The Contentious History of Symbols at Ole Miss: A Legacy of Conflict and Change

The University of Mississippi, often called Ole Miss, has a long and complex history intertwined with the symbols of the Old South. From Confederate flags and anthems to controversial mascots, the university has grappled with its past and the impact of its traditions on a diverse student body. This article explores the history of these symbols, the conflicts they have engendered, and the ongoing efforts to create a more inclusive and welcoming environment at Ole Miss.

Confederate Roots at Ole Miss

The University of Mississippi and what is now the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) began using Confederate symbols in the 1930s and early 1940s. The University of Mississippi sports teams became known as the Rebels, while USM started in 1940 as the Confederates before quickly changing to the Southerners. Colonel Reb became the University of Mississippi’s mascot in 1937, while USM adopted General Nat, in a reference to Nathan Bedford Forrest, in 1953.

Ole Miss's nickname itself harkens back to the plantation era, derived from the term slaves often used to refer to the wife of plantation owners. This connection to the Old South is further cemented by the former sports mascot, Colonel Reb, a caricature of a white plantation owner, and the once-customary playing of the Confederate battle hymn "Dixie" at football games.

Early Confrontations and Protests

Confrontations regarding Confederate symbols at the University of Mississippi and the effort to eliminate their use began in 1970. The integration of the university in 1962 was a watershed moment, marked by riots and violence as segregationists resisted the enrollment of James Meredith, the first black student. By that time, black enrollment had increased to more than two hundred students. At three separate protests, African American students burned a rebel banner, and the Black Student Union (BSU) published a set of demands that included curtailing the use of Confederate flags on campus. A proposal by the administration to add the letters UM to the school flag never became a reality, and the issue faded from public consciousness until 1979, when a brief flurry of debate occurred after the senior class donated Traveler, a horse named after Robert E.

The symbol conflict received national attention in 1982 when the university’s first black cheerleader, John Hawkins, refused to wave the Confederate flag at football games. In addition, when the university commemorated the twentieth anniversary of James Meredith’s 1962 integration of the school, he called for his alma mater to eliminate the use of all Civil War symbols. A few weeks later, twenty-nine members of the Ku Klux Klan marched through Oxford in support of the Confederate flag.

Policy Changes and Continued Debate

In April 1983, two days after a student rally of fifteen hundred flag proponents threatened to turn violent, Chancellor Porter L. Fortune instituted a new policy restricting official representatives of the university from wearing anything but university-registered symbols, which did not include the Confederate banner. In addition, the campus bookstore stopped selling rebel flags and merchandise with its image. But private individuals were still permitted to display the flag at university functions.

In 1985 Chancellor Gerald Turner requested that the school band play “Dixie” less often at sporting events, prompting a wave of columns and letters to the editor in the campus newspaper. The Confederate symbol issue subsequently resurfaced every fall with the start of football season. In 1989 the senior class fund-raiser created the “Battle M” flag (a blue block M with white stars on a solid red background).

In 1991, recognizing that the controversial symbols harmed the university’s image and recruitment efforts, both the Alumni Association Board and the Faculty Senate officially requested that fans not bring these Confederate emblems to university athletic events. The administration then announced a ban on all flags larger than twelve inches by eighteen inches in an effort to sidestep concerns about freedom of speech. During the 1993 basketball season, four black band members announced their refusal to play “Dixie.” The student government endorsed the song’s use, while the BSU instituted an economic boycott of campus food services. In 1996 the university altered the official flag to a solid red M on a blue background, a design that television viewers were less likely to confuse with the rebel battle standard. Many spectators nevertheless continued to favor the Confederate flag. Thus, in the fall of 1997, head football coach Tommy Tuberville asked fans to leave these banners at home, and the Associated Student Body requested that sticks be banned in the stands, another attempt to discourage spectators from bringing the flags.

When rumors surfaced in 2002 that the administration was trying to eliminate “Dixie” from the band’s repertoire, Chancellor Robert Khayat announced that the university would retain both the tune and the Colonel Reb mascot. The following year, however, the university removed Colonel Reb as an on-field mascot, and in 2009 Chancellor Dan Jones ended the university band’s playing of “From Dixie with Love” so that students would not yell, “The South will rise again!” after the song ended.

