Perhaps it’s poetic fate that ESPN recently aired “The Ghosts of Ole Miss” a documentary on the 1962 football season at the University of Mississippi, detailing the anti-integration riots, federal control, and the undefeated all-white Rebel squad, all centered around the enrollment of James Meredith, the first black student at the school.
For a moment last week, the MSM seemed to want us to believe that those apparitions from the past were stirring again—summoning the elements needed for a perfect cake of hate: white southern males and black victims of “racism”:
A protest at the University of Mississippi against the re-election of President Barack Obama grew into crowd of about 400 people with shouted racial slurs as rumors of a riot spread on social media. Two people were arrested on minor charges.
Ole Miss Chancellor Dan Jones promised an investigation and said “all of us are ashamed of the few students who have negatively affected the reputations of each of us and of our university.”
[Obama re-election protest escalates at Univ. of Mississippi; racial slurs, 2 arrests reported, AP, November 7, 2012.
The University organized a candlelight vigil—a standard University response to fake hate crimes—and subsequent MSM reports downplayed the disturbances. No need to call out federal troops again to remind these white southern college students that they live under the iron heel of multicultural democracy—yet.
But these tremors just keep happening along the fault lines of America’s increasingly imperfect union. Thus students and alumni at Clemson University in South Carolina booed Obama at a recent football game. Clemson President James Barker was incensed that these white rubes would dare defy the president:
The president of Clemson University reprimanded the school's football fans Tuesday for booing President Barack Obama during a military ceremony last weekend, saying there is only one president, "and he is president of us all."
The display came as students were taking their oath upon being inducted into the university's Reserve Officer Training Corps on Military Appreciation Day during Clemson's 38-17 victory over Virginia Tech at Memorial Stadium in Clemson, S.C. The booing began as the members recited their pledge to "obey the orders of the president of the United States."
[Clemson president scolds students, fans for booing Obama at football game, NBC News, October 23-2012]
Remember, Southern whites were overwhelmingly behind the candidacy of Republican Mitt Romney. Only the black vote in states like Mississippi or South Carolina makes things appear close.
But at Southern universities, academe’s endemic Cultural Marxism is combining with blind football boosterism to facilitate a totalitarian reconstruction of historic identities. Every school’s administration, athletic departments, alumni, and student body worries about how public displays of white pride will reflect on the ability to recruit black athletes:
Former Ole Miss running back Deuce McAllister,[who is black] who went on to be a first-round pick of the New Orleans Saints, understands well how the university's past —and now, its present—impacts the football program's recruiting efforts.
"I feel strongly for the university," he said. "I mean, I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed as an alumni, I'm embarrassed as a former athlete. Because I know how hard it is to get minority players to come to the university. That's the stigma that they have to fight. That's the stigma that the staff has to fight. [Ole Miss protest could damage football program, USA Today, November 8, 2012]
There was a time when the University of Mississippi was one of the great football powers in all of college football. But that was before integration, when the school boasted all-white squads. The school started fielding squads with half to three-quarters black players in the early 1980s—as I’ve documented, recruiters and college coaches work under a strict set of rules that result in teams filled with academically-challenged black athletes. To facilitate this, all traditions associated with the White South have been sent to the chopping block. Now the only whites who start for Ole Miss are an occasional quarterback and the kicker.
This prompted Brigham Young University white safety Daniel Sorensen to make a controversial statement before the 2011 BYU victory:
"What if we go out there and dominate (at Ole Miss, Sept. 3) and people start seeing us? And they put us on the map, and we're on ESPN. And they start wondering who these kids are—what are they doing with their lives, and why are they so good?
"And maybe a bunch of white boys out there go down and beat up on an SEC team, a big, physical team like (Ole Miss)." [Daniel Sorensen's "White Boys" Comment Getting National Attention, Blue Cougar Football Blog, August 27, 2011]
The Ole Miss’ student body (and alumni) are majority white male. But they have no place at the new Ole Miss. How dare a BYU white boy make mention of this fact by reminding Ole Miss alumni that white boys play—and win—college football elsewhere!
BYU won the game. Despite fielding teams of black athletes, Ole Miss has been among the worst teams in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) since integration brought blacks to the college football fields of the South.
The decision to erase the white people from Ole Miss was taken in 1997, when the New York Times decided a new pet cause could be launched:
Thirty-five years ago, James H. Meredith integrated Ole Miss. Now, the university's black students are deeply offended by the state-supported institution's continued use of the symbols, including the Confederate battle flag, the song ''Dixie,'' the nickname Rebels, the white-whiskered mascot known as Colonel Reb, streets named Confederate Drive and Rebel Drive, and even the name Ole Miss itself.
Just last fall during the football game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State, an Ole Miss alumnus, former State Senator Brad Lott, berated a black Mississippi State player with a barrage of racial slurs. The resulting publicity ''was devastating for recruiting,'' said Tommy Tuberville, the Ole Miss football coach. ''Racism is used against us,'' he said. ''I don't think there's any doubt.''
In 1983, Ole Miss disassociated itself from the Confederate flag, declaring that it would no longer be sold in the campus bookstore or waved by cheerleaders. But students, alumni and other fans still wave their flags at football games, just as they have since the 1940's.
[Old South's Symbols Stir a Campus, by Kevin Sack, March 11, 1997].
Midway through the 1997 season, Tuberville banned the Confederate flag from games, so as not to scare away potential black recruits.
In 2003, the university dropped its mascot “Colonel Reb” (whose appearance was crafted after an avuncular plantation owner).
In 2009, Chancellor Dan Jones [Email him]banned the Ole Miss band from performing the Elvis Presley song “From Dixie with Love”, a combination of “Dixie” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” because students and alumni dared chant “the South will rise again” at its end. [Ole Miss chancellor halts song with segregationist baggage, BY Jody Callahan Memphis Commercial Appeal, November 10, 2009].
And in 2010, Ole Miss finally became the Rebel Black Bears [Rebel Black Bear is Ole Miss mascot, AP, October 14, -2010].
As I noted at Alternative Right [No Country For Old White Men: Ole Miss Gets Reconstructed] there are, maybe, 75 black bears in all of Mississippi. But judging by the 2012 election results—whites voted 89% percent for Romney—there are a whole helluva lot more Rebels in the state than anyone wants to admit.
Yet Ole Miss is operating on the assumption that only by removing all white heritage from the school, to appease liberal white administrators and academically-unqualified black high students, can the Rebel Black Bears compete and win maybe three or four football games—out of 12—each year.
Now do you understand why I call college football the “Opiate of America?”
What if people realized that a team of athletes that was actually representative of the school’s student body and historic alumni could field winning teams? (Think BYU with its majority white squad).
Why was the sudden outburst of 400-plus white southern students protesting the reelection of Barack Obama cause for national concern?
Perhaps they should just bar white males from enrolling at Ole Miss.
This is why Ole Miss’ heritage must be destroyed. The ghosts of Mississippi aren’t even ghosts… they are still there, watching, waiting, anticipating a shift in the political winds.
And if the South can rise again, America might rise with it—Real America.
Paul Kersey[Email him] is the author of the blog SBPDL, and has published the books SBPDL Year One, Hollywood in Blackface andEscape From Detroit, and Opiate of America: College Football in Black and White.
