Article I just found on the Kansas City Star website. Some of you might be interested in it, although I found it to be predictably negative towards the South.
Southern discomfort
By BILL REITER
The Kansas City Star
Deep South memories
OXFORD, Miss. | So this is what it's come to for the Rebel.
He's Brian Ferguson, a 23-year-old University of Mississippi graduate leading an effort to bring back the school's banned mascot, Colonel Reb, and he's driving down the streets of Oxford in his pickup truck, trying to tell you that he's not interested in the Confederate flag.
He's telling you all he wants is for the school to bring Colonel Reb back to football games. He's telling you the South is facing a crisis of a fading culture, and the battle to save it has moved to the football field. He's telling you this isn't about the Confederate flag.
"We don't support that  we support Colonel Reb coming back," Ferguson says.
He's forgetting there are six Confederate flags hanging from his rearview mirror.
You point them out. He pauses. He changes the subject. He pauses again. The truck hums on.
"I have it for my ancestors," the Memphis native says, finally. "It represents where I came from. I have relatives who fought in the Civil War. It's part of my history."
Football is a part of his history, too  his, the history of those who support him, and that of those he's up against.
That's why this fight, over a mascot who looks like a white plantation owner, seems so important.
"To the South, football is the moral equivalent of the Civil War, where you can battle once again with the demons of an unhappy past," said Char Miller, director of urban studies and a professor of history at Trinity College in San Antonio. "That's why I love football in this area. There's so many things playing out on the ground, and only a few of them have to do with football."
It has to do with the SEC having won 15 national titles since 1934. It has to do with the South losing battles, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement, but dominating the North on the football field. It has to do with a region that sees the sport as its last chance to fight back.
It's as Faulkner wrote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
Particularly when it comes to football in the South.
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This is the past: It is the University of Mississippi's administration, in 2003, banning Colonel Reb from the sidelines at games. It is Ferguson, then a student, forming an organization to save the mascot. It is Ferguson and supporters passing out bumper stickers, talking to the press and creating a similar mascot named "Colonel Too."
Each game, someone dresses as the new mascot and sits in the stands. The administration doesn't bend. Neither does Ferguson.
The past is 1997, when the administration came up with a unique ban for football games in an effort to curtail the number of Confederate flags flying in the stadium. "The way we dealt with it was to have a ban on all sticks in the crowd," says Chancellor Robert Khayat, a former Ole Miss football great who went on to play in the NFL. "You can't bring an umbrella, or a hot dog on a stick, or a flag on a stick."
Though it diminishes the number of flags, it does not eliminate them.
The past is Oct. 1, 1962, the day James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, and the riots his enrollment sparked on campus. It is the federal troops and U.S. marshals brought in, and the violence that leaves two dead and dozens injured.
The past is the Confederate flag used as a symbol of opposition to a black man going to school here. The past is that flag flown for decades on the Grove, the school's campus green, on game days.
The past is the Civil War. It is the entire student body and much of the faculty leaving school to fight in a company nicknamed the University Greys. It is none of them coming home. It is the university being turned into a hospital that serves Union and Confederate soldiers.
It is dying during Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, when the Greys help the Confederacy push as far into Union territory as it would ever go.
It is Sherman burning down the South but sparing this campus, in part, say school officials, because of the Union soldiers who were treated well here.
It is all of this, all across the South, now being played out on football fields from Greenville, Miss., to Greensboro, N.C. It is Bear Bryant leading Alabama to six of the school's 12 national titles; it is thousands of Auburn fans lining Donahue Drive on game day; it is the pride of LSU, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida and, of course, Ole Miss.
"There's a sense in the South that they have experienced something no other part of the country has experienced in terms of loss," Miller said. "Oddly, it has been attached to football."
Every Saturday, another shot at victory.
"There's a deep, emotional, historical connection with the military here, with combat, with young Southern men wanting to serve," said Jeffrey Alford, the associate vice chancellor for university relations. "It's that deep-rooted tradition that attracts young boys in the South to play football.
"And its heart and soul is here in Mississippi."
The past is people like Ferguson fearing an end to those traditions. It is also people like Warner Alford  former football great, assistant coach and athletic director, a man who has seen the Confederate flag waved his whole life.
It is Warner Alford wishing people could learn to let go, just as he has.
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The evolution of Warner Alford starts in the fall of 1956. He is a 6-foot, 175-pound freshman from McComb, Miss., recruited to play center and linebacker. He has grown up in segregated schools. There are no black people, not one, attending the university during his time there.
He does not think about these things.
Not about segregation, or a sense of tradition in jeopardy, or a feeling of any kind about the Confederate flag. It's as common and unimportant as seeing the score on the scoreboard, or cheerleaders cheering.
"I didn't even think about it when it was here," he says.
