Left by the Wayside: The Struggle over Control of the Memory of the University of Mississippi’s Desegregation

This work examines the memory and legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in the South by using the University of Mississippi’s (UM) integration as a case study. It challenges the narrative that UM integrated when James Meredith became the first African American student in 1962. By framing that event as desegregation instead, the timeline for integration expands to encompass the long civil rights movement to the present. It also unseats the truncated, triumphant narrative that UM promotes. This traditional story is that Meredith wanted to attend UM and used legal recourse to defeat segregation. After the US Supreme Court decided in Meredith’s favor, the struggle became a battle between the federal government and the segregationist state government, which culminated in a violent and deadly riot on UM’s campus the night before Meredith registered for classes on October 1, 1962. The federal government and Meredith won, ushering in a new era for the university with Meredith’s graduation in 1963.Expanding the narrative incorporates other African American struggles at UM into the fight for integration. It also exposes the conflict over the control and use of the memory of UM’s desegregation. This work begins with Clennon King’s failed attempt to enroll at UM in 1958 as the beginning of desegregation and the influence of respectability politics on King’s exclusion from the integration narrative. It then analyzes Meredith’s own reflections on desegregating UM, which de-center the university and re-center Mississippi Choctaw history in his battle against white supremacy. Incorporating memories from local residents, the white versus African American interpretation of UM’s desegregation calls into question whose perspective dominates the public narrative about UM’s racist past, and how that control influences the present. This work demonstrates that the Black Campus Movement at UM in the late 1960s through the early 1980s was part of, not separate from, the struggle for full integration. It concludes with the effort in the 1990s and 2000s to commemorate civil rights struggles on campus with the Civil Rights Monument. The controversy over that monument resulted in a statue of Meredith walking alone toward an open university gate. It revealed the persisting struggle over the meaning of desegregation versus integration and over the memory of UM’s racist past.