Goddam. There’s more than one way to pronounce that word. Nina Simone did it with the wrath of a prophet, giving voice to the fury the term originally conveyed. When the God of mercy damns you, you are well and truly lost. Southern radio banned “Mississippi Goddam” in the ’60s; they said it took the Lord’s name in vain.
Yet goddam can also express something like revelation, or even wonder. For what everybody knows about Mississippi is largely mythic. The heart of darkness, the middle of the iceberg—at the very least, the place you don’t want to be caught after sundown. The state gets first prize in every contest you don’t want to win, from the highest number of lynchings (in the past) to the highest level of obesity (in the present). Despite occasional competition from neighboring Alabama and Louisiana, it is last on every list of goods we value: the worst health, the least wealth, the poorest quality of education.
All those things could be improved by legislation and taxes. Anything imposed by the government, however, raises half-buried memories of Reconstruction, the period between 1865 and 1877 when the federal government tried to cope with the consequences of the Civil War. The radical reconstructionist wing of Congress supported progressive legislation, including full civil rights for the nearly four million liberated African Americans, and they were prepared to keep federal troops occupying the South to ensure that legislation was enforced. The defeated Southern states found the occupation intolerable, and its memory fuels resistance to anything those Yankees try to tell us to do. Few will say it out loud, but the not-quite-conscious conviction that anything coming out of Washington is a Yankee military measure underlies opposition to every program that might benefit the South from outside, whether it’s infrastructure or Obamacare. If we knew more about Reconstruction, we would know that this conviction has some history behind it: there was no mandatory public schooling until the Radical Republicans introduced it. Schools and roads and public institutions for the care of orphans, as well as the introduction of taxes to support them, were all products of the wide-ranging structural reforms that even, for a moment, succeeded in suppressing the Klan.1 The line from Southern hatred of Reconstruction to Southern opposition to government programs is a straight one, though it’s rarely explicitly drawn. So Mississippi prefers potholes that can ruin your wheels in its capital, and schools that leave their graduates illiterate in its countryside, to imposing taxes that might fix them.
Mississippi wasn’t always the poorest state in America. When it was settled in the early nineteenth century, much of its land was wilderness, teeming with bears and panthers. By the time of the Civil War, the white gold in its fields made Mississippi the fifth-richest state in the nation, for cotton was the sort of international currency that oil is today. Of the seventy-eight thousand of its sons who took up arms for the Confederacy, only twenty-eight thousand returned. A third of these left at least one limb on the battlefield. Imagine Germany without the Marshall Plan and you can imagine the devastation the war left on the Deep South. The inability of Reconstruction to impose a thorough plan for physically or morally restructuring the land left it to fester. When the Radical Republicans lost the support of Congress, there was no force that could urge Mississippians to reconsider their past. On the contrary: Mississippi was the first state to introduce the Black Codes, which effectively revoked all the rights freedmen and -women had been promised with emancipation. Since the rest of the country preferred to think of racial problems as Southern problems, the better to ignore its own complicity in sustaining them, Mississippi was left to itself. Thousands of African Americans fleeing terror and poverty went up north as soon as they could buy a ticket. In fact, with the possible exception of William Faulkner, any Mississippian with any sense was inclined to start life over elsewhere.
I’d driven through the state many years earlier—twice, real fast, without even stopping for gas. Mississippi sends chills down many a spine. Nonsense, I told myself, you are white. Then again, I remembered, so were Schwerner and Goodman, the murdered Jewish volunteers who came to register voters during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Countless men and women were murdered in Mississippi in the ’60s, and only two of them were white and Jewish. But their names were the ones that rang in my ears when I crossed the state line in 2016. I was struck by the straightness of highway, the flatness of terrain. All the names were familiar, sometimes eerily so. And no wonder: these days Mississippi markets itself as the birthplace of American music. Who indeed can imagine American culture without the blues? Without Elvis? Aretha? This is just as true as the fact that Mississippi was called the lynching capital of the world not too long ago.
Suddenly all the references made sense. Jackson, Leland, Tupelo, names I’d heard sung but never quite imagined in space. If it’s set to music, you can start me off with a line and my usually mediocre memory clicks into overdrive. Crossing the bridge over a stream marked TALLAHATCHIE, I was hurled back decades to remember all the lyrics of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.” The song was sinister enough even before I recalled the name of the river where they found the body of Emmett Till. The county where his mangled corpse was left is still debated in the Delta, but there’s no doubt that the fourteen-year-old black youth was kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and thrown into that muddy rolling water.
All that was on my mind as I saw a sign advertising a Mississippi Welcome Center. The paunchy white man at the counter offered me a cup of coffee so affably and insistently that I gave in and took it. “Ah, Oxford,” he said when I told him my destination. “You go in for literature?” He handed me a brochure for Faulkner’s house, which I duly promised to visit. I smiled, took a brochure describing the Mississippi Blues Trail, and walked out the door. The coffee was as tasteless as expected, but I waited till I was out of sight to pour it out.
More than two dozen American towns are named for the city of dreaming spires in Oxfordshire, England. Most of that naming was done in the hope that a great university would follow, and Oxford, Mississippi, was no different. Inside the state, the town is known for its flagship university, still the first choice of the scions of business and politics who hold the Mississippi reins of power. They can be sure that Daddy will visit often, since many alumni come up every weekend during football season. Their wives lay out linen and china for the elegant pregame picnics that take place in the Grove, an ample space of tree-shaded ground in the center of campus. Not many of them remember how the Grove was once filled with fire when “two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon,” as Bob Dylan sang in “Oxford Town.”
Outside the state, Oxford is famous for two things. In 1962 it was the site of what’s been called the last battle of the Civil War, when governor Ross Barnett tried to prevent a young veteran named James Meredith from becoming the first African American to study at the state’s leading university. The governor was supported by thousands of rioting students, and the case was resolved only with the help of the thirty thousand troops President Kennedy sent to restore order. All over the South, brave young black men and women integrated universities under threat of violence; in Oxford the violence was so explosive it became a national turning point. If the name Ole Miss evokes football fields and magnolias for its alumni, it evokes tear gas and shotguns for others. Among those who remember the violence, Ole Miss is not an affectionate nickname, but a racially loaded reference harking back to the days when slaves spoke of “Ole Miss” and “Ole Massa.” As James Meredith wrote:
The ‘Ole Miss’ of the plantation was by far the most important person in Mississippi. She held the keys to every lock on the plantation. She was the monitor of culture, the developer of Christian virtue, the matchmaker and the director of education and training. Above all, she was the queen of white supremacy. The University of Mississippi played all these roles for the state. It is a fitting nickname, for Ole Miss was and is the dominant, most powerful institution in the state.2
So I learned to call the place by its official name, the University of Mississippi, though it has ten syllables instead of two.
Oxford’s other distinction: it’s the home of William Faulkner, the South’s only Nobel laureate in literature. I use the present tense deliberately; he died in 1962, but Faulkner’s ghost still hovers over the town today. Though he was loathed by most of his neighbors during his lifetime—“Count No Account” was the local nickname—Faulkner’s language turned the proud, twisted history of the postwar South into world literature. Today’s locals are mighty pleased to tell you that their home was the template for Faulkner’s fictitious Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner’s house, Rowan Oak, is now a lovely museum full of memorabilia, where seminars on his work are sometimes held on the gracious lawn. His grave at the local cemetery is regularly adorned with fresh flowers and bottles of his preferred brand of bourbon. And just in case you might be inclined to forget him, there’s a life-size bronze statue of the writer sitting on a bench in front of the town hall. Faulkner’s ghost draws other writers, along with literary conferences and archives, and it’s surely a reason why Square Books is one of the nation’s best bookstores. Joining the citizens who retire to the City Grocery bar for a whiskey after a bookstore reading, I felt I’d arrived at a small, warm haven of literacy and gentility. Even though the bar’s balcony looks right out onto a statue of Johnny Reb, the iconic Confederate soldier invented to stand for all those who fought for the South in the war.
Oxford isn’t the real Mississippi, I heard time and again. It’s been called the Velvet Ditch. Apart from the bookstore and a number of good restaurants on the beautifully old-fashioned square, whose storefronts house law offices and high-end boutiques, there’s no place to buy anything you really need. For that you must drive to the highway, where in addition to the Walmart you’ll see signs for a fitness studio called Rebel Body, a guitar shop called Rebel Music, and a clothing store touting Rebel Rags. The University of Mississippi’s venerated football team is called, of course, the Rebels, though in 2014 the chancellor decreed that “Dixie” would no longer be played at halftime. Many alumni were infuriated. None of them actually want to put their lives on the line to defend slavery, but the word rebel has a seductive sound. Besides, all those symbols belong to family tradition.
There’s no question about it: the binding ties that every native Mississippian mentions are appealing. “Doesn’t everyone love the place they were born?” asked one recent University of Mississippi graduate. “Not like this, they don’t,” I had to tell him. Curtis Wilkie, the liberal journalist who returned after decades of reporting from Boston to the Middle East, says people are kinder here. Lee Paris, the conservative businessman who founded an interracial church group, says he loves Southern culture for its gentleness. I couldn’t help being touched by the sweetness of the drawl, the way strangers move to hold a door or pick up a fallen package, the genteel friendliness that greets you on the sidewalk or at the cash register. It’s impossible to reconcile that sense of gentleness with the knowledge that more people were lynched here than anywhere else in the country, and lynch is a word that hides more than it shows. They were hacked to pieces, burned to death slowly, fingers and teeth sold as souvenirs to the mobs who drove for miles to witness and jeer. Mississippians’ beloved Jesus, mocked as he hung dying, did not suffer more. It’s hard to square with any definition of gentle I know.
Yet white folks are not the only ones drawn back and again to the place. “I am damned proud to be a Southerner,” says Charles Tucker. He’s a tall black man from a tiny Delta town who, when I met him, was working for the Winter Institute. Southern food is better, he told me; Southern people are warmer, whether black or white. “I’ve lived up north. You don’t realize how starved you are for human companionship until you come from the North to the South, where people will actually look you in the eye and speak to you. People who haven’t seen you for a while will hug you. They will ask after your family and actually mean it. The South has a ton of problems. Being human is not one of them.”
Whatever fears I’d had as I crossed the Tallahatchie River evaporated the first time I walked into the Winter Institute. The welcome I was given stopped just short of a hug as a group of strangers, black and white in equal proportion, stood up to greet me warmly. Founded in 1999 by Susan Glisson, the institute enjoys the name and the patronage of William Winter, the most progressive Mississippi governor since Reconstruction.
To outsiders familiar with only the Old South image of Mississippi, the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation could sound like an oxymoron, at best a cosmetic effort by wealthy businesspeople to polish the image of the state. But the founders were committed people … [and] it became an example of the other Mississippi, a small but energized minority in the state that … poked holes in the caricature of the state as home only to rednecks, racists and demagogues.3
When she wrote the above, Carol George was describing the Winter Institute’s first big victory, its key role in bringing the main killer of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner to trial. There were other successes: helping a Delta community honor the memory of Emmett Till, training Mississippi police chiefs to avoid racial profiling in the wake of Ferguson, smoothing discussions that led to the removal of the Confederate statues in New Orleans. Much of their work was done at the University of Mississippi, where the institute was housed until 2018. Given the university’s central role in past civil rights struggles, as well as its centrality in present Mississippi power relations, the institute’s efforts in Oxford had far more than academic significance.
