Word: merediths
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This is the 20th anniversary not only of Meredith, but of the death of William Faulkner. He died less than three months before the crisis; he lies now under a towering oak in the town cemetery up the way. The events of that September would likely have broken his heart, as they did the hearts of many Mississippians. "The white people have already lost their heads," he said of those years. "It depends on whether the Negroes can keep theirs." Between then and now there was to be more suffering...
...most splendid hopes, will attend, and so will Robert Harrison, a black from my home town, Yazoo City, who has just become president of Mississippi's board of trustees for institutions of higher learning. The keynote speaker will be Margaret Walker Alexander, the black novelist and teacher. Meredith, now a businessman in Jackson, has been invited to speak...
...ironies of Mississippi have forever baffled the outsider, as they should. Two and a half years after Meredith's admission, Governor Ross Barnett's principal antagonist of that time, Bobby Kennedy, gave the commencement address at Ole Miss. He was introduced by Senator Jim Eastland and received a standing ovation. Twelve years after the event, Ben Williams, also of Yazoo City, the first black football player at Ole Miss, was elected Colonel Rebel by the student body, the highest honor for a male student. (He is now with the Buffalo Bills.) More recently, Mississippi's Leontyne Price...
Like the university, Oxford has a population of 10,000. It is the fifth smallest town in the U.S. to serve as the seat of a capstone state university. There are only seven full-time undergraduate black professors; Meredith himself says he is reluctant now to praise an institution with so few black teachers and students. Money is one problem, and black professors and administrators are often lost to larger schools. The rural backdrop is another, as is the absence of a sizable middle-class black community. The Black Student Union and the Associated Student Body have recently merged...
...heard other stories. In a zoology class of 36 students, mostly white sorority girls, no one chose to be the laboratory partner of the only black male student. After an embarrassing interval, a white girl who was not in a sorority volunteered. In a class that was discussing the Meredith riots, a black student argued: "Only the vocabulary has changed. How many black professors are there? How many administrators?" A white private-school graduate replied, "If things are so bad, why are you here?" During this discussion, two white sorority girls were thumbing through Vogue magazine...