He thought about football. He played the game, moving to guard on one side of the ball and linebacker on the other. He was co-captain of the Rebels' 1960 national championship team.
"It was a good time," he says. "We won a lot of football games."
And that was it: He left college and ventured into the real world. He went home and helped run his family's retail department store. And then football, of all things, forced him to pay attention.
"I was at a game in Jackson," he says. "Ole Miss versus Kentucky, and the governor came into the stadium."
The crowd erupted. Confederate flags flew. Gov. Ross Barnett's voice spilled from the speakers. James Meredith wanted to enroll in school, and the governor vowed to take a stand against the black student.
"I love Mississippi!" Barnett told the crowd. "I love her people [and] our customs! I love and respect our heritage!"
The crowd cheered frantically, and Alford turned to his wife: "This is not a pretty sight," he remembers saying.
That started it, that moment altering the way a man can see the world. Then it was 1971, and Alford came back to Oxford as an assistant football coach. He was there when Ben Williams became the school's first black player. He was there in 1972, when Pete Robertson and Gary Turner made it three black football players.
"My evolution was coaching and recruiting our black athletes," he says. "I knew them one-on-one, personally. I watched them succeed, watched them graduate. I know their children now."
Watch closely. Because this is as much about how a state changes as it is about how a man does. It is how the past connects to today. It is why football matters. It is Alford, and many men like him, thinking about things in a way they never had before.
Things like the Confederate flag.
"I said (to our black players), if it's a problem for you," Alford said, "it's a problem for me."
Yes, some of those black athletes said, the rebel flag is a problem. Can you see Alford changing? Because a few year later, as the athletic director, he hires Ken Gibson to be the track coach. Gibson will be the first black man to ever lead an Ole Miss team, and one of the first black coaches in the SEC.
And then it is 1983, and Alford stands at a news conference with Chancellor Porter Fortune Jr. They announce the Confederate flag is no longer an official symbol of the university.
"That was a first step," Alford said. "It was not a popular decision."
This is how a man changes, and how men like him, in changing, transform their little part of the world.
The 18-year-old boy who arrived in 1956 wouldn't have given a second thought about that rebel flag. The 68-year-old man Alford is today can't stand the sight of it.
"The odd thing about the Confederate flag was, it was mainly only at football games," says Alford, who's now the executive director of the university's alumni association. "Not to baseball games, not to basketball. Confederate flags only came to football games."
Alford does not say the flag is necessarily racist. He does not say those who wave it are racists. He simply thinks people should let go, just as he has.
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Jerry Walker wishes he could let it go. He truly does.
But there are six Walkers buried 50 miles from his little gas station west of Oxford, all casualties of the Civil War. When he talks about them, his voice rises as if he's pleading. He stares out with the eyes of a man used to being judged.
"I have ancestors that were in the Civil War," the 51-year-old says passionately. "It's about telling a guy he has to forget his past and can't mention it. My people were part of it. Right or wrong. My people were part of it, as were all the people of the South."
Hundreds of Confederate flags sit around him. They're for sale, ranging from $1.75 for the tiny, hand-held variety to $15.95 for bigger ones. Dozens of football mementos hang around him. Ole Miss schedules. Signed footballs. Pictures of Ole Miss greats stretching back to the 1959 season.
The football collection and Confederate paraphernalia, all cramming this rundown gas station, seem as naturally linked as baseball and beer, as hockey and ice.
Walker is still talking, and Don Mills is standing next to him, nodding with approval. He's built like a 53-year-old linebacker and is wearing a bandana dotted with dozens of Confederate flags. He's an Oxford police officer.
"That's what separated us from the North, this Mason-Dixon line," Walker says. "It's in your heart. They can't take what you have in the past, right or wrong, sad or bad. You can't change that. It still happened."
Two black men walk inside the gas station. The four of them greet each other pleasantly.
"Hi."
"Hey."
"How's it going?"
"Real good."
Someone tells a joke, and they all laugh, the two black men, the white man wearing the Confederate bandana, the white man whose relatives are buried nearby.
The men leave, and Walker picks up where he left off.
Colonel Reb and the Confederate flag are "the traditions of the school," he says. "It's the school's heritage, team spirit."
"I'm not prejudice," Mills chimes in. "I treat everyone the same ... (but) I think if you keep giving a little piece at a time, you'll end up with something totally different."
Brian Ferguson's name comes up.
"Is he the guy with the other Colonel Reb?" Mills asks.
"Yep, that's him," Walker says.
"He's always in the stands."
"Yep, he's done a great job."
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Standing inside the Grove, Ferguson sees so much: The history of his school. Saturdays overflowing with 100,000 football fans. The Walk of Champions  the sidewalk in the Grove players march through on their way to the stadium.
He sees much of that history in jeopardy.
"By taking away Colonel Reb, you hollowed out the university," he says.
