Ole Miss Students Social Networking Against Klan

This image appears on the Facebook page of Students Against the KKK at Ole Miss.

by Darrell Creecy
November 20, 2009

The Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan plans to protest the University of Mississippi's decision to drop a controversial pep song Saturday before the football game against Louisiana State University. In response, Ole Miss students of all races are using Facebook to organize opposition and counter-demonstrations.

The Klan told Oxford media that its members will appear in full Klan regalia at the university in front of Fulton Chapel on Nov. 21 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. to hold a peaceful protest on the right to free speech. "We'll be there with robes on. It will probably just be a silent protest," KKK Great Titan Shane Tate of Tupelo told the Daily Mississippian. "We don't believe in hurting anybody, and we're not going to come up there with guns and ammo, but we will defend ourselves if we have to."

The chancellor has not said that spectators could not yell out the phrase, which indeed would be violation of their constitutional right to free speech at a public event at a public university. He did ask students to not chant it, however, and later asked the band director to drop the song.

The Oxford Eagle reported on its Web site today that Nathan Ray Nunley, 20, a white student from Tupelo, started a Facebook group this week -- Students Against the KKK at Ole Miss -- to counteract the inevitable bad publicity that the Klan is trying to kick up for Ole Miss and the state.

"I personally feel that if students don't show proper resistance to the KKK's presence, then the whole country will assume that the University of Mississippi condones their message. This is unacceptable for this institution's reputation," Nunley told the Oxford Eagle.

The Klan is protesting Chancellor Dan Jones' request to band director David Wilson last week to stop playing the song, "From Dixie With Love," at school events, including football games, due to students chanting "The South Shall Rise Again" during the song. The chant is a Confederate rallying cry and offensive to many students and spectators, as is the song "Dixie." The fight song combines "Dixie" with "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

"We live in the antebellum south which is based on slavery, and 'Dixie' is a song that celebrates that time," Mark Potok, the director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Ala., told the Jackson Free Press. "Organizations like the KKK are still living in a disillusioned world."

Tate, the great titan, told the Daily Mississippian that his ancestors fought in the Confederate War, but weren't slave owners. "[B]ut they stood tall and fought for the South because the South was being invaded," he said.

In a prepared statement, Tate tried to draw on racism against the United States president to draw support for his klavern's cause. He said that several speakers will address the state of the college and the nation, from their point of view: "They will be focused on Ole Miss and the current administration that is following in the footsteps of Barack Hussein Obama as he drives our nation into the ground."

"I think I'm gonna sleep in," Brandon Irvine, an opinion columnist for the Daily Mississippian, told the Jackson Free Press today. Irvine says that this issue is far over-rated and that the KKK is "all talk." It was rumored around campus that the KKK would protest at the Ole Miss vs. Tennessee game last week, but they did not show.

"It's just so not relevant," Irvine said. "If people would just let it go, it wouldn't still be an issue."

Another student group, One Mississippi, is also planning a counter-demonstration and met at the Delta Gamma sorority house Thursday night to strategize. According to its Facebook page, which has more than 200 members, of various races, the group wants to use the recent fight-song controversy to have a conversation about race at Ole Miss.

"Dialogue is the base of One Mississippi, in which we try to foster honest and frank conversation about the present trials that plague the Ole Miss campus. Not only does dialogue bring awareness, but it brings understanding," One Mississippi member Melissa Cole wrote on Facebook.

The group plans to give out T-shirts that say: "Turn your back on hate: I live by the UM creed," as well as "Unity" stickers.

Tate's Klan klavern also plans a lighting of the Christmas cross in Tupelo in December.

Darrell Creecy is an intern at the Jackson Free Press. Donna Ladd also contributed to this report.

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Also see: "From Dixie With Love," a JFP column about the controversy by former Daily Mississippian editor Bryan Doyle, followed by a rich thread of comments about the controversy.

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