They were Nifty brand, cost a dime and were filled with descriptions of suspicious characters, of license plate numbers and names. I came upon a box containing two small notebooks used by the soldier tasked with guarding James Meredith, the first African-American student at Ole Miss. More recently, my aggravation had been stoked by ignorant election e-mails from my great-uncle in Jackson, ones that seemed to be from a time long past. Why hadn't I been taught any of this in school? I'd had an entire Mississippi history class in junior high. Each page changed the way I looked at the place around me, the way I looked at the places inside myself where I love my state and its traditions. They seemed forgotten, their legend small despite big accomplishments, and I wanted to find out why.Ī few months back, I dove into the Ole Miss library's special collection, containing records and artifacts from the 1962 riots. It was also a team not discussed much, just a quick story here and there. It was the team that made my dad love football. 15 as a high school quarterback to be just like Glynn. The star quarterback, Glynn Griffing, was born near my family's farm, which his uncle managed, and my dad idolized him growing up, wearing No. That year, perhaps because of the school's near self-destruction over integration, or perhaps in spite of it, the team managed the most remarkable season seen in Oxford before or since. The 1962 Ole Miss football team fascinated me. Once I grew up and moved away, I began to study the history of the South. The South during the '60s was like that cross in our front yard: something they experienced but wanted to shield their children from. We never really talked much about the civil rights era, about things my parents had seen. Still, there were things never discussed. My dad ran the local Democratic Party, so I grew up around whites and blacks, which also made me different from many of my friends. That certainly made our house different from many in town. And, of course, no N-word, ever, under any circumstance. They enforced strict rules that made our home something of an oasis. In the years that followed, my parents raised my brother and me to leave old prejudices behind. Wright Thompson discusses the integration of the University of Mississippi with Bob Ley on "Outside the Lines."
0 kommentar(er)