The Removal of the Mississippi State Flag

The issue of the Confederate battle flag returned to prominence in 2015 in the wake of shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, perpetrated by a gunman who used the flag as a symbol of white supremacy. According to a statement released by interim chancellor Morris H. Stocks, “The University of Mississippi community came to the realization years ago that the Confederate battle flag did not represent many of our core values such as civility and respect for others.

Read also: Campus Life at Ole Miss

On Tuesday, October 20, Ole Miss student senators voted to ask the campus administration to remove the current Mississippi state flag, which features the Confederate battle flag, from campus. The University of Mississippi took down the state flag at the Oxford campus on Monday, days after students and faculty called for removal of the banner. Several cities and counties and three historically black colleges in the state also do not fly it. NPR's Debbie Elliott reports that Interim Chancellor Morris Stocks ordered the Mississippi flag removed to the university's archives.

In a statement, Stocks explained the reason for the decision: "As Mississippi's flagship university, we have a deep love and respect for our state. Because the flag remains Mississippi's official banner, this was a hard decision. I understand the flag represents tradition and honor to some. There has been a broader reckoning in the South about the Confederate emblem since a June massacre in South Carolina in which a 21-year-old white man is accused of gunning down nine African-Americans at a Charleston church. The suspect posed with the Confederate flag in photographs prior to the attack. Officials said the killings were racially motivated. South Carolina stopped flying the Confederate battle flag on its Statehouse grounds in July. Mississippi is the only state that incorporates the Confederate symbol as part of its flag. In a 2001 referendum, voters decisively rejected changing the banner. Despite a recent push to retire the flag, The Associated Press reports that some lawmakers have skirted away from staking out positions in the run-up to Nov. 3 elections.

university police officers quietly furled the state banner after lowering it from the pole it shared with the American flag in the university circle; the public wasn’t notified of the university’s action until later. John Brahan, vice president of the Associated Student Body, said he was surprised that the university’s administration had acted so quickly. At a noon press conference Monday, University of Mississippi interim Chancellor Morris Stocks explained the reasoning behind the administration’s decision to remove the flag. In a meeting Friday and another lasting three hours on Sunday, Stocks discussed the flag’s presence on campus and the controversy surrounding it with his leadership team, which unanimously agreed to remove the flag from campus. Stocks informed Gov. Phil Bryant, Lt. Gov. “We appreciate our state leadership, and we do not mean this in any form of disrespect for our state,” said Stocks. “We love our state and we’re proud to be a part of the state of Mississippi. Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze and athletics director Ross Bjork both said they stood behind Stocks’ decision at their weekly sports news conference held Monday. Former Gov. Stocks also said that he spoke with Jeff Vitter, who was recently named the “preferred candidate” for the university’s chancellorship, Monday morning about the state flag and that Vitter understood the administration’s reasoning for taking the flag down. Lee further wrote, “As interim Chancellor Stocks has said, ‘Our state needs a flag that speaks to who we are. Throughout the day Monday, students stopped to notice or take pictures of the state flag’s absence from the school’s flag pole.

The Rise of Activism and Division

According to members of the student body, faculty and the administration, the flurry of incidents has led to the growth of liberal and conservative activism. As a Southern university with a powerful sense of tradition, Ole Miss has never lacked a strong conservative presence. But with the success of organizations like the NAACP, an outspoken conservative opposition has developed over the past two years. “After the state flag got taken down, you really saw a rise in conservative activism,” said Dylan Wood, the student government’s secretary and a conservative activist on campus. “And I mean now, I would think if you took a poll of the (student) Senate, I would think that most of them would identify their ideology as conservative.”

Many students said such changes occurred out of fear that the voices of the majority were being stifled, voices that they said wanted to hold on to a Southern heritage. Coco McDonnell, an outspoken conservative student senator who wrote a bill to suspend the school’s committee that adds context to Confederate symbols, said activists attend popular student, alumni and visitor events to get the word out about their agenda. She said the Our State Flag Foundation drives much of that work. “There have been a lot of efforts made by students and alumni and people within the Ole Miss community and outside the Ole Miss community to bring the state flag back to campus,” she said. “You’ll see in the grove every game-day weekend, stickers are passed out that say, ‘Ole Miss, fly your state flag.’”

