity was then focused on Cleve McDowell who had been admitted to Ole Miss law school in June of 1963.

Nevertheless, with Meredith’s graduation, the process of having successfully desegregated Ole Miss was complete. In the meantime, several questions or issues became prominent – what would happen to the previously all-white institutions, what would happen to the all-Black institutions, and how would society be affected by the racial changes.

Fortunately, since 1963, we have been able to experience several actions that help answer those questions. For example, the Board of Trustees and the office of State Institutions of Higher Learning adopted different entrance exam scores for the historically Black and historically white colleges in order to prevent large-scale enrollments of Black students at the white colleges. As the Ayers case was being litigated, that tactic was replaced by a combination of constantly rising tuition and the creation of a universities classification system that affected the funding for the individual institutions. Both of these tactics affected and will continue to affect Black enrollment, including Black matriculation into and graduation from certain programs.

During the same time period, enrollment at the Black colleges declined. Some people have suggested that Black colleges are no longer needed since Black students can now attend white colleges. Likewise, an increasing number of Black students have chosen to attend the white colleges, feeling they have more to offer. Often those perceptions arise from myths growing out of racism; sometimes because more funds have been made available to the white colleges to improve their curricular offerings, equipment and facilities; and sometimes because their faculties are more professionally treated and highly compensated, enabling them to research and write more.

How society will be affected depends upon the further actions of the “keepers” of the system. If their actions are tied to the kind of racism used to keep James Meredith, Cleve McDowell, and Clyde Kinnard out of the white colleges, to the efforts to screen and price certain students out of the system, and/or to the effort to classify the universities and fund them inequitably, then society will continue to remain divided and less productive, and increasingly so on both fronts.

We are able to make this prediction because since the litigation of the Ayers case, the college board and the rest of the higher education establishment has concentrated much of their efforts on maintaining and funding their classification system which places the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, and the University of Southern Mississippi in a position that’s equivalent to being “too big to fail.” In their view, these three universities and the University of Mississippi Medical Center are to be protected at all costs, while the other universities, especially Mississippi Valley State University, can be sacrificed budgetarily. Delta State University is now feeling the pinch, and there have been several efforts to merge Mississippi University for Women out of existence. 

Under the current iteration, as tuition rises, it is our feeling that many African Americans will be eliminated from the university system, having to settle for technical and community colleges. This has been the leaders’ preferred option rather than having the predominately white institutions “overrun” by African Americans since the efforts of Meredith, McDowell, Kinnard, and others. One can witness this new strategy unfolding in the college board’s latest budget proposal for the upcoming year.

As the college board’s classification system becomes more “acceptable,” the unequal and inequitable funding problem for which the Ayers case was filed, will get worse. The system will become even more destructive to the historically Black colleges, and many unfortunate African American students will be left out all-together. This is only one, but is a major issue left unresolved since Meredith celebrated his historic graduation August 18, 1963.