The staff included people as different as Jackie Martin, a seventy-four-year-old black veteran of the civil rights struggle in McComb, Mississippi, and Jennifer Stollman, a fifty-year-old blond, blue-eyed Jewish historian from Detroit who views her work as a form of tikkun olam—the Hebrew idea of repairing the world. Most of their work consisted of talk.
“They say talk is cheap,” says Susan Glisson. “But only cheap talk is cheap. Honest, purposeful talk works.”
Susan is a white woman who speaks with a sweet, soft drawl, slings a baseball cap over her long brown ponytail, and tends to wear overalls that recall the early staff of SNCC—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—one of the leading civil rights organizations of the 1960s. In her impoverished family in Augusta, Georgia, nobody imagined getting a Ph.D. in history. But she grew up in “something people think does not exist, a progressive Baptist church,” and she remembers her pastor receiving death threats for inviting black children to the church Bible camp. She was finishing a dissertation on Ella Baker, the leading light of grassroots civil rights organizing, when she came to Mississippi and discovered the power of narrative. “We know all the facts we need to know about race, but facts alone do not heal. Narrative shows the myriad ways we are vulnerable.” The guiding principles she developed can make academics cringe: Be present and welcoming. We are not here to set someone else straight.
“I hated the language when I first saw it,” said Jennifer, whose own style is sharp, fast, and very funny. “But it turns out that the guidelines work.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing when I started,” Susan added. “I was making it up in the car.”
This is how she described the institute’s tasks:
… prosecutions against racist violence, public ceremonies that I term rituals of atonement, historical tours and markers that change the geography of memory, the creation and implementation of school curricula on human rights, healing work among previously segregated groups through community building to alter public narratives of communities known for racial violence, academic investigation and scholarship on patterns and legacies of abuse, and partnerships of advocacy and policy groups that seek new institutional reforms that undo the structures of oppression and replace them with equitable ones.4
None of those things can take place without the national conversation about race that has been so often called for and so rarely achieved. Talking about race makes everyone uneasy. If I mention race to an African American, am I reducing her to a category rather than meeting her as an individual? I certainly felt like a category during my first years in Berlin, watching Germans react to the news that I’m Jewish. Suddenly they felt an urge to mention the uncle who helped Jews emigrate just before the war, or to present me with an expensive book about Moses Mendelssohn. I’ve grown skeptical about the first claim, and I’m not all that interested in Moses Mendelssohn. At one formal dinner I was stuck between a couple who persisted in telling me how much they love Woody Allen, while I tried to turn the conversation to Mozart. I failed.
The centrality of race is so palpable in the South that it’s impossible to ignore in conversation, however unsteady. The Winter Institute developed procedures for making those conversations honest and productive, and watching those procedures in 2016 made me feel more hopeful than I’d felt in years. Eight of them, to be precise. Susan, Jennifer, and I reminisced about where we were the night Obama was elected. After reading his books in 2007, I’d become a volunteer when my friends were still calling me out of touch: only someone living in Europe could believe that an African American intellectual might be elected president. Sitting in a Mississippi diner and hearing about the little victories of the institute and its allies brought back the brightness of the early Obama campaign.
What keeps them going, said Susan, is something she learned from her mentor, SNCC veteran Chuck McDew. “Mississippi is the Broadway of the movement, and you don’t leave Broadway.” Put less theatrically, if you can change Mississippi communities, you can probably change anything. Is it redemptive to stand on ground zero, knowing you’re at the heart of America’s worst? “I still think Mississippi holds the key for healing the nation,” said Jesse Jackson. “There’s something magic about Mississippi.”5
Perhaps it isn’t just the challenge: perhaps you actually like places where you feel a little fear. Not too much, just a little. It took me years, after all, to stop feeling fear in Berlin. I cannot say my fear of Mississippi turned into a deep love, but it did become the deep fascination that’s a first step toward love. Everyone says it: you either get it or you don’t, but the state exudes a kind of gentle seduction even in its hardest, harshest spots.
People in Oxford are tired of hearing Faulkner’s quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But it’s true no matter how often it’s repeated, and nowhere more so than in Mississippi. The historian Howard Zinn’s remarks about the South make sense: it is “not the antithesis but the essence of American society which could therefore function as a mirror in which the nation can see its own blemishes magnified.”6 If the South is a mirror, Mississippi is a microscope.
After a short stay in 2016, I asked the Winter Institute if I could spend a sabbatical there the following year. I don’t think they really believed I’d return, any more than the friends back home who asked, “You’re going where? Now?” With a solid sweep of the South, Donald Trump had won the 2016 election. My apprehension returned, just a little, but my plans were already set. I had an office at the Winter Institute and a rented house, complete with front porch and rocking chairs from which to watch the townsfolk stroll between the university and the Square. If I wanted to study American Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, there seemed no better base than an institute whose web page called its vision “a world where people honestly engage in their history in order to live more truthfully in the present, where the inequities of the past no longer dictate the possibilities of the future.”
Jennifer Stollman was raised in a Jewish community in suburban Detroit. What made her a social justice activist? “Serendipity” is part of her answer. She was born on Martin Luther King’s birthday, in the year of his death. Her father and her aunt marched in Selma, two of the many Jews who believed that segregation was in conflict with Jewish tradition and decided to do something about it. When Jennifer describes her biography while she’s training a group, however, she brings up something else. “I was adopted out of the foster-care system when I was almost five, so I remember going from eating onion-skin soup, when there was nothing else, to a purple organza bedroom.” Being lifted out of the cycle of poverty into a life of privilege made her aware of the arbitrariness of social injustice at a very tender age. Racism was fierce and open at the University of Michigan in the ’80s, where she became politically active while studying American history, eventually earning a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Southern Jewish women.
“I had done Hebrew school, studied and taught the Talmud, lived and worked in Israel. It was enough already. I didn’t want to do a Ph.D. on Jewish history.” But she was fascinated by the diary of the Jewish wife of a Georgia plantation owner. “Farrakhan’s claim that Jews were the principal slaveholders is a lie. But Jews have to confront their history apart from these triumphalist narratives that say we treated our slaves well and we were all civil rights activists. We’ve got to tell the truth.” She began to read letters of Jewish women who lived in the nineteenth-century South, appalled by what she found. “Women never beat their slaves, but they used the threat of sale.” When she spoke about her work at her hometown Jewish Community Center, she was roundly attacked by the audience, among them a number of Holocaust survivors. “I had this endless faith that my community was forthright and self-reflective. ‘Young lady,’ said an older man who started to roll up his sleeve to show his tattooed number, ‘do you know how dangerous this is, the story you’re telling?’ He accused me of sympathizing with Louis Farrakhan, who has blamed the Jewish community for racism. I said, ‘No, I’m trying to get you to see that we are part of this history; lying about it only expresses our anxieties. We are not fully Jewish in America if we’re not fully telling the truth.’ Only one woman in the room supported me. It was ten years of education in one night.”
Stollman went on to teach at several colleges across the country, including a short stint at the University of Mississippi. She thought she was settled at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, where she learned Navajo in order to work with the large Native American student community, while skiing the Durango slopes in the afternoon. In 2013 Susan Glisson asked her to become the Winter Institute’s academic director, promoting racial reconciliation at the university that was always a symbol of white supremacy. While knowing that her Northern Jewish background would make her an outsider in Mississippi, Stollman took up the challenge. After helping to develop the institute’s procedures for confronting racism, she was soon on call as an expert on moving through racial tension not only at the University of Mississippi but at campuses and communities across the South.
Jennifer became my Mississippi mentor. She was the first to take me to the Delta; I marveled at the way she pointed out crops that hadn’t yet sprouted, where all I could see were fields of dead sticks. She got us out of a carjacking attempt in Clarksdale while I was distracted and dazzled by an elegantly derelict blues club. She was crucial in explaining the way things worked, and didn’t, in Mississippi, translating the native tongue when necessary. Bless your heart sounds sweet, for example, but it’s closer to a curse than anything else. A hypothetical sign that read, for example, KWIK KAR KOMPANY, was less likely to be a reflection of local illiteracy, high as it is, than a barely coded pledge of allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan. (A road trip made to count how many deliberate misspellings of this kind dot the roads could last quite a while.) The magnolia is not just any old state flower; it was chosen as an emblem of pure whiteness.
And she helped me read the Confederate iconography tucked into the pretty university. The Johnny Reb statue towers over the entrance to campus and is graced with a heroic quote from Lord Byron. There was a recent victory, now marked only by absence. On the flagpole where a lone American flag flies, there had been a Mississippi one emblazoned with the Confederate emblem the state government refuses to change. An intense student campaign mentored by the Winter Institute led the university to take that flag down, though not without great dispute, national attention, and an appearance by the Ku Klux Klan. There is also, most controversially, a memorial statue to James Meredith.
Once a year during Black History Month, a group of African American students called Men of Excellence lead a tour around the campus in honor of Meredith. Roscoe, the guide I followed, had tied his long hair back into a ponytail, but like all his fellows, he wore a dark blue jacket and a yellow striped tie. The tour started at the Lyceum, where Meredith was taken for shelter when rioting students tried to attack him. “When I think of thirty thousand troops guarding one black kid, I feel honored by what he did for me,” said Roscoe. We proceeded to the spot where a French journalist and an American jukebox repairman were shot dead in the struggle. The press was there in force, for everyone said the Civil War had come again. The students, aided by Klan members who had come from across the South, were no longer just fighting to keep Meredith out; they were picking up the banner of the Confederacy against the hated North, which insisted on enforcing the federal laws that gave Meredith the right to study where he chose. Curtis Wilkie, who was a student at the time, recalled, “I thought the university might close. There was even the thought that Mississippi might try to secede from the Union again. That’s how intense the situation was.” To this day, most black Mississippians prefer to study at one of the historically black colleges rather than venture onto the University of Mississippi campus, despite its better funding and facilities. “Our uncles and aunts ask us why we choose to go to a school known for its racism,” said Roscoe. “Our answer is the same as James Meredith’s: we’re just exercising our constitutional right.” We were standing next to the flagpole; high over the bare treetops, the Stars and Stripes waved with the wind. “Later we had to battle to tear down the Mississippi flag. Look at its absence and feel your heart sing.”
The tour ends at the monument to Meredith, which was unveiled in 2006. It consists of a pillared marble arch on which four words are carved: COURAGE, OPPORTUNITY, PERSEVERANCE, and KNOWLEDGE. Before the archway, under the beam marked COURAGE, a bronze statue of the young James Meredith steps forward. It’s an accurate rendering of the short, handsome young man whose resolute face, flanked by U.S. marshals, is set against fear. Meredith swears he never felt it. But how could he avoid it when the troops sent personally by President Kennedy to protect him were being barraged by Molotov cocktails and gunfire? Meredith answered that question in his 2012 autobiography. “As a black male living in Mississippi in 1960 I was already a walking dead man … It takes no great courage for a dead man to want to live.”7
Roscoe asked the group to observe a moment of silence “for the sacrifice this man made for us.” We should ask ourselves, he continued, “Are we simply doing the norm, or doing things to inspire others, to uplift others as James Meredith would like us to do?” The silence was observed; the group—mostly black students, with a sprinkling of white and older people—looked solemn, reflective, and satisfied.