One of the people behind the foundation is Howie Morgan, a Republican political consultant and Ole Miss graduate who founded it with a few like-minded friends. Morgan, who runs a campaign management firm called the Election Impact Group, based in Gulfport, Mississippi, has worked on numerous right-wing and Tea Party campaigns since 2005, including presidential campaigns for Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. He is using his political and fundraising skills to fight for his favorite Ole Miss traditions.

“[Conservatives] were scared to share their views because they didn’t want to be labeled a bigot or a racist or whatever,” said Wood. “But I think that’s changed with, not just the election of Donald Trump, but the whole nation I think is headed toward the conservative movement.”

The Black Student Experience

Mississippi’s population is nearly 38 percent black, higher than any other state, but Ole Miss’ black student body is less than half that share. And the percentage of black students in undergraduate programs has only decreased 7.7 percent over the past five years after the rash of racial incidents. Black students described a tense environment filled with overt harassment and subtle micro-aggressions. Some said they were afraid to walk alone at night and that they felt unwelcome at Ole Miss’s many publicized traditions, such as football game tailgates and fraternity parties.

“It’s one thing to say that you want to make the university more diverse,” said Jonathan Lovelady, a sophomore economics major and self-described student activist, “but you can’t do that if students are afraid to come here or they feel unsafe.” Nevertheless, many of those same students said they wanted to attend Ole Miss, despite their families’ advice, to combat the problems they see at the university and develop an activist community. Many helped persuade the student government to remove the state flag from campus in 2015, one of the biggest victories for the many black and liberal voices on campus in recent memory. After rebuilding the long defunct NAACP chapter on campus, student activists had steadily lobbied and channeled their energies toward taking down the flag.

But with that small success came a sudden outpouring of intimidation and harassment, via social media and in person. Dr. James Thomas, a sociology professor and the NAACP faculty adviser, said many activist students were surprised when a substantial backlash developed to the flag’s removal, much of it led online by a new organization called Our State Flag Foundation. And that fog of harassment hasn’t dissipated, he said, although administrative support has not risen to meet it. “Our students who are being harassed received very little support from the administration throughout the process,” Dr. Thomas said. “Faculty and staff meanwhile are leaving their doors open and basically doing triage for these students.”

Some black students said their next mission is to persuade the school to adopt a hate-speech policy. They would start with teach-ins for interested students and move to protests if necessary. “We have vandalism policies, but that doesn’t address when you’re pushed and called the N-word,” said Taia McAfee, a sophomore accounting major who leads Students Against Social Injustice. “Obviously if we’re ignored,” she said, “we’ll see what happens.”

The University's Response and Future

While conservative and liberal students openly debated each other on the campus’s sidewalks over the past year, the University of Mississippi has pursued introspection. School officials knew there were many dormant, foundational and - at times - hidden Confederate legacies that haunt the corners of this campus. In the summer of 2016, the university created a committee to conduct a thorough inspection of every name, symbol and icon on the school’s more than 3,500 acres. This group of faculty, alumni and a single student returned to the chancellor with a 49-page final report a year later. It included 18 recommendations that endorsed contextualization plaques, a yearlong education series of events, the construction of a museum dedicated to the university’s history and more. They also identified buildings named for problematic figures, such as James Vardaman, governor of Mississippi in the early years of the 20th century, who campaigned on a policy of endorsing lynching as a means to promote white supremacy. There are also numerous buildings erected by slave labor.

The school will rename the Vardaman building, but, for the most part, the school chose to erect plaques that provide historic context rather than removing names or expunging memories. “That’s why we did this exercise,” Vitter said, “to make sure that we scoured the campus to recognize those places where we needed to add that context so that we understand the issues of the past, the problems that we will never repeat, and make sure that we create that welcoming climate for all people in Mississippi and beyond.” The administration also adopted a diversity plan that leads with a difficult question: How does the school convince potential minority students and the country that it has not only moved past its stormy racial history but is now welcoming and safe for a diverse student population?

