School Racism Faced by African Americans
Ghost of Ole Miss In 1962, Ole Miss enrolled their first African-American student at the school and you would have thought the world was ending. There was riots of all kinds and people fighting, it was insane. There were different sides to each story and different perspectives on the whole thing but one thing was the same, things would never be the same and the South would change forever. The Governor of Mississippi at the time was Gov. Ross Barnett. He publicly opposed the enrollment of James Merideth at the University of Mississippi, which caused many riots and fights. Gov. Barnett supported Segregation and was also a Democrat. He didn’t want James to be enrolled because he was scared of what people would think of him and the university. He didn’t want to be thought of as a person who supported blacks. Majority of the people in the south were racist and believed everything and everyone should be segregated. So Gov. Barnett was just another Southern man who believed like everyone else. He thought he was right by not wanting him to enroll and that would make a bunch of people happy. It would show others that he was the one doing the right thing. If you were on the football team for Ole Miss, you didn’t know what to think. With everything going on and the season about to start, you don’t know what to think. Things are going crazy. Football player, Buck Randall, who saw the worst parts of the riots and attempted to stop them. And it was football that both acted as a point of pride for Mississippians, “We’ve got to show the world that we’re not all bad,” head coach Johnny Vaught told the team before a game against Houston, and pointed out the lack of true equality shown to Meredith, who couldn’t even attend football games because of safety concerns. These distractions were hard to deal with as a team, but their coach was right, they should show that they were better than everyone thought they were and that they were not that bad. You can’t forget about