I grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, home of the University of Mississippi — Ole Miss — and one of the most progressive places in the state. A spot of purple in a political sea that is otherwise dark red. Oxford has made tremendous progress in the last half century. As I have written previously, the town that rejected integration embraced my multi-racial family.
But the town, and the university in particular, are still plagued by the ever-present specter of racism. Ole Miss stands at the epicenter north Mississippi’s racial history, ironically it is both the institution that galvanized the forces of racism for a century, but now offers the best hope of healing the raw wounds of the past and moving forward together. In the 1860s the school sent a regiment, the University Greys, to fight in the Army of Northern Virginia; they are commemorated with a monument at Gettysburg, where they led Pickett’s Charge, and one in Oxford, from whence they came. A century later Mississippi governor Ross Barnett would physically block James Meredith from enrolling as the first black man at the university. In the subsequent riots, two men were killed and dozens injured.
Yet today Ole Miss is a positive force in the community. While it has yet to fully shed its racial trappings, the university has undertaken numerous steps to purge and moderate the effects of racism it so long condoned and supported. Now, Ole Miss is the blue heart of Oxford, from which the ideas of progress emanate, causing the purple spot as they seep into the surrounding red territory. It is because of Ole Miss that Oxford, MS has a mosque. It is because of Ole Miss that Oxford nurtured my multi-racial family. It is Ole Miss that gives Oxford and much of northern Mississippi a chance to shape the national conversation on race.
William Faulkner — another Oxfordian — once famously said that “to understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” There is wisdom in these words. In Oxford there exists the tension between education and inequality, between history and healing. In many places one can find bigotry or tolerance, or more likely both, but in Oxford the dark forces of hate, the light of progress, and tension between them are intertwined in such a complex web that the messy but important process of unravelling them will yield valuable lessons for a country whose racial legacy haunts its present and obscures its future.
America has never overcome our racist legacy because we have never truly attempted to move past it. Our original sin is baked into the national DNA, and while — over the centuries — we have acquired a mild degree of immunity, we are still very prone to racial flare ups that threaten all the progress and hope of the American experiment. The most recent of these — Donald Trump’s racism-fueled victory in November — represents the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War. If this wake up call cannot show us the desperate need for discussion, then I fear we will never recognize how hamstrung we are by the living legacy of racism. If, however, we read the writing on the wall, and choose to address the hatred at the heart of our nation’s problems, examining a place a place like Oxford would help us heal by showing how the institutions at the center of progress — a university for example — have been both bastions for the causes of bigotry, and the epicenters of resistance to such hate. In my college town’s Confederate legacy lay the clues to understanding how hatred has evolved, how we may stunt its growth, and ultimately how we can pull out the roots of this evil ideology.