THE
Daily
MISSISSIPPIAN theDMonline.com
Monday, February 24, 2020
Volume 108, No. 58
50 years later Remembering the protests that changed UM
EDITORIAL DANIEL PAYNE
thedmeditor@gmail.com
F
ifty years ago this week, three protests for black equality on campus led to 89 arrests and changed the course of the university’s history. On Feb. 24, 1970, forty students from the Black Student Union presented 27 demands for inclusivity on campus to then-Chancellor Porter Fortune. At the same time, another group of black students burned a Confederate flag and danced on tables in the cafeteria to the music of B.B. King. The next day, almost half of the black students at the university — some of whom are in the photo above — participated in a peaceful protest outside of Fulton Chapel during a concert. During and after the concert, 89 people were arrested and sent to a local jail or Parchman state penitentiary. They were released the next day. Eight students, their names listed in the middle column, were suspended from the university. This was “a watershed event,” wrote university historian David Sansing. The results of the protests would effectively start black students’ ongoing struggle to be seen as full members of the university community. The protests sparked a number of important developments. In the same year, a black
Students suspended for protesting John Donald Alva Ruth Peyton Henriese Roberts Kenneth Mayfield Donald Ray Cole Paul D. Jackson Theron Evans Jr. Linnie Liggins
woman graduated from the law school for the first time, the university hired its first full-time black faculty member, the university created an African American studies program and a committee to improve race relations, a campus minister was appointed for black students and the first black student athlete enrolled. The day after the arrests, The Daily Mississippian ran a front-page story with the headline “Eighty-nine blacks arrested.” The story referred to the people arrested only as “blacks,” and an editorial from the editorin-chief said the protests had “gone too far” because they were disrupting a campus that had been “bending over backwards trying to give students a fair shake.” These students were not being treated fairly, of course. Nearly every institution, including this newspaper, treated them as outsiders to the university. “At the time, an attitude still existed among whites in the state that blacks could attend Ole Miss, but that was all they could do,” UM graduate and author W. Ralph Eubanks wrote in 2004 about the early 1970s at UM. “The culture, heritage and traditions of the school stood as barriers, since those were the domain of the dominant white culture and would remain.” Institutions of power on campus did not take the protests lightly. The chancellor announced that criminal charges were filed against the students and threatened severe
SEE PROTESTS PAGE 8