The gratitude expressed by the Men of Excellence was noble and moving, but the exposition at the statue left out complications in the story. First of all, the university may have changed enough in half a century to devote central space, and money, to memorialize the man who made it infamous, but not all members of the university are pleased with the change. To put it mildly. In 2014 two drunken frat boys hung a noose around the statue’s neck and draped the rest with a Confederate flag. They were expelled—national attention, outside pressure—but it was federal, not state law that prosecuted them for hate crimes, and the final sentence was extraordinary. One of the young men did serve six months in jail, but the other was given a year’s probation and ordered to write a five-page report on chapter 19 of Faulkner’s Light in August, which describes a lynching. It was a federal court in Oxford, after all. It’s hard to know how anyone could understand that chapter alone, without context, but the judge must have thought that requiring him to read an entire book would be cruel and unusual punishment.
The more fundamental fact about the statue was left out of the tour entirely. James Meredith hated it. By 2018 he had softened, but for years he urged that it be not only dismantled but “ground into dust.”8 Susan Glisson told me the story. “We wanted to commemorate the struggle for equal access in education in Mississippi in a way that reflected the movement itself, which was grassroots. There was no desire to deify a savior.” Susan and other progressive forces on the campus raised money, and recruited a national jury to judge the proposed design. The jury eventually selected the African American artist Terry Adkins, whose design involved two sets of doors inscribed with the words JUSTICE HENCEFORTH and EDUCATION FOREVERMORE.” Between them, hurricane-proof glass panes were engraved with words inspired by Meredith’s 1966 March on Fear: “Teach in fear no more. Insist in fear no more. Unite in fear no more.”
The chancellor refused to accept the design; he found the word fear “too negative.” Despite protest, the chancellor insisted on rejecting the original design, so a different committee settled on the statue of James Meredith. He has called it an idol, a graven image, a violation of the Second Commandment. He doesn’t like to see himself rendered as a “gentle, solitary supplicant,”9 and he is outraged that the monument includes a “butchered, out-of-context quotation from my 1966 book … expressing my love for the land of Mississippi but making no mention of my hatred of its ruling system of white supremacy.”10 The quote is a sop to local patriotism, meant to soften the hearts of those alumni who would object to any Meredith monument whatsoever—quite possibly because they were among the rioters fighting to keep him out. The carved plaque reads ALWAYS, WITHOUT FAIL, REGARDLESS OF THE NUMBER OF TIMES I ENTER MISSISSIPPI, IT CREATES IN ME FEELINGS THAT ARE FELT AT NO OTHER TIME … JOY … HOPE … LOVE. I HAVE ALWAYS FELT THAT MISSISSIPPI BELONGED TO ME AND ONE MUST LOVE WHAT IS HIS.
What bothered Meredith the most, said Susan, was the knowledge that he was used. The Meredith statue, like the naming of countless streets after Dr. Martin Luther King, has been used to claim that we have turned a corner to make racism a thing of the past. At the University of Mississippi, that claim was reinforced by the ceremony at which the statue was unveiled, where Congressman John R. Lewis and Morgan Freeman, among others, made triumphalist speeches. Meredith himself, although invited to the ceremony, was not invited to speak—“because of time constraints,” according to the university. He’s too volatile, say some. Unpredictable, say others. Nutty as a fruitcake comes up often too.
The university is not averse to inviting controversial speakers on occasion, especially when they’re outsiders with no plans to stay. On my first trip to Oxford I went to hear the black feminist writer Brittney Cooper speak to an audience of some hundred students and faculty, most of them white. She’s a good speaker, and I liked the fact that she could express rage at America’s systematic racism in that space, but I was disturbed by her answer to one white student’s question. “What should we do?” asked the girl. “There really could be a President Trump.” It was March 2016, and Trump was surging in the primaries. “Black folk have a long experience with crazy white racists,” Cooper answered. “We’ve learned to keep our heads down, raise our children, and get on with our lives.”
I waited till the students’ questions were finished before approaching the speaker, disturbed that she’d missed a teaching moment. “Shouldn’t we be telling students to get their asses moving and make sure everyone they know is registered to vote?” I asked, adding that as a writer who lives abroad, I’m painfully aware of how much the American presidency affects the whole world.
Cooper looked me up and down. “You keep saying we, but Trump is not my problem. He’s a white people’s problem. There’s no we between us.”
I swallowed hard before saying that I didn’t even know anyone who would consider voting for Trump, but I was worried about disaffected voters.
“Disaffected white voters is also a function of white privilege,” said Cooper.
I could have speculated about how different Congress would be if all the disaffected and disenfranchised black voters went to the polls, but I didn’t want to argue, and conversation was clearly impossible.
“There’s no space for a we yet,” said Jennifer, standing beside me as I fumed. “I have to believe it won’t be that way always.”
There were any number of we’s between me and Brittney Cooper. We are both women, writers, humanities professors, Americans. Perhaps she’s a mother too. We are certainly both human beings who could be blown to bits if an unstable commander in chief decides to play with the nuclear codes. Racial experiences divide us. But can’t we use other experiences to try to bridge that gap?
The Winter Institute’s signature program, the Welcome Table, proceeds on the assumption that we can. It brings together racially mixed groups of fifteen to twenty people, beginning with a weekend retreat. Thereafter they meet every month for a year and a half. Groups engage in a series of exercises designed to build trust between them, as individuals, before moving to confront more difficult questions about race. When was the first time you noticed that race is an issue? is a question that brings most everyone back to their childhood, however different black and white childhood experience will have been. Poetry is read about homes, about identities; participants are required to write and share their own. The group breaks into dyads and triads, then returns so that each can tell their partners’ stories, not their own. Learning to listen. Learning to hear. All that takes place to create a mosaic of we, opening minds and hearts to face the harder stuff.
Once trust is established, the group moves on to information. The difference between systemic and deliberate racism, for example, and the ways in which we are all damaged by both. The ways in which intention does not matter—anyway, not always. (“The opposite of good is good intention,” wrote the Berlin Jewish writer Kurt Tucholsky.) You may not mean to express a racist or sexist stereotype, but if you’ve grown up among them, you have to work to notice that they’re there.
The Winter Institute’s style made that work as pleasant as possible, insisting on the humanity of the perpetrator as well as the victim. “The limbic system is primed to distinguish between safety and danger, and takes in eleven million secondary cues every moment,” says Jennifer. “We can consciously categorize forty or fifty of them; our unconscious work is done for us.” Implicit bias is always operating. There’s a reason I tensed up, some time ago, when I saw a tall, casually dressed young black stranger rushing toward me on a New Haven sidewalk. How could I know he was running to ask if I was the one he’d seen on Tavis Smiley’s show? Though I succeeded in concealing it long enough to be gracious, my initial anxiety left me ashamed for years. “Learn to recognize it, not weaponize it,” says Jennifer. “That way you can navigate it, and it’s liberating.” What we’ve learned about neuroplasticity shows that even unconscious processes can be changed.
They cannot be changed until they’re acknowledged, and claims about being post-racial or color-blind do not help. As an African American woman in one of the groups put it, “If you say you don’t see color, it means you don’t see me.” A friend had told her he’d just realized she was black. “I always knew he was a white man. What does he mean he just realized?” I remembered the German man who long ago rushed to tell me he wouldn’t dream of noticing I was Jewish, as if the only decent thing to do with the unpleasant fact that I am Jewish is to overlook it altogether. This is what most white people do with race, and the implication is very clear: not being white is unpleasant, if only because it makes white folks uneasy, so the proper thing to do is ignore it entirely. “My job is to work with anxious white people,” says Jennifer. “People who are so worried about saying something wrong that they say nothing at all.” That lets racial resentment grow and fester, on all sides of the table. In some ways it’s more poisonous than outright racist action.
The process of building the trust needed to talk directly about racism, past and present; learning the mechanisms by which we imbibe and inherit it; as well as discovering how to intervene to confront it in ourselves as well as others—all that can be done in programs of varying length. The Winter Institute has led such programs for criminal justice workers, teachers, corporations, and the Mississippi police department. In the final third of the Welcome Table program, the group develops a project it will complete once the process is finished. The first project was bringing Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner’s killer to trial. It could be developing programs for civil rights education and commemorating community heroes; using a coastal oil spill to set a program for environmental justice in motion; even creating a communal garden in a Delta community that normally runs on chips and Twinkies. What’s important is that each community decides on a workable task that meets its own needs, using the trust built in the groups to foster the even deeper trust that evolves when people work together on something that concretely furthers the common good. I know. It sounds either utopian or banal, and quite possibly both. But in its first two decades, the Winter Institute’s programs served thousands of people, and I have seen it work myself.
I asked the staff member April Grayson what she did with the tension she must experience in the process.
“There’s the private me and the facilitator me,” she answered. “I might be outraged at something someone says, but I hold sacred their right to tell their story.” The faith in the power of narrative—the belief that every story needs to be told—is not the belief that every opinion is equally valuable. Nonetheless the Winter Institute has been criticized for being too soft, giving too much power to racist white people by honoring their narratives. “We try to emphasize that our way isn’t the only way, but our way is to uphold the sanctity of people’s stories. When you’re listened to, no matter what your identity is, you feel valued, and you’re more open to engage in conversations that get deeper and deeper.”
April is a small-boned, pretty white woman who was born in 1970 with four generations of Mississippi blood in her veins. “Their Confederate history was in the background, but it was never romanticized.” Her father’s family were considered oddballs; they were always reading poetry. “It took me years to do the math and realize where all the arrowheads came from. We found them while we were gardening. I had to acknowledge that this family land so dear to me belonged to Native Americans, and that one of the most infamous incidents in Mississippi civil rights history happened down the road.” The home of Vernon Dahmer, a well-respected man whose independent store allowed him to be more outspoken than many other African Americans, was firebombed by the KKK. Dahmer fired back at the attackers long enough for his wife and children to escape into the woods through the back door, but he died of smoke inhalation a few hours later. “Every time I feel ready to leave Mississippi, I think of his wife,” said April. “She’s been asked so often why she didn’t leave, and her answer is always the same: ’Cause I can’t change it if I leave.’ I figure if Ellie Dahmer can do it, I can do it.”
April grew up in a progressive-minded family in Rolling Fork, a small town in the Delta. Her father was a dedicated superintendent for the county public schools at a time when most white people sent their children to “seg academies,” private schools that were founded to avoid integration after it was clear that the federal government was serious about enforcing Brown v. Board of Education. In the little Methodist church that was the center of the social world in the community, many people thought her dad was the devil—simply for supporting good public education for white and black students alike.
Her family was never sure who they could trust. Did the nice lady at the corner grocery belong to the Klan? “People don’t understand how much fear there was,” said April. “I knew a family in McComb whose daughter was chosen to be Miss Mississippi. They were run out of the state after the father had the audacity to talk to a journalist about the need for integration.” April considers herself fortunate; although she and her brother were among a handful of white students at the public school she attended, she had many African American teachers who had been involved in the civil rights movement, and she came out knowing more about civil rights history than most current graduates.
Like most reflective Mississippians, April left the state for years, working and studying documentary filmmaking in Seattle. “I loved Seattle, but it was so white,” she said, incredulity still breaking through her words today. She returned to work at the Winter Institute, partly as an oral historian, filming many of the institute’s events and subjects, later taking charge of the Welcome Table program. April is so gentle that even her outrage comes out in a sweet-tempered fashion, but when it comes, it’s unmistakable. She is especially furious at the state’s continued attempts to undermine integrated public education. “Once it was seg academies, now it’s charter schools. It’s still about race here, and there’s an orchestrated attempt to sabotage public funding for education.” None of her anger is visible at the meetings she runs with patience and skill.
The group I’d just witnessed had been discussing the Mississippi state flag. Most of the black participants said they didn’t care much; questions of poverty and education were more important than symbols. It was the white participants who insisted that the Confederate symbol is parallel to a swastika. The black participants said it was different, but they didn’t say why. One older African American administrator pointed to his gut. “It tears me up inside every time I see it,” he said, “but I don’t show that to others.”
