NOTE: This is and article I found in the Daily Journal that tells the story of the protest at our show at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). My side of the story is in my blog post. The story was online for many years but not available at this point (at least I can't find it).
The 'other' turning point
Posted on February 20, 2005 by Ashley Elkins in News at djournal.com
BY DANNY MCKENZIE - Daily Journal
There is an old saying that what goes around comes around. Kenneth Mayfield and Don Cole are living proof of its accuracy.
On the night of Feb. 25, 1970, as African-American students at the University of Mississippi, they found themselves on stage at Fulton Chapel protesting during the ultimate feel-good concert of the day, “Up With People.” A few minutes later they found themselves among 89 arrested and locked up in the Lafayette County Jail and the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.
A few weeks later they found themselves among eight students tried and summarily suspended from the university.
Today, Mayfield finds himself either in his attorney's office in Tupelo or sitting on the bench as a municipal court judge in Okolona.
Today, Cole finds himself in his office or strolling across campus as an associate mathematics professor, assistant provost and assistant to the chancellor concerning multicultural affairs – at the same university that 35 years ago showed him the door and shoved him out.
A peaceful civil rights protest during a sprightly concert seemingly pales in comparison to the deadly and destructive riots by white protesters during the 1962 enrollment of James Meredith as the first black student at Ole Miss.
The so-called “Up With People” incident, however, is considered by many as the second-most important step in racial relations at the university that had become a national symbol for bigotry.
With the wisdom of 35 years behind them, Mayfield and Cole agree it was a large steppingstone in the pathway to racial civility on the Ole Miss campus.
“Without question,” says Mayfield, who was a sophomore from Okolona when he joined his cohorts on the Fulton Chapel stage. “For us not to have done something could have easily set things back,” says Cole, who was a sophomore from Jackson when he marched down the Fulton Chapel aisle.
Thomas “Sparky” Reardon, now the dean of students at Ole Miss, was a freshman from Clarksdale during the protest. When he surveys the changes during the past 35 years, he draws one conclusion: “I don't think a lot of what Ole Miss is today would have happened as quickly as it did if those students hadn't gotten up there that night. I can't imagine the courage it took.”
Troublesome times
The 1969-70 academic year was perhaps the peak of the tense atmosphere on college and university campuses across the country. The Vietnam War was raging, the civil rights battles were being fought and civil disobedience was being replaced by Black Power in the aftermath of the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Ole Miss students were not immune to the nation's unrest. Although most were caught up in the heady football days of John Vaught, Glenn Cannon and Archie Manning, many realized that all was not bliss.
Mayfield, Cole and their fellow members in the Black Student Union were in the midst of the national civil rights activities – and one much closer to home: the arrest of several hundred students protesting the deplorable living conditions at nearby Mississippi Valley State University. “We had been protesting for the entire year,” Mayfield recalls. “There were various forms of peaceful protests several times.”
He recalled one episode proceeding the “Up With People” concert in which several black students marched on the campus home of Chancellor Porter Fortune. As they presented Fortune with a list of demands, Mississippi Highway Patrol rifles were trained on them from third floor windows across the street in Farley Hall.
“We thought Chancellor Fortune was awfully calm, but we didn't understand why until we saw those guns,” Mayfield says. “We had a few more words to say, then we dispersed. Who knows what would have happened if things had turned ugly? It could have been another Jackson State” where two students were killed by Jackson police.
The concert
While Fortune and other Ole Miss administrators had always been cordial to members of the BSU, very little progress was being made. “We saw the administration moving slow in the efforts we were asking them to make,” Cole remembers. “At that time we termed them demands.'
“I don't ever remember a time when Chancellor Fortune wasn't completely cordial to us, but neither do I remember a time when he actually said he was going to do this or that.” Among those demands were a black studies program, black faculty members, black athletes and a black barber at the campus barber shop.
By the afternoon of Feb. 25, they had had enough. Some five dozen BSU members decided they would disrupt the “Up With People” concert that night, thereby gaining attention for their plight. Theirs was not a thought-out, intricate plan; they just knew they would march peacefully down the aisle and onto the Fulton Chapel stage.
“We walked inside chanting What you gonna do?' Do it to 'em.',” Mayfield says. “We got up on the stage and John Donald, our leader at the time, grabbed a microphone and started talking. The person at the control board turned it off. We all followed John's lead and started grabbing microphones and trying to speak; the guy turned them all off.
“Now, all the time the Up With People' group is still singing, and right in the midst of all this they suddenly switched to What Color is God's Skin?' … When they started singing that, we started responding, He sho' ain't white.'
“Then we got word the Highway Patrol was outside, and we said, All right; that's what we've been waiting on.' Then we peacefully left the stage and marched outside where some 60 or 70 Highway Patrol cars were waiting on us.”
While 48 protesters had taken the stage, word spread about what was happening, and more black students rushed to Fulton Chapel to be arrested with their friends. In all, 61 students were arrested on the spot, another 18 were arrested for trespassing nearby and 10 more at Fortune's home.
Most, including Mayfield and Cole, were sent to the local jail, but some were taken to Parchman, the state's maximum security prison. Though they were all released unharmed the next day, it was then that many white student leaders and white faculty members also decided enough was enough and began criticizing Fortune and other administrators.
The backlash
After the Student Judicial Council recommended one-year suspensions for Mayfield, Cole and a half-dozen others, and was upheld by Fortune, more voices of displeasure were heard – from the state College Board, a federal court and even more white students and faculty members.
A letter to the editor of the campus newspaper, The Daily Mississippian, pointed out the discrepancies in the punishment for the peaceful protest by black students and the recent rowdy party behavior of white students on Fraternity Row, where garbage dumpsters were set afire and fireworks thrown into passing cars.
While the black students were sent to jail and suspended, the white students were rarely punished.
The letter, signed by a dozen white students, including Dick Molpus and former football standout Frank Trapp, concluded:
“As white, middle-class, native Mississippians, we regret that the Administration has accepted the recommendations of the Judical Council and hope that in the future more moderate, more understanding, and, above all, more equitable methods of dealing with our University's black students be employed.”
And that, Reardon says, is what makes the whole “Up With People” episode so significant. “On the one side you had people asking what they were doing,” he says, “and on the other you had people asking why were they sent to Parchman and why were they kicked out of school.
“It changed student life on the Ole Miss campus. The black students set the tone by saying it's all right to speak up, and, now, there were some white students saying the same thing.” Molpus, who would become Mississippi Secretary of State, terms the incident “a galvanizing moment” in Ole Miss' history.
“It was a true awakening for many of us,” says Molpus, who was a junior from Philadelphia and at the concert that fateful night. “What happened afterwards brought fraternity guys and sorority girls together with football players and pre-med students to say This isn't right.'
“It was galvanizing for so many of us, because it was so obvious what happened to those students was just wrong. … Most of us had just rocked along through Ole Miss without giving race relations much thought, but not after this.”
Contact Danny McKenzie at 678-1605 or danny.mckenzie@djournal.com
The “Up With People” protest in February 1970 came during a tumultuous time on university campuses. In a stretch from early 1969 to mid-1970, the nation saw:
– Four students killed and nine wounded on the Kent State University campus by members of the Army National Guard.
– Two killed on the Jackson State University campus by Jackson police.
– A gathering of 100,000 protesters in Washington, with only 10 days' notice, to march on the White House.
– Thirty ROTC buildings burned or bombed.
– The mobilization of National Guard units on 21 college campuses in 16 states.