Believe it or not, we see a rally by members of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan — prior to Saturday’s football game between the University of Mississippi and LSU — as yet another positive sign that the old racist South has fallen.
Only about a dozen hooded Klan members participated in the brief rally and they were greeted by far more jeers than cheers by fans on their way to the game. As they waved flags, displayed Nazi-style salutes and occasionally gestured at detractors, the Klan members were outnumbered by more than 20-to-1 by hecklers. However, the vast majority of those headed to the game simply ignored the Klan members.
Contrast the response to Saturday’s Klan rally at Ole Miss with the September 1962 enrollment of James Meredith as the first black student at the school. Meredith’s enrollment was virulently opposed by segregationist Governor Ross Barnett, sparked riots on the Oxford campus, and required enforcement by federal troops and U.S. Marshals, who were sent by President John F. Kennedy. The riots led to a violent clash which left two people dead, including French journalist Paul Guihard.
In a rally that lasted less than 10 minutes, Klan members at Saturday’s game were protesting Ole Miss’s decision to drop a pep song that included “Dixie.” Some fans had been ending the song by chanting, “The South will rise again.” Chancellor Dan Jones asked the band to stop playing the song after fans ignored a request to drop the chant.
The Klan said it was protesting lost Southern symbolism at Ole Miss, but instead of re-igniting the schools’ racist past, the rally succeeded in showing just how much the South and Ole Miss have changed since 1962.
Does racism still exist in the South? Sure, it does, but it dominates neither the politics nor the economy of the region.
The South indeed may rise again, but it will be far, far different than the old racist South of which the Klan is a symbol. The New South is one in which whites and blacks work together for the common good — just as they did on the field Saturday in a game featuring two schools that long ago abandoned their racist pasts.