The discussion ended without resolution, and I don’t know if the group ever achieved consensus. “This is not all happy touchy-feely stuff,” said April. “It can get very intense. In New Orleans there was one man who was really malicious, out to prove that our process was ridiculous. Another one showed up wearing a hunting knife just to intimidate us, but we don’t play to the drama. He could have snapped, but he just fizzled out.” Despite detractors, so many communities ask the Winter Institute to set up programs that the small staff has to turn down many requests.
Recently, April started a Welcome Table together with a Catholic priest in Vardaman, Mississippi. The sign at the town’s entrance reads
A LITTLE PIECE OF HEAVEN
WELCOME TO VARDAMAN
SWEET POTATO CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
Who picks all those potatoes? Central American immigrants, most of whom came in legally many years ago and overstayed their visas. They don’t talk about Confederate insignia, but about less symbolic problems: separated families, abusive employers, children threatening suicide, people no longer going to church for fear of being picked up by ICE. April guided the group as good-naturedly as always. Only when we left did she say, heatedly, that she wished she were an immigration lawyer.
On the drive back to Oxford, I switched on American Family Radio, which was holding a discussion about whether Jesus supports restrictions on immigration. Of course he does, said the speaker, and he supports a border wall too. How do we know? Revelation tells us about the heavenly gates, and if there are gates to the heavenly city, it stands to reason there’s a wall. He also says you must wash your robe in the blood of the lamb in order to enter. That means you have to assimilate.
The date was February 8, 2017, should you care to check the source. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
“What keeps you going?” I asked Jennifer.
“Dark humor is helpful.”
“Boredom is never a problem?”
“It’s never the same thing twice.”
“There’s fear and depression, but not boredom,” said Susan Glisson.
“I’ve never seen you get angry,” Jennifer said to her. “Even when they were beating the shit out of us in New Orleans.”
“I’ve only screamed at two people,” said Susan. I won’t repeat the names. “When he said he was supposed to be the fourth person in the car—and he’s just a jackass. He started screaming at me, so I gave it to him. I wish I had a dollar for every person who said they were supposed to be the fourth person in the car.”
The car in question held the murdered heroes Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. The claim reminded me of ones I sometimes hear in Germany: my grandfather was a secret resistance hero. Like any other significant movement, the civil rights movement created longing, exaggeration, and outright lies. When the shouting is all over, who doesn’t wish they’d been a hero?
Jackie Martin, another Winter Institute staffer, was a real civil rights hero at the age of fifteen. She was born in 1946 in McComb, one of the most violent spaces in Mississippi, but she prefers to talk about the warmth of the self-contained black community in which she was raised. Though her mother had only an eighth-grade education and her father had less, they made sure that life would be different for their ten children. The segregated library was closed to black people, so the community bought and shared what books they could. Jackie cannot remember knowing any white people as a child, for she was allowed to cross the tracks that separated the communities only when accompanied by her mother. “Emmett Till’s lynching was pivotal, and our parents used it as a teaching moment. ‘This is why we are so strict. We need to protect you from the white community.’” Still, she says her parents didn’t raise their children to be fearful, just cautious. Nor were they raised to hate anybody. They just didn’t understand why the white community had so many rights and they so few. Black veterans returning from World War II had changed the temperature of the South. Lauded as liberators in Europe, they returned to a place where they had very little liberty themselves. “If I was man enough to fight the war, I’m man enough for everything else,” said Jackie’s uncle. Like many other black veterans, he left the South, embittered, in the ’50s.
“In the summer of ’61 Bob Moses came to town.” The legendary civil rights activist asked McComb’s young people to work with him canvassing for voter registration. “Kids are courageous; that’s why they make change. We didn’t think about the danger,” Jackie recalled. SNCC set up a school to teach people how to interpret the Constitution, one test African Americans had to pass in order to register to vote. It was the year of McComb’s first sit-in. Following successful sit-ins in North Carolina, sixteen-year-old Brenda Travis tried to desegregate the local bus station by ordering a hamburger. She was given a one-year sentence for trespassing. Released early, she was expelled from the local high school. Jackie, her older brother, and 112 other students staged a walkout in protest, marching down to city hall and drawing a crowd of onlookers shocked to see so many black students walking.
Already trained in nonviolent protest tactics, the students were orderly. They sang, and when told to stop before city hall, they knelt and prayed. Bob Moses and Chuck McDew—“the guys, we called them”—did their best to keep the students safe, but they couldn’t protect the white SNCC worker Bob Zellner from being beaten senseless by the mob or the students from being arrested. “One jailer was nice, and brought us water. I wish I could remember his name. One girl started crying because it meant her mother would lose her job. But we were going on adrenaline and the good feeling that we could change the world.”
Most of the students were under eighteen, so they were released the same evening. When they returned to school the next day, the principal demanded that they sign a promise never to engage in civil disobedience again. They refused, and their parents stood behind them. They knew the community could stand together, and they weren’t going to let the school take away one more right from a black child. Besides, they were proud. “Maybe they hadn’t stood up themselves, but they raised kids who could.”
All 114 were expelled and barred from the Mississippi public school system. They couldn’t have known what a blessing that was: they were taught by Bob Moses, who already had an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard, Chuck McDew, and others in Mississippi’s first Freedom School. Later, private religious schools offered to take them. The Tennessee civil rights hero Diane Nash took Jackie to Atlanta, and then to New York, to tell the story of the high school students who’d stood up to terror.
Jackie too left the state for a time, but she returned to her hometown, where she worked in local government administration for nearly thirty years. After she retired, she began to work part-time for the Winter Institute, where she often leads Welcome Tables with April. “We have an opportunity to show what race relations can be like,” she says. “Mississippi is one of the best-kept secrets out there.” Jackie doesn’t believe the country will get rid of every racial problem, but she believes it can get better; she has seen it happen. At seventy-four, she still has the zeal to continue to work for it. Her highest hope for Mississippi is that it could be a model for America.
I asked her why so many white Southerners hate President Obama. Her answer was swift; she had no need to speculate. “I’ve had two white men tell me they’re afraid he’ll take revenge for all the things whites did to black people.”
“But he hasn’t! And his mother was white besides!”
“They’re still afraid.”
“I suppose it is a wonder that more black people haven’t sought revenge.”
“We’re better than that,” said Jackie.
When I returned to Mississippi in 2017, Donald Trump had just been inaugurated. No one was echoing Brittney Cooper; the new president was everyone’s problem, and people from all walks of life were engaged in doing something about it. There were not enough of them, but the diversity of engagement was both comforting and uplifting.
By early February, the Haitian American law professor Michèle Alexandre had organized a gathering of local activists who met in a cupcake shop to discuss first steps. “Pushback is only to be expected,” she said. “I know this, though my heart is not yet healed. But we now know there’s a plan to create chaos in all the major agencies: justice, environment, education. The first thing Trump did was to fire people so he could replace them with foxes guarding henhouses. Litigation comes later, and they want to drive us out of our minds trying to protect the vulnerable.”
“We have to keep reminding ourselves that the majority didn’t want this,” said Daniel, a white volunteer.
“People assume that the loudest group is the majority,” said the Winter Institute’s Charles Tucker. “We have to repeat the same message we’ve been saying, but louder.”
“We’re not demonizing anyone who voted for Trump,” said Susan Glisson.
The Winter Institute operates as a nonpartisan organization, believing that civil rights are human rights, independent of party lines. I understand the impulse: they want to open the circle as wide as they can. There are political conservatives who hold all people to be equally deserving of justice; there’s no principled reason they can’t be opposed to racism, sexism, and homophobia. But historically, it turns out that conservativism and tribalism usually go together, and not only in America. It’s not a necessary connection, but it’s nevertheless very real. Yet I understand why the group wanted to emphasize moral rather than political language, even if it did initially result in the unwieldy name A Group of Concerned Citizens Against Fear and the Erosion of American Principles.
Not three weeks later, the concerned citizens could no longer fit into a cupcake shop. The town hall meeting was held in Oxford’s largest theater. A pretty blond woman representing Moms Demand Action explained how to call legislators to push for new gun laws. A Southern Poverty Law Center attorney explained how their organization sued and bankrupted the Klan in the ’70s and how they were now tracking the new hate groups that sprang up after Trump’s election. Two students asked for support for the labor drive they were organizing to form a union at Nissan, the largest factory in the state, which had moved to Mississippi to profit from cheap, nonunion labor in the poor and jobless Delta. A gray-haired former journalist vowed to organize other retired women to chase down their representatives who were avoiding constituents’ demands to protect Obama’s health-care reform. All these and other community efforts are ongoing. Like other groups that blossomed after the election, they focus on local action they hope will have national repercussions. It is too soon to tell, but as I followed many such meetings, I was buoyed beyond anything I’d expected. Had I spent the first half year watching Trump’s presidency from New York or Berlin, I might have despaired. Instead I was watching from what is, officially, the least educated state in the Union, and I joined the local chorus: if there’s hope for Mississippi, there is hope for anywhere else.
By the beginning of March, an organization called Mississippi Votes was preparing for the 2018 midterm election. As the SNCC heroes had understood fifty years earlier, it was clear the only way to uphold civil rights was to elect congresspeople who care about them. Mississippi Votes was organizing volunteers to knock on every door in the state. Since Mississippi is too poor to invest in data management, no one knew who wasn’t voting and why.
“It’s like your grandfather who refuses to get an iPhone,” said Ella, a young black woman who had worked for the Obama campaign in Iowa. As the first state in the country to vote in the national elections, Iowa has experience collecting vast amounts of data. In a training session for volunteers, Ella explained the eighteen crimes that lead to disenfranchisement in Mississippi. Some of them are strangely anachronistic, like timber theft. But many ex-convicts who committed other crimes don’t know they are eligible to vote, even while serving their sentences. The door-to-door canvassing is intended to educate those who might think they don’t have the right to vote, and to get them registered.
“It hasn’t been done on this scale since Freedom Summer,” said John, a tall young white man who was working with Ella. Organized by SNCC, Freedom Summer drew nearly a thousand Northern white students to help black Mississippians register to vote.
Voter registration is one of the causes Adam Flaherty took up. His first engagement in traditional forms of political action ended in failure: the proposed state constitutional amendment to adequately fund public schools did not gain enough votes to pass. Adam described that as heartbreaking, but it hasn’t dented his sense of duty to improve Mississippi rather than become part of the brain drain the state bemoans but does little to stop.
I first met Adam after giving a talk about the differences between German and American ways of working-off-the-past. The blond, mild-looking young man raised his hand tentatively to ask, “Do you think the difference is due to the difference between Habermas’s discourse ethics and Rawls’s notion of reflective equilibrium?” I don’t, actually, but it was hardly the question I expected to hear from a junior studying at the University of Mississippi. I got to know this young man, who appeared more extraordinary with every meeting, quite well. He’s the first in his family to attend university; his father, an occasional construction worker, has cussed him out for becoming a “college-educated prick.” He escaped the troubles in his difficult family by immersing himself in literature and theater, eventually winning a Rhodes scholarship to study philosophy, politics, and economics at the original Oxford. Adam turned down the award when his ailing mother had a heart attack. Living at his grandparents’ home just outside Oxford, Mississippi, he manages to keep faith both with his growing moral and political principles and with the family who rejects all of them. His father, Adam told me, finds Jefferson Davis to be a better American than Abraham Lincoln; his relatives all voted for Trump. Adam thought his way out of their worldviews years ago.
