Yesterday afternoon, Tate Reeves tweeted that he would protect the constitutional rights of free speech for the pro-Palestenian Protesters at Ole Miss. I tweeted how much I appreciate his dedication to keeping the peace. An hour later, he tweeted “I love Mississippi” over a video of frat boys chanting “We Want Trump” and singing the national anthem.
Tate has a sterling education. As I understand it, he made pretty good grades at Millsaps and impressed some of his professors as a conscientious student. His memory of the history of Mississippi, however, failed him.
On Sept. 29, 1962, my mother still had another eight months to go before delivering me. She was well enough to attend a football game in Jackson with my father. At that game, the University of Mississippi vs. Kentucky, the Governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, delivered a speech vowing to never allow a colored student to enter the University of Mississippi, which ended with a paragraph beginning with his fervent declaration, “I love Mississippi!” If you’ve never seen the video, I’ll include it below:
The next day, President Kennedy federalized National Guard Troops in Mississippi to quell the violent protests in Oxford.
As you might imagine, people on Twitter who remembered their Mississippi history better than Tate immediately began to drag him about this. The Governor of Mississippi can’t speak on Twitter without twenty people attacking him about the TANF scandal. He almost always gets ratioed on Twitter. That means there are more comments on his tweets than likes. Sometimes, many more. It’s not a good sign.
I have more faith in college students than I do in political pundits on the internet. College students will act like college students, and people who decide they are pundits try to shape the world the way they see it.
I’ve known Clay Edwards for a long time. Although we see the exact same things in Mississippi, he interprets them very differently from me. Clay tweeted that he hates Ole Miss, but there were communists protesting there and he appreciated the frat boys “taking care” of the situation. I tweeted back, “Which ones are the communists, again.” Palestinians are many things, but they’re not actually communists. They’re not even liberal. Your average Palestinian is far more conservative than Clay and all his readers.
Russ Latino tweeted that he hoped frat boys at Ole Miss “answered the call” and dealt with the protestors. I immediately tweeted back that I didn’t appreciate him inciting frat boys. He said I was “silly.”
I texted another conservative blogger I’ve known for a while. “Goddamnit (name redacted), these kids hang on to every word you say. If you tell them to riot, they will riot. This is not 1962; they will get arrested, suspended, and expelled, all because of the words YOU SAID.”
My words sometimes make people think I am pro-Palestinian. I am not. I’m pro nobody-gets-blown-the-fuck-up. That means sometimes I’m upset with Palestine, sometimes I’m upset with Iran, and sometimes I’m upset with Israel, and sometimes, SOMETIMES I’m upset with the President of the United States.
There’s a woman I know who lives and teaches in Tel Aviv. There was a time when she might have been my second fiance and my first wife. That didn’t happen because, even though she wasn’t a practicing Jew, her parents were, and they were of ailing health in Israel, so that’s where she went. When the attack happened in Israel in October, I couldn’t reach her for three days. Even though she wasn’t near where the attacks landed, there was no phone service for a day, and I couldn’t message her on WhatsApp or Facebook.
I learned from a man and a woman I know from Millsaps and Galloway that their child was in Israel. They were very concerned about his welfare. There’s a fairly close-knit group of senior Millsaps people, and they were all praying for him. Fortunately, he made it out of Israel and is in the US now. There’s something uniquely distressing when somebody you’ve always known and respected is afraid for their child. It immediately becomes not a “they” problem but an “us” problem.
When the Israel counterstrike started, I tweeted, “I presume the land Israel takes from Palestine in this action will never return to Palestine.” I think I worded that poorly. What I meant was that forces who don’t live in Palestine attack Israel from Palestine, and Palestine suffers and loses ground again. This has been happening since I was a child. Countries surrounding Israel have taken turns using the Palestinian people in their attacks on Israel, which are clearly proxy attacks on the US, and very poor arab people living in Palestine who have nothing to do with it suffer the most.
Texting my conservative blogger friend, I said “Look, these boys aren’t that much different from you or me at nineteen. If you held up a map and asked them to find Israel, they’d point to India—but you, YOU want them to put their ass on the line so you can get clicks on your tweet.” What I didn’t say, but what I thought, was that there were conservative bloggers in Mississippi, trying to get frat boys, who just want approval from people they admire, to carry out attacks they’re unwilling to do themselves, to prove a point that doesn’t really impact the frat boys. There were no burning American flags. There were no shouts of “Death to America!” There were ten or fifteen arab kids and ten or fifteen of their friends, trying to change the world with their little protest in Mississippi, quite a bit away from Palestine.
At the 100th anniversary of the Millsaps Players, I got to spend over an hour talking with Brent Lefavor and Jazmin Gargoum, just like we used to do when she was a student. Brent has a remarkable education. Besides theater, he’s taught me about so many things. Jazmin was a brilliant student, largely because she is actually brilliant. As a freshman, Jazmin wrote an essay entitled “My Daddy: The Terrorist.” Her daddy wasn’t actually a terrorist, but he was a Lybian immigrant, and twenty-five years ago, in Mississippi, nearly every Arab was considered a terrorist, and that was her point. Jazmin has lived and worked in DC for twenty-something years now; I was grateful just to have her back for a day or two.
