The front page of the Daily Mississippian from February 25, 1970, with a picture of the student protest from the previous afternoon.

Late in the afternoon of February 24, 1970, in the University of Mississippi cafeteria, forty students of the recently chartered Black Student Union (B.S.U.) lined up in front of the cafeteria before it opened for dinner. The forty protesters grabbed their food, and each of them took over a separate table as the white students stared back at them silently, or left their seats, or placed their trays on the cafeteria’s conveyor belt and walked out. Kenneth Mayfield, then a second-year student, grabbed his mini stereo, and the students found themselves eating to the strains of Eldridge Cleaver’s cry for Black Power on “Soul on Wax.” The B.S.U. members had already attempted a form of protest. Members of the B.S.U. presented a list of twenty-seven demands to the university’s chancellor, Porter L. Fortune, Jr.; the demands included hiring black faculty, forming a black-studies program, establishing more scholarships for black students, and eliminating Confederate imagery at official university gatherings. Next, the group brought a Confederate flag—then an unofficial symbol of the university—into the cafeteria, where they burned it. (In 1972, abuse of the Confederate flag was illegal in Mississippi, though this law was largely unenforced.)

Undaunted, the B.S.U. members moved from the cafeteria to the Ole Miss campus-security office to file a complaint. “They handed each one of us a form, and we filled it out,” Mayfield said. “I put my name on the form,” he said, “and I wrote the source of my complaint, in bold print, as ‘racism.’ ” His classmates did the same. It was one of those balmy days in Mississippi in late winter, just before spring arrives. Again, white students happening past mostly ignored the protesters.

The evening after the cafeteria protest and flag-burning, Mayfield recalled, “We were in a Black Student Union meeting and somebody commented, ‘We’ve got a group that’s performing right here in Mississippi—it is international and interracial.’ ” The group was Up with People, the wholesome and positive travelling revue. In the spur of the moment, the students—sixty-one in all—decided to march to Fulton Chapel, where admission to the Up with People concert was two dollars. “I remember somebody saying, ‘Step aside, we’ve already paid our dues—we’re going in,’ ” Mayfield said. Once inside, where Up with People had already taken the stage, the B.S.U. members started to chant, “What you gonna do? Do it to him. What you gonna do? Do it to him”—the “him” being the Ole Miss administration. Soon Up with People invited the protesters to join them onstage, where the students offered a Black Power salute. A few began grabbing the microphones. As the musical group launched into one of their most famous songs, “What Color Is God’s Skin?” (“Black, brown, it’s yellow, it’s red, it is white. / Every man’s the same in the good Lord’s sight.”), Mayfield tried to yell into a microphone, “He sure ain’t white, he sure ain’t white.”

Just before they headed to Fulton Chapel, Mayfield recalled, the protesters acknowledged the possibility that they could be arrested for their impromptu action. A year before, eight white students had been jailed for protesting mandatory R.O.T.C., and after their arrest they were placed on probation for the remainder of their time at the university. Mayfield remembered telling his friends, “The worst-case scenario: you get a little probation. You don’t get kicked out of school.”

At the time of the Up with People protest, more than seven years had passed since James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss, in 1962, after a legal battle that reached the Supreme Court, and over the objections of Mississippi’s governor and state legislature. President John F. Kennedy’s Administration ordered five hundred U.S. marshals to insure Meredith’s safety as he arrived on campus and added military police and troops from the Mississippi National Guard and the U.S. Border Patrol when he learned there needed to be additional support. Two days of rioting ensued, leading to two deaths and some two hundred injuries. Much of the rioting was concentrated around University Circle; there, the grounds are dominated by the Greek columns and red brick of the Lyceum building, which was constructed with slave labor. A gray-stone Confederate soldier stands in the Lyceum’s shadow, and, in 1962, it served as a rallying point for those opposed to integration of the university. Now, fifty years after the B.S.U. delivered its demands for the elimination of Confederate imagery, the monument will be moved to a Confederate cemetery elsewhere on campus, pending the final approval of the university’s governing board.

Then, and even today, many Ole Miss students and alumni wished to preserve the campus as a simulacrum of Southern exceptionalism—a memorial to the Lost Cause. Confederate-heritage groups still tour the campus, pointing out the old marching grounds of the University Greys, a Civil War regiment formed by Ole Miss students in 1861. The state’s white-power structure emphasized the university’s link to secession as a shield that made black students feel unwelcome and unlikely to enroll. It is something I felt when I arrived, as a freshman, in 1974, four years after the Up with People protest and twelve years after Meredith walked up the blood-stained steps of the Lyceum to register for classes. Two months before the Up with People protest, M. M. Roberts, the president of the governing board of the university system of Mississippi, acknowledged in a public speech that he was a racist. “Every time I read a definition, I say, Well, that’s me,” Roberts said. “I have no apologies for it, though. . . . But it’s my philosophy. Many of you don’t share that philosophy and it doesn’t bother me. . . . I don’t share yours.”

There were fewer than two hundred black students enrolled at Ole Miss in 1970, among a population of some seven thousand students, and they had grown weary and impatient in the face of persistent racist harassment: threatening notes pushed under their doors, loud knocks in the middle of the night, accompanied by taunts and racial slurs, physical intimidation. “I remember being on my way to class one day, and some big football-looking guys blocked the sidewalk,” Donald Cole, a participant in the Up with People protest, said. “It had been raining, and it was muddy. When I came upon them, I knew I couldn’t proceed, and the only option was to get off the sidewalk, walk in the mud. Of course, I was alone. So that’s the path that I chose, as opposed to a more violent one.”

It is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to threaten Don Cole, who has a bright, wide smile and speaks with a gentle Southern lilt. He is tall and slender, of regal bearing, and, at the age of sixty-nine, his face is unwrinkled and youthful. But if you ask him to remember the events of fifty years ago, his face contorts, and he seems to age before your eyes. An encounter with Cole provides an answer to the question that W. E. B. Du Bois asks in “The Souls of Black Folk”: “How does it feel to be a problem?”

In 1969, Frank Moak, then the dean of students, wrote that black students at Ole Miss “come bearing feelings that have been pent up for years and years and possibly centuries. Suddenly these feelings are heaped on the shoulders of this generation, making them feel they have a mission to change radically the whole structure of society to accommodate the anxieties they have been subjected to.” Moak encouraged black students to be patient. The same year, in an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, he said, “Problems are only compounded when black students eliminate completely from their vocabulary the word ‘patience’ and substitute the word ‘now.’ ”