“Empathy has a way of eating at you. It’s not enough to have a dialogue within the bounds of reasonable discourse. I will not sacrifice my autonomy for the sake of my father’s redemption. But it’s an area of my life where there’s an opportunity for me to do good. It’s entirely possible that the consequences will be nothing. But I think consequences aren’t all that matter, you know? With philosophers”—here he paused, looking thoughtful—“the South is a perfect test case for moral and political theory,” he said, hurrying off to register new voters. Adam is immensely concerned with the connections between reason and emotion, and whether it’s possible to raise people’s consciousness of injustice through rational argument. Surrounded most of his life by people who seem immune to it, it’s small wonder that he clings to philosophy like a swimmer gripping a raft in a storm. Upon graduating, however, he chose not to pursue it professionally, but opted to teach mathematics in the Delta with the Teach for America program.
Buka Okoye stood out in the seminar on philosophy and social justice that Jennifer and I taught together. Tall, dark, and handsome, Buka is the son of Nigerian immigrants who live in Jackson. He was a senior majoring in public policy, but he knew a lot of philosophy, and his comments in the seminar were always measured, forceful, and completely serious. When he had something to say, everyone else stopped talking. Still, I didn’t fully appreciate him until we spent two hours talking philosophy during a Memphis march commemorating Martin Luther King’s assassination. Slipping toward the back of the line so we could hear each other over the resplendent marching band, we went through Kant’s idea of autonomy, Rousseau’s notion of democracy, and were starting on the question of whether Heidegger can be deconstructed when we reached the Lorraine Motel.
As president of the campus chapter of the NAACP, Buka led the university in reconsidering its Confederate symbols. The Charleston massacre set a wave in motion that prompted many universities to examine the remnants of white supremacy still glorified on their campuses. The University of Mississippi was no different. It took four months, and considerable student pressure, to remove the state flag from its entrance. “My school is finally taking a stance,” said the student organizer Dominique Scott. “Which side of the war do you choose to be on?”
If it took the university 150 years to conclude it was not on the side of the Confederacy, well, better late than never. There remained the question of what should be done with its twenty-seven Civil War–related historical sites. To no one’s surprise, the university appointed a committee that originally consisted of four retired white men. “Any wonder why their version of history came out so poorly?” said Buka. He led the student protest, supported by many faculty, that succeeded in enlarging the committee on contextualization to include people of color, whose first focus was the giant Johnny Reb statue at the university entrance. The first committee had proposed a plaque that made no mention of slavery, a position that implicitly endorses the common Southern view that slavery was not the cause of the war at all. Instead, it promoted itself with the words “The university admitted its first African-American student, James Meredith, in October 1962 and has worked since to promote inclusiveness in all its endeavors.”
With the exception of a building named for Mississippi’s most racist governor, James Vardaman, who openly advocated lynching as a means to suppress black voting, the committee was not in favor of renaming buildings or removing statues and signs. Rather, it supported contextualization, a process that simultaneously preserves offensive material by embedding it in historical context and distances the institution from assenting to it. I’d seen plenty of instances of the process in Berlin; the Academy of Science’s decision to erect a plaque explaining that the swastika mosaic on the floor predated the Nazis was only one of them. So I was especially curious to hear it discussed at the town meeting called by the university after the committee had completed another version of its report.
The little Belfry church, oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the county, was packed full that evening. The meeting was chaired by Don Cole, who began his career at the University of Mississippi as one of the black students expelled from it for demonstrating for more black faculty, and athletes, in 1969. Now he’s a professor of mathematics and assistant to the chancellor for multicultural affairs. Cole opened the meeting by noting that the University of Mississippi is further along in the contextualization process than Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. Before submitting its final report to the chancellor, the committee—now in subcommittees, including a subcommittee that reviews the work of other subcommittees—wanted to call this meeting to ensure that the process was transparent and the community had input.
The parts of the community that showed up that evening were almost exclusively white, and very happy to offer input. One white man after another stood up in that black church and described himself as a proud university alumnus, naming the date of his graduation. For good measure, one alumnus added the graduation dates of his brothers and brothers-in-law. Their positions would be familiar to anyone who has followed recent American debates. You cannot rewrite the past, you should not dig up old bones, what may be distasteful to us was just fine back then. Let things be, don’t DESTROY Ole Miss TRADITIONS, things have already gone too far. For the sake of God, the state, and the university, do not take one step more! One man came armed with a poster on which he had written tables and numbers. “I’m in economic development, and we know that sixty-five percent of all tourists seek travel experiences that retain their historical character. It’s a 192-billion-dollar industry.” He added that alumni donations could be affected by the proposed changes.
This ruckus was not raised, mind you, by a proposal to remove anything but the name of the lynching cheerleader James Vardaman. All that was up for discussion was the addition of a number of plaques.
Allen Coon, a tall, blond student who’d been active in the drive to take down the Confederate flag, questioned the distinction between Vardaman and other racists still honored with buildings in their names. “Vardaman talked the talk, but the others walked the walk. What’s the difference between praising lynching and owning black bodies?”
“We hear your question,” said Don Cole, looking uncomfortable. “We are still debating it.”
Chuck Ross, a black professor of African American history who was also a member of the committee, looked ready to burst. “This is not a modern interpretation. People of the time were very clear about what they were doing. I cannot do my job as a historian without noting that these people left letters. They left memoirs. They were proud of what they did.” One white alumnus rose to support him. He urged that what was at issue was not denying history, but expanding it. “Maybe when we have an Ida B. Wells Hall we could have a Vardaman Hall too.” Wells, the courageous writer who fought against lynching, was born in nearby Holly Springs.
After several hours Cole concluded the town meeting by quoting Socrates: an unexamined life is not worth living. “This is what we do in academia,” said Cole. “By putting everything on the table and examining it, we think the truth will come out. The committee members have devoted their lives to this university. They don’t want to destroy it, only improve it.” Cole walks a very narrow line every day.
In an article for The Atlantic, the historian Timothy Ryback compared the work of the committee on contextualization to recent events at the original Oxford University. Students who protested the statue honoring Cecil Rhodes were told they could love it or leave Oxford—in polite Oxbridge tones, of course. Ryback argued that the original Oxford could learn something from its namesake.11 It’s no surprise that the committee for contextualization posted the article on its website, but those behind the scenes in Mississippi were not so sure. A few days after the town meeting, I interviewed Chuck Ross. Did he think the whole effort was a matter of window dressing? Did the university want real change?
“That’s a very complex kind of a question,” said Ross. He paused, shaking his head slowly, deciding where to begin. “From the time that James Meredith got the opportunity to come here in 1962, many have argued that we as a university have been stripping ourselves of our Southern identity. They won’t go so far as to say we lost something beginning with integration, but this institution has just been the standard for Southern pride. It’s been a very effective and vital way of keeping classes of whites from challenging each other.”
Ross is skeptical that real change will occur in his lifetime. There are people who want to move the university forward—if only to “make sure that people like yourself, the public media who come to scrutinize, can see signs of progress.” On the other side are the alumni who identify with Ole Miss, the university as it used to be. “If you want them to donate money to support buildings like the one we’re sitting in now, then they want to feel comfortable.” After the town meeting, he’d spoken to one of the alumni who was opposed to changing anything, including the name of Vardaman Hall. The man’s relation to the university was entirely nostalgic; he wanted things to be left as they were in his undergraduate days. Ross responded by suggesting that the university go back to having an all-white football team, which would mean “you would never have any chance of beating Alabama or the others, because the game has changed and African American athletes are doing all the heavy lifting.” In Mississippi and Alabama, only God is more exalted than football; the alumnus was so appalled at the suggestion, he did not understand it. Nor did he understand Ross’s point, which was that if you want black athletes to win the games for you, you shouldn’t force them to parade around Confederate symbols.
“The university is so saturated with those symbols that many African Americans on campus just give up. Your grandmother, your aunt, your father, everybody’s told you: you can’t change white folk, it’s their school.”
For Chuck Ross, that attitude is not an option. He’s at the university for the long haul, teaching history to black students and white ones. With his work on the contextualization committee, he tries to create, at the least, sensitivity to the problems those symbols invoke, even if he’s doubtful about the possibility of deep change. Mississippi’s governor declared April to be Confederate Heritage Month, a clear reaction to the fact that the federal government has declared February to be Black History Month.
I have always been wary of Black History Months and women’s studies departments, believing they confine their subjects to reconstructed ghettos. Of interest to black people. Good work for a woman. Those are the unspoken but absolute assumptions such programs unintentionally reinforce. I want to live in a world where everyone who studies American history reads Frederick Douglass and everyone who studies English reads George Eliot—just to stay with the nineteenth century. If they are cloistered, another generation will grow up thinking they can learn American history without Douglass, English literature without Eliot. Intellectual segregation is no better than any other kind.
But I know the other side of the argument. Chuck Ross teaches African American history because the texts and the problems he wants to teach don’t get the hearing they deserve in standard history departments. He can get discouraged because he believes that most white Mississippians he meets are still fully committed to the Confederate mentality that has dominated the Southern political world since Reagan was elected in 1980. Going to vote in 2016, he was struck by the huge number of white male voters. “They were looking at each other and connecting informally. I saw very few black males, I saw more black females, and I knew that if this is representative of America, it’s not going to work. When you see that the most unqualified candidate ever won the election, it is a total backlash to Barack Obama.”
I thoroughly agreed, but the young people I kept meeting in Mississippi made me more hopeful. It wasn’t only Adam and Buka. Though I knew they were in a minority, I kept finding others who were outstandingly bright and outstandingly committed, thirsting for justice, hungry for change.
“I don’t think you’ve had much of an opportunity to interact with the large number of people in fraternities and sororities,” said Ross.
He was right. I tended to avoid the Square on Friday and Saturday nights when they come out. The boys flaunted expensive cars, the girls flaunted skintight designer dresses, and long before the stars began to twinkle, they all began to weave. Greek life, as they call it, is probably the most central part of their college experience, as it is in many state universities, North and South. Students who came to me have already chosen to be outsiders.
I asked Ross a final question. “What do you think the differences would be if you’d wound up teaching African American history in Ohio?”
“Oh, it wouldn’t be as exciting. Here history is a living, breathing thing. It’s not just something in the books you write and have students discuss. You have an opportunity to live it.”
A year after our conversation, the committee had made its final recommendation, and the chancellor opened the ceremony at which the disputed plaque was unveiled. Rita Schwerner Bender, Michael Schwerner’s widow, had suggested a simple solution for the Johnny Reb statue: just add the Mississippi articles of secession, which make plain that slavery was the heart of the Confederate cause. But Rita wasn’t on the committee, which eventually came up with this:
As Confederate veterans were dying in increasing numbers, memorial associations across the South built monuments in their memory. These monuments were often used to promote an ideology known as the “Lost Cause,” which claimed that the Confederacy had been established to defend states’ rights and that slavery was not the principal cause of the Civil War. Residents of Oxford and Lafayette County dedicated this statue, approved by the university, in 1906. Although the monument was created to honor the sacrifice of local Confederate soldiers, it must also remind us that the defeat of the Confederacy actually meant freedom for millions of people. On the evening of September 30, 1962, this statue was a rallying point for opponents of integration.
This historic statue is a reminder of the university’s divisive past. Today, the University of Mississippi draws from that past a continuing commitment to open its hallowed halls to all who seek truth, knowledge, and wisdom.