He frowns, caught between anger and sadness. What, he wonders, will they remove next? The term "Ole Miss," because it's an old moniker for a plantation owner's mistress? Or the word "Rebels" because of its link to the Confederacy and, by connection, to slavery?
"It's something we've feared for a long time," Ferguson says. "If they continue to take away the traditions, we'll end up as Bland University."
For Ferguson and those like him, this isn't about a mascot. It's about an avalanche of political correctness overwhelming what it means to be Southern. It's about tradition. It's about not giving in.
"People like the athletic director and chancellor, in many people's eyes, have lost a little bit of their connectives of this whole concept," says Charles Ross, director of African-American studies at the university and author of a book on the reintegration of the NFL. "Football games take this notion of this lost cause, and this nobleness of the Civil War."
It is a battle played out in bars and restaurants, from the old Taylor Grocery south of town where folks eat catfish and talk sports, to the Grove on game days, to the small towns that make up Mississippi.
"We're winning the battle," Ferguson says. "But when we get him back on the field, we'll have won the war."
The chancellor says that will not happen. Ferguson sees it differently. Get a new chancellor or athletic director, he points out, and things could change.
"When it comes back to it," Ferguson says, "the only people that want Colonel Reb gone are the chancellor and the athletic director."
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That's not quite true.
People say many things. They get emotional talking about Ole Miss, football and a tradition steeped in rebellion. They feel many different things but seem to communicate the same way, with the painful pauses of those who assume they will be misunderstood.
This is what they say:
Chancellor Khayat, who received death threats after the stick ban. He is white: "Our students and our alumni realized it was not in the best interest of the university to continue that rigid position of we're not going to give up this flag. It became uncool, in our students' terminology, to wave the flag."
Larry Happs, 62, who is white and lives outside Oxford: "Folks still want it, but the chancellor and the higher men said no. They still get them on the campus and at the ballgames, but it's not allowed."
Reshika Coleman, 21, a senior at the university who is black: "I don't have a problem with (the Confederate flag) ... I would say it's not good that we don't have a mascot."
Brock Harrington, an 18-year-old sophomore who is white: "People have always looked down on the South and haven't understood us. You don't have to come here if it offends you."
Ross, the director of African-American studies, who is black and has lived in the South for 11 years: "At football game tailgating, I've got to tell you: I've never experienced that level of Confederate paraphernalia. It is intimidating, psychologically, particularly for African Americans. And yet they're inviting you over for chicken, and they're so inviting. So I don't know. Maybe it's a Southern thing, maybe I don't understand it, maybe I'm too sensitive."
Adam Jones, an Ole Miss alum whose dad played football for the Rebels. Jones is white: "The flag and Colonel Reb, let's just say this: The people it was a big deal to were in the minority. They want to see the university as a positive, and anything that could hold the university back, they oppose."
Jon Rawl, an alum, radio show host and founder of Y'All, a magazine for Southern people, on opposition to Colonel Reb and the Confederate flag. Rawl is white: "I think it's silly, absolutely silly ... the flag is beloved... You're going to see, in the not-too-distant future, the revival of a lot of these things."
Khayat: "I don't see how people can argue the flag should be a symbol of this university, given the negative light of the flag today."
Jill Miley, a 25-year-old Ole Miss grad and local bartender who is white: "I love tradition. It goes hand-in-hand with SEC football. I don't like the fact it offends people. It's such a touchy issue. I wish we could meet in the middle, but I don't know if the university can. I'm glad they took the Confederate flag away, but I miss the Colonel. It just seems like tradition is slipping away a little bit."
Khayat: "You'd do a good thing to tell people that the Confederate flag is no longer associated with the university. Truth is a powerful thing ... People think we're down here hanging black folks by their toes."
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The wind blows through the cemetery. It is the first cool breeze of the 100-degree day. It makes you smile as you walk across the charred grass.
The granite grave marker juts out of the grass. Flowers sit at its base.
The block letters on the 10-foot marker read: "Here rest more than seven hundred soldiers who died on the campus of the University of Mississippi when the buildings were used as a war hospital, 1862-1865; Most of them Confederate, wounded at Shiloh; A few federals of Grant's army; A few Confederates of Forrest's cavalry; Even their names, save these, known but to God."
There are about 124 names. Union and Confederate soldiers buried together in a mass grave not far from the school's football stadium.
"The cemetery is a history lesson," Ferguson says. "There have been a lot of hardships, a lot of things we look at now and view as something we wish had never happened. But at the same time, we have to understand the situation. You have people on both sides of the fight."
"What's buried there is, they're all Americans," Alford says. "Just different sides of an issue. When you think about it, they were fighting each other and they were buried together. It's kind of an emotional thought, to tell you the truth."
Four-hundred yards away, the Mississippi Rebels football team is practicing. You hear a coach yelling. You see young men  white and black  playing together.
You take a moment and watch the game.
