Word: racially
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...John McCain has decided to attend Friday night's debate, Ole Miss should be able to breathe easy. The presidential debate, after all, is supposed to be Ole Miss's big moment. Hosting the first such forum of the general campaign, administrators hoped, would help the school shed the racial-backwater image that has clung to it since its embattled 1962 integration, when 120 federal marshals could barely hold back the violent riots that left two civilians dead and dozens injured. The fact that the debate participants will include Barack Obama, the nation's first black presidential nominee...
...Still, there are some cracks in this apparently united front. A quiet but frank minority of students at Ole Miss say racial tensions still exist. They point to the Confederate-soldier monument that stands just 100 yards from the statue saluting James Meredith, who led the 1962 integration of Ole Miss at age 29. (Meredith himself reportedly told a small group of student journalists that he was not permitted to speak at his own 2006 statue dedication; a University spokesman denies this, saying Meredith declined to speak of his own accord.) These students cite self-segregated fraternity houses, dorms, parties...
...trouble. "I'm not in the fraternity circle," he says. "I don't know which parties you can go to and which you can't." After a university investigation, the fraternity members were suspended from conducting rush activities for one year and required to do community service and undergo racial sensitivity training...
Susan Glisson, the executive director of Ole Miss's William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, notes that a smattering of groups working against racial strife have sprung up in recent years and that any viable candidate for student-body president must now include race reconciliation as part of his or her platform. Still, Glisson admits that racial tension "is a substantial problem...
...Racial tension, of course, is not unique to Ole Miss - just this Tuesday an Obama effigy was found hanging from a tree at George Fox University in Oregon, accompanied by graffiti mentioning a scholarship program for minority and low-income students - and neither are self-segregated parties, frats, dorms or social gatherings. Many Ole Miss students, in fact, say their school comes under unfair scrutiny because of its past...