“I’m a trained historian,” said Jennifer Stollman, who had been a member of the committee, “and I’m bored by looking at it.” That’s an outcome that might technically satisfy both sides. Spend months coming up with a statement that’s historically accurate and put it in language so dull it’s more likely to put people to sleep than to rile them up. It’s not surprising that the solution was put together in an academic institution.
In 2019, student groups voted to remove Johnny Reb altogether. Whether the state will allow them to do so remains to be seen.
Local citizens in Oxford often oppose, more or less politely, the efforts made by progressive forces within the university to enlighten them. The love of local citizens for their idea of the university only redoubles their efforts to silence it. When the Winter Institute offered to conduct a Welcome Table for teachers of the local school district, some of the town turned out to oppose them. They were led by one Lee Habeeb, who works for right-wing radio star Laura Ingraham.
Habeeb had had his eye on the Winter Institute for some time, and on hearing of the planned workshop at his daughter’s school, he went online. Three Winter Institute staff members had private Facebook accounts upon which they’d posted their immediate reactions to the 2016 election. Those reactions were typical for millions on each of the coasts, and indeed throughout the world. (Die Zeit and Der Spiegel are Germany’s most respected weeklies. Days after the election, Der Spiegel’s cover depicted Trump as a malevolent comet aimed straight at the Earth. Die Zeit opted for a weeping Statue of Liberty and the words “Oh My God” in English.) In Mississippi, however, the vast majority of white voters supported Trump, and the comments of the Winter Institute staffers were unacceptable. Jennifer Stollman wrote about angry rural white voters and about taking a moment to weep and rest before getting up to continue the fight for equity. Jake McGraw retweeted Marine Le Pen and said the fascists of the world are uniting. Melody Frierson posted a notice offering a teach-in on resistance for Inauguration Day. All these were photographed, photocopied, and distributed by Habeeb under the heading “Should intolerant activists teach tolerance in our schools?”
Habeeb demanded a discussion at the town school board meeting, which was held in the Oxford Middle School auditorium. Like so many institutional spaces, this one was lit by ghastly, ghostly overhead bulbs. Apart from a large American flag and a small sign reading IN GOD WE TRUST, the only decoration that relieved the gray gloom was a small collage on the blackboard featuring a yellow star with the word Jude, decorated with tinfoil and string. Clearly the students had been learning about racism—far away, and in another country. The room was packed to overflowing, and the school board members were trying to keep order. They had imposed a limit of ten minutes on every speaker, which Habeeb challenged by demanding to add his wife’s minutes to his own.
“We’d like to hear your wife speak for herself,” said the school board chair, seeping Southern charm.
Several people stood to speak in defense of the proposal, and the Winter Institute. An Italian American who’d participated in a Welcome Table called it one of the most noble and uplifting experiences of his life. Speaking for the institute, April Grayson said they’d worked hard to find a model that enables people to discuss difficult questions. Her voice was shaking slightly as she told the packed hall that she welcomed this kind of dialogue.
Those who were angry refused to be calmed:
The Facebook posts prove they are a bunch of liberal extremists, however kumbaya their website appears to be.
Not one of those staff members is conservative, and they talk about tolerance. I don’t want anyone teaching my daughter about race.
Nothing wrong with their plan, it’s the people who teach it. Do you want Che Guevara or Stalin teaching your kids? One of the staff has a Che Guevara T-shirt on his Facebook page—the butcher of Cuba, they called him.
What the hell are microaggressions: fifty things my kid won’t be able to talk about because of political correctness?
I’m a Christian, not just on Sunday, and these people come from the outside!12
It was instructive to hear claims that, with minor variations, were made sixty years earlier in opposition to integration. Anyone actively opposed to racism is an outside agitator disrupting a peaceful way of life, and an un-Christian communist to boot. The atmosphere in the room was so tense that I was surprised when the school board voted, 6–0, to allow the Winter Institute to offer seminars for those teachers who chose to participate.
When the chairwoman announced the decision, her ambivalence was unmistakable. In honey-sweet tones she said, “What Mr. Habeeb said about Facebook posts by certain individuals is concerning to me, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. But the Winter Institute staff are all professionals, so they won’t bring their personal views into the training. I talked to the Mississippi police chiefs who worked with Dr. Stollman, and they said they’d recommend her in a heartbeat.” And with some general remarks about what’s beneficial for our children, she closed the meeting. The victory felt Pyrrhic. True, my friends at the Winter Institute would be allowed to bring their program to the Oxford public schools. But how many of the assembled voices would continue, politely or not, to undermine it?
“You’re doing the Lord’s work,” said Curtis Wilkie. We were seated at Square Books waiting for Richard Ford to begin a reading. I’d been introduced to Wilkie as a visiting scholar at the Winter Institute.
“They’re doing the Lord’s work,” I responded quickly. “I’m just writing about it.”
Curtis Wilkie’s ties to Oxford go way, way back. Not only did he study here in the fateful year of ’62; his great-grandfather, a Confederate soldier, was also a proud graduate of Ole Miss. Curtis was born in 1940, and his book Dixie described how, thanks to encounters with the black civil rights leader Aaron Henry, he went from being an ordinary Mississippian to a fierce critic of its racist policies. Curtis became a reporter who covered Martin Luther King in the Delta, Jimmy Carter in the White House, and any number of Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine. He returned to Oxford in 2002 as progressive policies were gaining traction in the South. He now teaches journalism and Southern history at the university, when he isn’t working or sipping sweet tea in his exquisitely flowering garden. The Sunday afternoon I met him there, he was distressed by his home state.
“When I wrote Dixie nearly twenty years ago, I was very optimistic about where we were going, particularly racially. That’s when I decided to come back home.” Now, he says, Mississippi is regressing. Reliving battles that were fought in the ’60s. White people “have an appalling record of voting against their interests because to do otherwise would help the blacks.”
“You really think it’s that simple?”
“In Mississippi, in the end, everything goes back to race.”
For Curtis Wilkie, Lee Habeeb is a symbol of a national rightward turn. Though Curtis hadn’t been to the school board meeting, he’d heard plenty about it. As a Southerner who never lost his drawl or his ability to defend the South against Northern condescension, and still had a place on the national stage, he counts as Oxford aristocracy: someone whose left-leaning views will be forgiven because he comes with pedigrees that make most things forgivable. He’d followed Habeeb since he first surfaced a few years earlier in discussions over the university’s treatment of Confederate symbols. Curtis believed he was part of a shadowy group that receives money from the Koch brothers.
“Habeeb is smart enough not to embarrass himself publically,” he said. But as a student, Curtis had known groups that went much further. “They were known as the Rebel Underground, and they would slide racist tracts under your dorm room door. Before Meredith. After Meredith. We had two chancellors in a row who stood up to those bastards.” Chancellors Robert Khayat and Dan Jones were respected by most faculty and many students. Although Khayat’s liberal views were hardly welcomed by the Institutions of Higher Learning—the governor-appointed body that oversees state universities—he raised too much money to be disposable. The IHL did fire his successor, Dan Jones, because they found his positions on Confederate symbols “too liberal.” Curtis wanted to give the new chancellor, Jeffrey Vitter, a chance. “He’s not as activist as we’d like, but so far he hasn’t come down on the side of the demons.” It was tepid praise, but whoever the chancellor might be in the future, Curtis believed that the forward movement at the university was impossible to stop. When he started teaching in 2002, the black student body was 4 percent of the total; now it’s nearly 20 percent. There’s a resolute LGBT movement that would have been unimaginable before. And the Winter Institute is doing the Lord’s work—in Oxford, but also in the Delta, in Neshoba County, and elsewhere.
“I think we’re all beaten down.” Curtis sighed. “In part because of Trump, but also the governor, the legislature, the general mood in Mississippi. Things are not getting better here, but they are on the Ole Miss campus.”
I asked him what he’d do if he were the governor of his beloved state. The thought experiment wasn’t crazy; he had once been a governor’s son-in-law. His answer was immediate: he would focus on improving education at every level. The current government, he said, is determined to do whatever it can to undermine it. He believes that the movement that supports charter schools as alternatives to public education is part of a very effective right-wing conspiracy.
Sooner or later, every Mississippian I met—black or white, progressive or conservative—raised the question of education. By most measures, the state of education in Mississippi is the worst in the nation. James Meredith says that education has always been the most important subject of his life. His autobiography concludes with a Challenge for America: “I challenge every American citizen to commit right now to help children in the public schools in their community, especially those with disadvantaged students” before listing a host of practical suggestions. Everyone, he argues, whether they have children or not, has a stake in the quality of public education.
I have always believed in what Jean Améry called the central truth of the much-maligned Enlightenment: “knowledge leads to recognition, and recognition to morality.” Améry did not come by that belief lightly. After spending two years in Auschwitz, the Austrian philosopher wrote the most searing account of the Holocaust I ever read. There are more gruesome descriptions, but Améry’s analysis of what Auschwitz did to the mind seems to leave reason damned. Yet he spent the rest of his life writing the twentieth century’s strongest defenses of the Enlightenment, which he saw as the only power against the irrationalism at the heart of fascism. Even further, he believed that the only hope for fulfilling the one truly human task—giving meaning to the meaningless—lies in “the benevolent optimism of the Enlightenment with its constant values of freedom, reason, justice, and truth.”13
Upholding that belief today is more than complex. It’s a matter of combating false consciousness, the ways in which ideologies and advertisements blind people to their real human interests through a combination of propaganda and distraction. And so often, those who write and pay for the propaganda believe it themselves. If all the people want is bread and circuses, what’s wrong with giving it to them? Claims like that are usually made by people whose own goals reach no higher than French pastry and box seats at the theater. You can’t really call them deceptive; flooding the airwaves with mind-numbing entertainment instead of culture that challenges is hardly at odds with their own way of life. The tastes may be different, but there are classy ways to numb your mind as well as vulgar ones. Why shouldn’t those who own the means of production peddle the same stupor to others?
But these are complicated ways of opposing the Enlightenment, and in Mississippi the opposition is a blunt force. I’d no idea that those who perceived educated African Americans as a threat were still explicit about it until a white waitress came up to the table in Jackson where I was eating dinner with Charles Tucker. They’d known each other for years. “See that table over there?” The waitress motioned, lowering her voice just a tad. “One of them just said, ‘If we let them get educated, they’d figure out how badly we were screwing them,’ and the others laughed.” I was shocked that anyone would be this open in a public restaurant, perhaps just as shocked that they would admit it to themselves at all. But then Mississippi is a place where the resistance to the Enlightenment is out in the open, making it anything but obsolete. No wonder the place never failed to move me.
There’s another ghost drifting through corners and conversations in Oxford, and he isn’t even dead. When people talk about the university, James Meredith is never very far away. I knew he lived in Jackson, and I wanted to meet him, but no one I knew was willing to introduce me. They’d all met him on one occasion or another, but said they didn’t know him well enough to ask. He didn’t come to Oxford often, he hated the statue, he’s hard to talk to anyway. Or so I was told. With less than a week to go before I returned to Berlin, I’d given up hope of interviewing him.
Instead I went to Hernando, just south of Memphis, to interview Robert Lee Long, editor of the local paper there. I’d met him at a town meeting in Oxford, where he spoke passionately about his project to exchange the current Mississippi flag for an earlier one that was designed in 1817. Yes, he allowed, it has a magnolia, and that has baggage too, but “you’re never going to get the good ole boys to give up their stars and bars without a shred of history. What the good ole boys rail against is this idea of political correctness.” Curious to know how a seventh-generation white Mississippian came to champion such a project, I went to the office of the DeSoto Times, whose weekly edition was about to go into production.
