Several players with the University of Mississippi basketball team took a knee during the national anthem before their game Saturday in protest of a Confederate rally being held near the arena.

Initially six players knelt during the start of the “Star Spangled Banner.” By the end of the anthem, two more of their teammates joined in.

”The majority of it was just that we saw one of our teammates doing it and didn’t want him to be alone,” Ole Miss player Breein Tyree said at a press conference after the game. “We’re just tired of these hate groups coming to our school and portraying our campus like we have these hate groups in our actual school.”

The players’ gesture — a nod to the NFL protests over racism and police brutality that for several years defined America’s modern culture wars — feeds into a contentious debate on Ole Miss’s campus (not to mention many other schools’) over the legacy of Confederate iconography that is still celebrated and on display throughout the university grounds.

For months, student groups had tried to force the university to remove the several Confederate monuments currently housed on campus, but still the statues remain in place. In response, roughly 100 protesters, many draped in Confederate garb, marched on campus Saturday to pay tribute to those monuments that honor fallen Confederate soldiers.

It’s a striking move for players to take a knee in Mississippi, where the Confederate legacy is so ingrained in the state’s culture that the stars and bars of the Confederacy remain on the state flag. The NCAA and the SEC both refuse to hold championships in the state as a direct result of the imagery on the flag. And though Ole Miss coach Kermit Davis had said previously that he would not tolerate his players kneeling during the National Anthem, on Saturday he gave them his support.

“This was all about the hate groups that came to our community and tried to spread racism and bigotry in our community,” Davis said. “This created a lot of tension for our campus. I think our players made an emotional decision to show these people they’re not welcome on our campus. And we respect our players’ freedom and ability to choose that.”

The two protests point to America’s simmering culture wars

The pair of protests on the Ole Miss campus on Saturday represent two threads in the ongoing cultural battle over the legacy of racism and oppression in America: The first is the controversy over National Football League players kneeling during the National Anthem; the second involves the battle over Confederate statues and their symbolism.

Neither started the culture clash — they’re just flashpoints in the country’s broad reckoning over racism and violence aimed at communities of color.

In 2016, prominent athletes first began kneeling during the National Anthem in a movement started by Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick, then the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, first took a knee after speaking with a former NFL player who had served as a Green Beret and who told him kneeling was both a sign of respect and protest. It was in the aftermath of several high-profile police shootings, and Kaepernick said he hoped to use his platform to raise awareness about racism and police brutality. Soon, this protest took hold. Vox’s Jane Coasten has more of the origin story:

Other players from across the NFL began to join the protest as the regular season began — in total, about 200 players have either knelt or sat during the national anthem since the protests began in August 2016. And so did athletes from other sports, like professional women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe. Even some high school football teams began to kneel during the anthem. Though the NFL didn’t even have players on the field for the national anthem before 2009 (and the anthem is traditionally not a part of the television broadcast shown to fans at home), the issue became a lightning rod for discussions about race, inequality, and police brutality… But though some conservatives viewed Kaepernick’s protest as an expression of free speech, many on the right didn’t see it that way, seeing the protests as an example of the “politicization of sports” or “symbolic of how liberalism has been allowed to spread unchecked through our culture,” and, most importantly, indicative of anti-Americanism run amok, as NFL players “disrespected” the American flag and veterans of the wars fought to protect it. In October 2017, Vice President Mike Pence left a 49ers/Indianapolis Colts game when members of the 49ers knelt during the anthem. And some conservatives urged a boycott of NFL games in response.

The NFL protests have since simmered down significantly — Kaepernick, who claimed the NFL colluded to blacklist him from playing because of his political protests, has reached a settlement agreement with the league — but conversations about race and slavery’s legacy haven’t.

In recent years, a number of cities and states have been taking a hard look at their Confederate monuments and celebration of figures who fought to maintain white supremacy. (Parts of Ole Miss’s student body are among those groups.) Some cities and schools have opted to remove these statues from public spaces, to intense backlash.

As Vox’s German Lopez explained in 2017, much of America is still coming to terms with our nation’s legacy of racial oppression — “but not without a passionate, sometimes violent reaction” from those who say the country needs symbols of white heritage and culture:

The argument is simple: The Confederacy fought to maintain slavery and white supremacy in the United States, and that isn’t something that the country should honor or commemorate in any way. Critics argue, however, that these monuments are really about Southern pride, not commemorating a pro-slavery rebellion movement. They argue that trying to take down the Confederate symbols works to erase part of American history.

Protests and counterprotests over Confederate monuments at the heart of the Ole Miss campus have picked up steam in recent weeks. Now that the school’s prominent athletes are joining the fold, the campus has become microcosm — in more ways than one — of the ongoing battle over racism and the legacy of white supremacy that the rest of the US has yet to reconcile.