student Rob Waters, a veteran DM staff member from California, was left off of the ballot because he didn’t have a journalism background. Later, the Student Judicial Council ruled that the entire screening process was unconstitutional and restored the process to a wideopen election. Fed up with the whole thing, the DM staff, led by its last elected editor, Bill Dabney, ran white space with only this statement on three pages:
“
In protest to the current process of election of the editor,
the staff of the DM has refused to place news on this page.
We are dissatisfied with the current election process and will
”
continue to express our views in similar manners.
“Similar manners” showed up on day two of the protest. That’s when the staff ran the entire text of the U.S. Constitution all the way through the paper. Sixteen pages of it. For the record, there were dissenters in the newsroom. In fact, fearing some staffers might sabotage the protest, Dabney took the pasteup pages home. Other students protested the protest by littering the hallways of Farley Hall with the protest edition. But it worked. The ASB finally passed a bill that would result in the complete transition from public election to committee selection. Ole Miss would make history again a few short months later by naming its first selected DM editor, who also happened to be its first African-American one. Back then, like most young people, the newspaper staff was thinking in the moment—they hadn’t considered the legacy their protest would leave. But since then, there have been four more black DM editors—two of them black females. While having a black editor is not a big deal these days, we might still be waiting on our first if editors were still publicly elected. All it took was some good old-fashioned freedom of the press, a little courage, and two days of a newspaper without news. ~Lee Eric Smith, First African-American editor of The Daily Mississippian
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