With all the allure of Southern hospitality, Robert apologized for the fact that he could only give me an hour before his staff began to chafe. He was glad to talk about his cause, which he sees as the only realistic way to remove the Confederate icon. “Robert E. Lee himself said, ‘Furl the flag, boys, take it down.’” Robert Lee Long is distantly related to Robert E. Lee’s family, but it’s not the only famous Southern family among his relations. He was not, he said, “necessarily” named for the commander in chief of the Confederate Army. His people were cabinetmakers on one side, cotton brokers on the other, and his great-great-grandfather, a member of the Dixie Boys of Company K, was captured in the Battle of Lookout Mountain and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Rock Island, Illinois. “He was there for over a year and weighed eighty-two pounds when he came out. I would have every right, if I wanted, to carry some kind of grudge, some kind of cross, had I not had an enlightened grandmother in Memphis.”
Lucy Wilkerson, Robert’s grandmother, used the family cotton money to go to university and thereafter to travel the world. “There’s nothing like getting out and seeing how other cultures live to really change your worldview,” Robert said. “She marched with Coretta Scott King, and she was a true Methodist minister’s wife, embracing the humanity of man.” Robert’s father, on the other hand, was very much of the Old South. Robert said he became a newspaperman in the cauldron of political confusion that marked his family; he wanted to investigate and find some truth.
He began his journalism career in high school, when the school paper sent him to interview both James Meredith and Ross Barnett for the twentieth anniversary of what was called the Meredith Crisis. The principal warned him that the governor, who was frail, should be treated with caution, but after flattering the old man, seventeen-year-old Robert asked Barnett some tougher questions. Had he changed his views in the past twenty years? “He was deaf, but his secretary leaned down to his ear and said, ‘He’s asking about James Meredith.’ It was like the old man had been struck by lightning. That was his legacy. With every ounce of fervor, and that chin just shaking and that turkey wattle just wattling, he said, ‘Young man, I have not changed my views one iota, and you can put that in your paper.’” The ex-governor had a heart attack a few hours later, but Robert took no responsibility. “He had faced far tougher journalists than a high school kid. I asked the question that had to be asked because in the early eighties people still looked upon him with reverence.”
Long wanted to continue to talk about Barnett, but I interrupted him. “What did James Meredith say at the interview?”
As it turned out, Robert Lee Long’s relationship with Meredith went far beyond that high school interview. Just the previous year, he and Meredith had taken a train trip across the country, speaking against racism at five colleges in the West. Robert worried about protecting the man whose life had been threatened so many times, but Meredith was disarming—even to a man who came to threaten him. “Perhaps because he’s a conservative himself, I don’t know. He’s just a free spirit. He doesn’t espouse any particular line.”
My head spun ever so slightly. I was leaving the country in four days, during which I’d already planned several meetings. I settled back in the tiny newsroom to listen to this paradigm of enlightened Mississippi, as he put it himself. Robert was arguing that it wasn’t just the blood and agony of the civil rights workers that changed Mississippi; Mississippi had to change itself. “Believe it or not, it was Nixon’s silent majority that had to have a soul-searching moment and say ‘You know what? Racism is wrong. I have been wrong. I’ve got to change.’ People like my own dad.”
Robert turned back to an earlier question. “You asked me if I believe in collective guilt. Yes, well, I kind of sort of do.” It was an interesting locution for an otherwise articulate man. “Because when you have the original sin of slavery in Mississippi, there has to be an atonement. I’m one of those sinners that will sip whiskey on a Friday afternoon, but I teach a Sunday school class.” With the right sort of atonement, Robert believes, Mississippi can shine. In the endearing local patriotism I had come to expect, he began a love song to his home. “We’ve always been told you’re from Mississippi, you’ll never amount to anything, yet we have a state of overachievers in the arts, in music, in literature. I love the fact that we have Leontyne Price, we have Morgan Freeman, we have Elvis Presley. I remember seeing Miz Eudora Welty writing in her window. I want my state to be the best. We engage each other in conversation, we tell these stories, we enjoy our spirits, we enjoy good gospel music whether we’re believers or not. I yearn for the day when we can truly embrace, as Lincoln said, the better angels of our nature.”
Atonement, he believes, begins with acknowledging history. “I’ve got a thirteen-year-old, and I’m trying to inculcate in her the importance of history. Not from some textbook standpoint or to win prizes—no, it’s so you won’t make the same mistakes your grandfather or your great-grandfather made. You’ll be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say I’m a good person and I’m contributing to the world I live in. I get passionate about it, and my daughter gets tired of me saying it, but it’s true.”
As a newspaperman, Robert follows international news more closely than most Americans. He ended by saying that he hoped Europe wouldn’t make the same mistake with its Muslim immigrants that America had made with its people of color. He stood up, apologetically; it was a Friday afternoon and the paper was in need of printing.
“I’m wondering if I might ask you a favor,” I said, rushing to get the question out before I faltered. “It sounds like you’re pretty close to James Meredith. I’ve been wanting to meet him since I arrived. Could you possibly put in a good word for me?”
“I’ll call Judy right now,” Robert answered. “His wife makes all his arrangements.”
Leaving his staff more anxious by the minute, Robert picked up the telephone. Judy Meredith didn’t answer, but he left a long message asking her to call the woman from Berlin who was writing about what Americans, among others, might learn from Germany’s responses to its racist past. In the time I had left, I was doubtful she would answer, but I thanked Robert profusely and happily agreed to take a selfie outside the newspaper office. He pointed to the road leaving town, where I could see the marker where Meredith had been shot. In 1966 Meredith had announced a March Against Fear, planning to walk some two hundred miles from Memphis to Jackson. His goal was to encourage black people to vote. A year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, most were too frightened to register. If they saw a black man walking alone through the state, surely it would lay their fears to rest.
Sixteen miles into the march, Meredith was pumped full of buckshot by a white man in the bushes by the road. The press initially reported his death, but a quick operation saved his life, though some of the buckshot remains in his body to this day. Martin Luther King Jr. flew to the hospital in Memphis and vowed to continue the march. King was joined by a host of other civil rights leaders, and the march swelled into the thousands. By the time they reached the state capital, six thousand new voters had been registered. Later reporters would see the March Against Fear as Meredith’s second blow against Mississippi despotism, which together with his integration of the university marked the end of Jim Crow everywhere in the South.14
I photographed the plaques that marked the spot as part of the Mississippi Freedom Trail and returned, rather glumly, to my car.
The gloom changed to elation the next morning when I got a call from Judy Meredith. Sure, I could visit. He’s at home all afternoon. Would I like to come today?
Jennifer offered to drive me to Jackson, and she was insistent all down the highway. “This is an honor. He is an icon, and you’re invited to his home. An icon, remember? Think about what you want to ask him, because we’ll only stay an hour. Any more would be rude.” Her well-meant admonitions left me more nervous by the minute. Two hours later, in the midst of a gushing rainstorm, we arrived at a house so modest we couldn’t believe it was the right one, and we circled the block checking numbers.
Inside, a few reproductions of African art graced the walls, and Fox News was running on a large television. James Meredith looked more impish than imposing in white khakis, a button-down shirt to match, and a baseball cap that said OLE MISS. Four of his grandchildren were seated stiffly around the dining table in the living room corner. Ranging in age from about ten to sixteen, each stood up to shake our hands, looking shyly at the floor before sitting down again.
“I told you,” Meredith said to them, “this lady’s going to tell you something about Germany. I’m going to shut my mouth,” he said, turning to me. “And maybe you can give me a summary of how Germany handled the problem you’re talking about.”
African Americans I met everywhere in the South were so fascinated to hear about Germany’s transformation that I was almost sick of talking about it, but this was James Meredith. I wasn’t prepared, but I had to oblige. I talked about how Germans after the war talked like Southern defenders of Lost Cause mythology: for twenty years they saw themselves as the war’s worst victims, refusing to admit any wrong. How their children had erupted in the ’60s, asking why they should respect the authority of people who committed one of the worst crimes in history. I talked about the way the working-off process had started from below, and how long it took the government to act. I talked about monuments, mentioning the stumbling stones that dot the sidewalks—
“Like the Hollywood stars?” asked Meredith.
“In a sense. Except they don’t have just a name, they have a date of birth and the date they were deported to a concentration camp.”
“Right on the sidewalk?”
“Yes, sir. The idea is that people should remember every day what was done to their neighbors and do what they can to make up for it.”
“Get out of here,” said Judy Meredith incredulously. She’s a handsome professor of mass communications who had once been to Berlin herself as a member of the Fulbright Commission. “I really enjoyed the beer. But that was a while ago.”
“They’ve been working on things like this on and off for fifty years. My interest is in figuring out how to translate that. Every place is different, but if they did it, why can’t we do something like that here?”
“I can tell you,” said James Meredith. “Because America never got their butt kicked. Besides, the problem is different. Black people built this country. They say cotton was like oil? It was bigger than oil. Cotton changed the way people dressed all over the world. I’m not trying to discourage you,” he continued. “I’m trying to encourage you. I still want to read your book. But you may have a problem. I promised God I wasn’t going to lie no more.”
“I hope not” was all I knew to say. “I know you’ve told the story of how you integrated the university many times. You’re wearing an Ole Miss hat. I want to ask what you think of the University of Mississippi today.”
“I was very upset the last time I was there, when I saw the statue of the Confederate soldier. Last time I was there, they had my name on it two times. Do you know what they had the audacity to do? Take my name off. I wasn’t shocked, I was stunned. I’ll never forgive Ole Miss for that.”
It was an odd kind of outrage, given the reason his name was taken off the plaque. Students and faculty had complained that the plaque as it stood was an attempt to absolve the university of everything that happened after 1962. After James Meredith integrated the university, it has worked since to promote inclusiveness in all its endeavors. It was a stance that failed to do justice to the violence and intensity that took place in Oxford at the time, much less the halting way the university continued to drag its feet on ending racism in the years thereafter. Meredith’s indignation over the absence of his name was even odder, given that he’d often called for the destruction of the statue he has called a graven image.
In his autobiography, he cheerfully admitted to charges that he has both a Messiah complex and a colossal ego. I thought he’d be pleased to hear about the James Meredith tour I’d taken with the Men of Excellence months earlier.
“You know what I like best?” said Meredith. “The coats and the ties.”
“You were wearing a coat and tie in all the pictures,” I said. Clearly they were trying to look like him, despite their long hair.
“I do have a question for you,” he said. “Do they know how bad a dude James Meredith was?”