One of the early goals is to increase minority enrollment and graduation rates, and the University of Mississippi paints a rosy picture. Since 2011, the administration remarks in its diversity plan, the school’s minority student enrollment has grown from 19 percent to 25 percent and the number of degrees awarded to black students has risen 30 percent. But, using Ole Miss’s own enrollment metrics, those numbers are misleading, as their black undergraduate population has dropped more than 7 percent while the white student population has grown 23 percent.

The Enduring Challenge

Ole Miss is fighting a constant war against the image of its own history. It will always be the place that rioted to prevent its first Black student from enrolling in 1962 and the place where the head football coach in the late 1990s publicly admitted that the university's reputation was hurting his ability to recruit Black players. Alan Coon, one of the students who spearheaded the initiative against the state flag, told CNN, "We are forever tied to the horrors of our past."

Despite eliminating a few of the prominent symbols linking the university to its Old South history, Ole Miss still fails to provide opportunities to Black people. In a state that is almost 40 percent Black-the largest proportion in the country-only about 15 percent of the student body is Black and only about 49 percent of Black students graduate from Ole Miss. The plight of Black faculty members is even worse. Only 46 of the 823 full-time faculty are Black-six percent. There are no Black faculty in the accountancy school, only one in the business school, only one in the school of engineering, and only 4 of 140-a miserable, pitiful three percent-Black faculty in STEM fields in total. If achieving equality is the goal, then Ole Miss must go much farther than its previous efforts. It is not just about opening the doors to Black students. It is recognizing that many Black students, particularly those from the state's inadequate school system, face unique challenges in college. It is not simply accepting faculty applications from people of color.

Replacing opportunities for White people with opportunities for Black people is the dirty underside of "progress" that institutions like the University of Mississippi desperately, and often successfully, try to ignore by boiling the legacies of a violent history down to easily removable symbols. Good symbolism means that the university doesn't really have to grapple with the idea that its horrible history is still remembered in its choices for Chancellor, its faculty promotion process, and its Black graduation rate. But the fact is that the campus will be little more hospitable for Black faculty and students the day after all of the flags are taken down than the day before the vote.

The SEC's Stance and the "Rebels" Nickname

So the Southeastern Conference has thrown down the gauntlet in the direction of Mississippi, whose state flag is an embarrassing relic that stubbornly honors American traitors who do not deserve it. It’s no secret that administrators and coaches associated with the SEC’s two Mississippi schools have wanted the flag gone for a long time. Its nod to the Confederacy is outdated, its symbolism is a disgrace and the fact it hasn’t been changed is an endless frustration to the people whose business is attracting Black students and athletes to those institutions. And so Greg Sankey, a true bureaucrat of an SEC commissioner whose tenure has been light on notable accomplishment and heavy on keeping the league’s cash registers ringing, has made his move at this moment of national reckoning. He’s threatened that the league could ban SEC championship events from being held in Mississippi unless its flag is changed, applying the kind of pressure that a college sports-crazed state can’t ignore. “Our students deserve an opportunity to learn and compete in environments that are inclusive and welcoming to all,” Sankey said.

But if this is where the SEC is going to draw its line in the sand, if this is the moment when the league is going to wade into a gnarly, emotional political mess that is intertwined with a never-ending love for Confederate nostalgia, how can it not address the fact that one of its very own members is called the Ole Miss Rebels? It’s time to have that conversation. It’s time for a progressive, forward-thinking university that has desperately tried to strip away all connotations to the Confederacy while leaving the actual nickname intact do the right thing for the Black players who have brought so much acclaim and wealth to its athletic program. It’s time for fans to stop playing footsie with the school’s often terrible past and start thinking about how Black athletes will view that branding of “Rebels” in 15 years, in 30 years once this country finally and uniformly treats the losers of the Civil War as losers. It’s time for the conference that distributed $45 million to Ole Miss last year to tell the school that its athletic branding is not - in its own words - “inclusive and welcoming to all.”

Much to its credit, the University of Mississippi has taken significant steps in the last 25 years to bring its athletic department out of the dark ages of American history. The school banned the Confederate flag in the late 1990s. It dumped Colonel Reb, a caricature of a gentlemanly Southern plantation owner that used to roam the sidelines as its mascot. It banned playing any variation of “Dixie.” And at every step along the way, it endured complaints from fans who saw the school as dumping on tradition for the sake of political correctness.

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