Since we’re all reasonable people, while Sam Sparks printed up and stapled programs for the night’s performance, Brent, Jazmin, and I decided to sort out this Israel-Palestine business since nobody else could. The conversation soon became “the history of the United States in the Middle East” and we were drawing imaginary maps in the air with our fingers, and I guess that’s my point. We three, I would say, were unusually well educated on the situation and unusually interested in it, with unique and unusual perspectives, but I could draw an imaginary map of Lybia, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan, but pretty soon, I got lost and confused. Brent tried to help, but he just made it worse. Jazmin, being brighter than either of us, pulled out her phone and found an actual map.
Understanding the situation in the Middle East is complicated and difficult. We three had to use the Internet to make our imaginary map, and Jazmine is actually brilliant—and more than that, she’s from there!
One of the top actors in the Millsaps Players is a third-generation Iranian-American. Sam is looking for plays for her this summer for the next season. She’s that good. Her father went to Millsaps, as did her Aunt and other members of her family. In two generations, there have been as many Azordegans at Millsaps as there have been Campbells in four. I visited with her while the cast put on makeup for “Eurydice.” We talked about her family, that I’ve known for quite a while now. We talked about the complicated history of the Iranian Revolution, the Rise and Fall of the Sha, and Mississippi to try and explain why an Iranian would move to Mississippi, of all places, when things got uncomfortable in Iran. The other students giggled. They had no idea what any of this meant. They’re not supposed to; they’re nineteen.
I’m not necessarily against the idea of protesting. Under the right circumstances, it can be exactly the right thing to do. When I was a child, some Millsaps students and professors joined students from Jackson State and marched downtown to protest the shooting of students at Jackson State. The date was May 16, 1970, twelve days after the Kent State shootings. Every time I hear the phrase “Kent State Shootings,” I’m tempted to say, “What about the Jackson State Shootings.”
Millsaps and Jackson State students march past the Office Supply Company, Jackson, MS. May 1970.
I mentioned that they marched past the Office Supply Company because that’s where my father was watching but not interfering. Daddy was on the Board of Millsaps, and I’m a third-generation graduate of Millsaps. My nephew is a fourth-generation graduate of Millsaps.
I mention this because tomorrow is the fifty-fourth anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University. As these pro-Palestinian protests grow across the United States, nearly all the journalists I’ve read writing about them above a certain age have invoked what happened in 1970.
There’s more to it than that, though. In 1970, the Governor of Mississippi had an actual spy agency at his disposal to identify “agitators” and “communist infiltrators” in some of the people protesting for social change in Mississippi. That sounds insane, but it is absolutely true. As these young people marched past the Office Supply Company on their way to the New Capitol, across the street from Galloway United Methodist Church, there were men in hats photographing them, photographing their car tags, and doing their best to identify the protestors for their files.
Forty Years later, a court order opened the files to the State Sovereignty Commission. The Rev. Ed King petitioned to keep the files secret. He didn’t want forty-year-old potentially damaging information coming out about men he knew and worked with. He knew what kind of information the State Sovereignty Commission gathered. If they had, say, forty-year-old evidence that a man was a homosexual or some other condition condemned in the seventies, he didn’t want their personal lives exposed.
When the files were released, I went through them to find out what they had to say about my Father, Grandfather, or Uncle. I found that the first item in the file about my Uncle Boyd was that the police had arrested a black man and were working to get a confession out of him when he admitted that he sometimes did yard work for my Uncle Boyd. In the mind of that investigator, that made my Uncle Boyd suspicious.
I say all this to make the point that particularly well-attended protests can be dangerous. Despite their good intentions, had any of these boys gotten in a fight or done something in the heat of the moment, it would have seriously impacted their academic careers. The same is true of the twenty-five or so pro-Palestinian students. I had nightmares of some frat boy from Sardis getting arrested for this when he couldn’t identify Israel on a map.
Nothing bad happened. The Chancellor, the Oxford Police, and the Campus Police ensured nothing bad happened. I don’t have anything but praise for them. There were five or six conservative bloggers and podcasters who just about got me Pissed off. They were absolutely encouraging violence—violence they weren’t in danger of. They wanted some drunk frat boys to throw a punch so they didn’t have to. I have a problem with that.
There was very little, if any, “raising of awareness” or education about what’s going on in the Middle East. That part is a shame. I believe these kids had their hearts in the right place but not very much leadership.
To my way of thinking, the story Molly Minta submitted to Mississippi Today was possibly the most useful thing that happened all day. In it, she talked about Jana, an Arab American student whose father is from Jericho. Letting students know that there are people in their own classes with real-life experiences with these issues can be incredibly illuminating. She also got Jacob Batte, the University’s Media Relations Director, to clarify the school’s position on Israel and its investment in Israel. Her afternoon of work did more to improve this situation than either the protestors or the counter-protestors.