The seventh of thirteen children, Meredith was born in 1933 in Kosciusko, Mississippi. One of his great-grandfathers was a white man. Given the incidence of rape on Southern plantations, that was hardly uncommon. More uncommon was the fact that this great-grandfather was “the founding father of white supremacy,” who wrote the notorious Mississippi Constitution of 1890, which set aside every aspect of citizenship African Americans had gained with Reconstruction and established the notorious Black Codes that severely restricted civil rights. Another great-grandfather was the leader of the Choctaw Nation. James’s father, whom he adored, owned a small timber farm and “was known as the hardest-working and most dependable man in the county.”15 He was the first, and for many years the only, black man to vote in Attala County. “Three years before I was born, my father and his neighbors borrowed $310 from the Merchant and Farmers’ Bank to build a one-room schoolhouse,” Meredith told us. “There was one teacher and eight grades. At three, I started at that school, and by the time I was six, I knew just about everything that was taught there. And because of that, every place I went where there was an opportunity, I was able to take advantage of the opportunity.” When he was seven, his father told him he had a divine mission; he must bring together the best of the white and the best of the black and save the world.16
Like his father, who had no qualms about pointing a shotgun at an intruding policeman, James Meredith never believed in nonviolence. After finishing high school, he joined the U.S. Air Force, where he served, both at home and overseas, for nine years. He still considers himself a military man, whose purpose as a soldier was “to secure my country and its principles against any enemy. I saw white supremacy as one of the most powerful enemies the United States faced.”17 The issue, he believes, was not civil rights, but American citizenship. Meredith insists on military metaphors. His goal in 1962 was not to integrate the University of Mississippi, which he viewed as a minor and timid objective, but to “physically and psychologically shatter the system of white supremacy in Mississippi and eventually all of America, with the awesome physical force of the United States military machine.”18 In the two years when the state of Mississippi fought the federal injunction that granted him a place at the University of Mississippi, Meredith received enough credits to graduate by attending Jackson State, a historically black university. His object was not education. Rather, he sought to “drive a stake through the heart of the beast.”19 He was opposed to Dr. King’s idea of nonviolence, believing that only overwhelming physical force applied by the federal government could overcome white supremacy. Meredith was averse to flooding the streets with brutalized bodies; far better, he thought, to flood the courts with lawsuits that would trigger American troops to enforce federal court orders.20
That’s exactly what happened in Oxford in the fall of ’62, though not without some foot-dragging by the Kennedy brothers. By all accounts, Attorney General Robert Kennedy was genuinely committed to the civil rights movement, but he and his brother were worried about losing Southern support in the next election. (As Lyndon Johnson later predicted, federal support for the civil rights movement did lead most Southern Democrats to join the Republican Party.) For almost two years, the Kennedys negotiated with Governor Barnett to find a solution that would allow them to enforce federal law while allowing him to save face. But compromise proved hopeless, and President Kennedy was under international pressure. The dogs and fire hoses and beatings and bombings that accompanied the civil rights movement had made world headlines, and the Soviet Union did not refrain from pointing them out. Doesn’t the violence against African Americans show that American proclamations about liberty and justice are nothing but hype? This reasonable question became a problem for the Kennedy administration. Finally, it sent federal troops to put down the armed insurrection taking place in Oxford, and when the first set of troops proved insufficient to stop the riot, planes and jeeps brought in thousands more. The ensuing battle resulted in two deaths, more than three hundred military and civilian casualties, three hundred arrests, and the mass federal confiscation of hundreds of firearms.
Meredith’s military metaphors will seem odd unless you know that the battle wasn’t metaphorical at all. On campus he was guarded by three jeeps full of soldiers wherever he went, but his family’s home in the countryside was shredded with buckshot, narrowly missing his sister. For himself, he insists, he was never afraid at all.
“There have been no accidents in my life,” he told us. “Everything has been according to a plan. It’s hard when you promise God you ain’t going to lie no more. You have to think before you say anything.”
“It’s true,” I said, waiting for him to think.
“Most of my life, when people say anything to me about Ole Miss, it’s ‘thank you for being so brave.’ I ain’t never wanted to be brave. I wanted to be considered smart. And now it looks like I’m going to have to tell you all. You ever see the way I looked when I walked on that campus?”
“I’ve been struck by those photos, and I’ve seen some newsreels.”
“I practiced ten years on that. It didn’t just happen. I had read all the great books of the Western world. And in one of them the historian wrote about the last time the pope conquered Rome. Originally the popes were military commanders. This historian described the way the pope looked. His troops stayed on the outskirts of the city, and he walked all the way from the outskirts by himself. It was designed to scare the life out of anyone who opposed him. They thought, this guy’s got to be crazy. Anyone can kill him.”
Meredith paused, sure of his impact. “Every day on campus, my goal was to look like that pope.”
To see how intense the battle was, you need only read the speech Governor Barnett made to justify his defiance of federal law: “There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide.”21 Genocide? According to arguments like Barnett’s, it’s a slippery slope. Integrate the schools, and the kids will befriend each other. Let them befriend each other, they’ll start to date. And before you know it, there will be mixed-race babies all over the South. The fact that millions of lighter-skinned African Americans were products of a system that allowed white men to rape their black slaves—and later their servants—bothers no one who holds such views. The fear is of the mirror image of that fact, the fantasy of black men raping white women that was so often a pretext for murder. I cannot say if this image is a form of projection. Does white guilt at the knowledge that their ancestors took black women as they pleased fuel the fear that black men will do the same?
I have come to believe that part of the deep white hatred for Barack Obama is connected to it. Otherwise that hatred is incomprehensible. No white person I met in the South would say their distaste for Obama was a function of racism. I don’t agree with his liberal policies, they’d tell me. But disagreement is not hatred, and a growing body of literature argues that racism was the deciding factor in the 2016 election. Still, the simple word racism needs to be unpacked. Jackie Martin told me that white Obama haters were afraid of revenge, but that didn’t seem enough to explain the depth of their passion. Nor did the fact that the Obama family’s behavior in the White House refuted every racist cliché. Their very presence undermined any excuse for white supremacy. Blacks are stupider than whites? Lazier? Less honest? Less kind? Say what? For those with neither Obama’s intellect nor his character, his very excellences were a thorn in the side. But another, less visible thorn must have pained Southern white voters, whether they noticed the sting or not. Barack Obama was not just the first black man to become American president. He is the product of the phantasm that fed racist nightmares: a very dark man from Kenya who married a very white woman from Kansas. This must have fueled the incredible claims, still visible on the internet, that the forty-fourth president was the Antichrist. The president once called himself a mutt; Ross Barnett would have called him the first step to genocide.
“I wonder what you think about President Obama’s impact,” I said.
“He’s clearly the smartest president,” said Meredith. “Before he went to Harvard, he went to Columbia.” Proud of his own degree from Columbia Law School, Meredith had earlier insisted that Columbia was superior to Harvard and Yale. “Beyond a doubt, Obama is the most important thing that’s happened to blacks anywhere in the world.”
The grandchildren slumped in their seats. One boy was thumbing through an atlas; the electronic distractions so ubiquitous elsewhere seemed to be forbidden in the Meredith household, with the exception of the television playing Fox News. “He says he’s got to listen to all of them,” said Judy, rolling her eyes just slightly. “I leave the room and get on my computer when he’s watching.” I wasn’t sure that was the only reason Meredith went for Fox. He is known to enjoy flaunting expectations. His political views are conservative: God, family, and a good education are the pillars of his worldview. But he goes much further: he’d briefly befriended David Duke at a time when the Klan leader had disavowed racist ideology. Meredith now acknowledges that Duke has re-embraced it, but he makes no apologies for supporting him, nor for working for the archconservative Senator Jesse Helms. The former segregationist was the only congressman to respond when Meredith wrote to many of them in 1988, seeking a job on Capitol Hill. Was Meredith really just trying to know the enemy, or did he approve of the way Fox presents the news? It was very hard to tell when he was teasing, confounding, and when he was playing it straight. As Robert Lee Long put it, Meredith is a free spirit. He’s perfectly aware that many call him crazy.
The doorbell rang, and the children brightened considerably as a delivery boy entered with two large pizzas. Jennifer and I took it as a signal to stand up.
“You’ve been very generous with your time,” I began, remembering Jennifer’s warnings. “We don’t want to take up any more—”
“Now, that really bothers me,” said James Meredith. “What makes you think I don’t know how to run you all out when I’m ready?”
“It’s a matter of respect, sir,” said Jennifer. “I don’t want you to have to run me out.”
“Break bread with us,” said Judy Meredith.
We had no choice but to help ourselves to the tiniest pieces of pizza in the box and stay for another three hours.
“I understand you are both focusing on education now,” I said.
“Go to the car, boy, and get that brown folder on the seat,” Meredith said to his grandson James.
“Isn’t it still pouring?” I asked. “I don’t want the young man to go out in the rain.”
“He said get the folder out of his car,” said little James. Clearly his grandfather had the last word on everything.
Little James returned, dripping, with a brown folder. Meredith opened it and handed me an essay. “It’s the most important piece I ever wrote,” he said. The essay was devoted to the importance of education.
“It’s moving to meet someone who has done so much and can say at eighty-three that the most important thing is what he wrote last month,” I replied, deciding it was time to bring out the gift I’d grabbed on my way out the door. “If it’s not rude, I’d like to reciprocate. This isn’t my best book, and you don’t have to read it, but perhaps one of your children or grandchildren—”
“It’s got English in it,” said Meredith, thumbing the pages. “Why wouldn’t I read it?”
“He reads everything,” said Judy.
“I just suppose you have a lot to read.”
“When I went to law school, I took a speed-reading course. If it took me longer than a day to read this book, boy, it would really be something.”
Judy Meredith says she was glad I was looking at the Southern experience. “To be honest with you, I thought like everyone else. I never thought in my wildest dreams I would come through here, let alone move here or marry a Mississippian. The whole world thinks it’s just awful here, but it’s been good to me. People are so much nicer here.”
“They are,” I agreed again.
“I grew up in the fifties and sixties,” she continued. “There was so much activity in terms of marches and King and Medgar Evers and James, all concentrated in the Deep South. There was little being done where I grew up in Chicago.”
“Didn’t Dr. King say he never saw as much hatred as he saw in Chicago?”
“I think I read that somewhere too. That’s why it is better to live here than up north, even to this day. It was never cleaned up there.”
“The grand wizard of the KKK is from Michigan,” said Jennifer.
Judy Meredith teaches at Jackson State, where she says most black people don’t care about things like statues.
“I know some students who care very much,” I replied.
“That’s up there at Ole Miss,” she said.
“It don’t sound like you understand what Ole Miss is,” said James Meredith.
“That’s why I’m here, sir.”
“You think we want everyone up at Ole Miss? You got to be kidding.”
“But you’re still wearing a hat.”
“You don’t understand why, and I ain’t going to tell you,” he said with a smile.
“How many hats did they give him?” Jennifer asked Judy.
“Oh, you know that story? They give him hats every time we go up there.”
“Boxes and boxes and boxes,” said her husband.
“The first time he had on the Colonel Reb hat, that symbol they stopped using.” Johnny Reb, the generic Confederate infantryman, still stood at the entrance to campus. But to the indignation of many alumni, Colonel Reb, the generic commanding officer who once symbolized the university, is no longer used as a mascot. Buy a hat or a mug or a tote bag today and it will say nothing more provocative than “Ole Miss.” “Don Cole took us on a little tour and asked me, ‘Judy, how can I get that cap off his head?’ I told him to buy him another one and switch it out. That’s what they did.”
“That still ain’t the reason I wear it,” said Meredith. “But I ain’t going to tell you why.”
“We can’t encourage you?” asked Jennifer. “You said you don’t lie.”
He took another piece of pizza and paused to eat it. “Have you ever seen that picture of Iwo Jima? With the soldiers when they conquered it?”
“Sure,” I said.
“They put up the flag, but they could have put up anything they wanted.”
“Yes.”
“I captured the colonel.”
“You sure did, Mr. Meredith.”
“My established image was just a good guy who wanted an education. They put pressure on the chancellor, and he called me into his office. He wanted me to make a statement that all I want is an education. I said, ‘Chancellor, you got to be crazy. I’d be a fool to go to all this trouble to get an education. I already had an education when I came here.’”
“You captured the colonel,” I said.
“Well, you can say ‘captured.’ I said ‘conquered.’” He hadn’t, and I’ve got the recording to prove it, but no matter.
“You conquered the colonel.”
“So the crown belongs to me.”
“That’s going in my book, sir.”