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1 The Road to a Closed Society: Mississippi Politics and the Language of White Southern Identity a vote for vardaman is a vote for white supremacy, the safety of the home, and the protection of our women and children. —Slogan from James K. Vardaman Campaign Banner, 1903 Q: I’m wondering if you consider Negroes people in Mississippi. Barnett: I would say that the Negroes, the Indians, the Eskimos, and all the whites—90 percent of them are against Kennedy in Mississippi. —Ross Barnett at Western Michigan University, 1963 Racial bigotry transcends reason in Mississippi because . . . so many leaders are willing to exploit the nameless dreads and alarms that have taken possession of most white people. —James Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society, 1964 On the evening of Saturday, September 29, 1962, as the crisis over James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi came to a head, Governor Ross Barnett sat in Jackson, watching the Ole Miss Rebels play the Kentucky Wildcats 2 The Road to a Closed Society at Veterans’ Memorial Stadium. At halftime of the football game, the Rebels, ranked in the top five in preseason polls and headed toward their first undefeated and untied season in the program’s history, led the Wildcats 7-0, on their way to a 14-0 victory.1 The stadium rang with the chant “We want Ross!” as Barnett began to address the enthusiastic crowd of more than 40,000 people as well as a statewide television audience. “My fellow Mississippians, I love Mississippi,” he declared. “I love her people, our customs. I love and respect our heritage.”2 The Rebel faithful loved their governor, too; the crowd roared its approval. “On nights like this,” a commentator wrote recently, “it’s easy to forget the South lost the war. In some ways that’s the point.”3 The previous Thursday, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger had printed the words to the “Never, No, Never Song,” recalled University of Mississippi historian James W. Silver, “with the suggestion that it be clipped and taken to the Ole Miss–Kentucky football game”: We’ll never yield an inch on any field. Fix us another toddy, Ain’t yielding to nobody, Never, never, never, never, no never. Ask us what we say, It’s to hell with Bobby K. Ross’s standing like Gibraltar, He shall never falter. Never shall our emblem go From Colonel Rebel to Ole Black Joe.4 Barnett “was a symbol of the South,” explained his former campaign publicist; he “represented the traditions that emerged after Reconstruction, a way of life that white southerners had vowed to continue.”5 Awash in a sea of Confederate flags and rebel yells that night in Jackson, Governor Barnett, the son of a Confederate veteran, took his stand, assuring white Mississippians that the foundations of their society were solid. Yet twentyfour hours later, Ole Miss’s campus in Oxford was engulfed in riot over the Mississippi Politics and the Language of White Southern Identity 3 admission of Meredith, the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Students, other Mississippians, and out-of-state supporters joined in an orgy of rock throwing, automobile burning, and federal marshal taunting. Two men were killed, dozens were injured, federal and National Guard troops occupied the campus, and the reputation of the University of Mississippi as a cauldron of racial hatred was fixed in the minds of a generation of Americans by nationally broadcast television footage. “The eyes of the nation and all the world are upon you,” President John F. Kennedy counseled Mississippians that night. “The honor of your University and your state are in the balance.”6 Four years before Barnett’s gridiron apotheosis into Mississippi’s most prominent massive resister, C. Vann Woodward undertook a “Search for Southern Identity,” and recalled an earlier occasion when the South struck a defiant pose and vowed “Never!” Advising his fellow white southerners not to misread the changing national mood, signaled by the Brown decision, the first federal civil rights measures since Reconstruction, and the unmistakable emergence of a grass-roots civil rights movement in the South, Woodward wrote: Once more the South finds itself with a morally discredited Peculiar Institution on its hands. The last time this happened, about a century ago, the South’s defensive reaction was to identify its whole cause with the one institution that was most vulnerable, and make loyalty to [it] the cardinal test of loyalty to the whole tradition.7...

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