The University of Mississippi — Oxford, founded 1848. Some of it is glorious. Some of it is not. All of it happened here.
If you're running a hunt across this campus, it's worth knowing what you're running across. The University of Mississippi is one of the oldest public universities in the South, and its story is not a tidy one. It is a place that produced Nobel-adjacent literature and a battlefield casualty rate of one hundred percent, that fought integration with gunfire and then put a statue of the man it tried to keep out at the centre of campus.
Two decades before the war that would empty it
The Mississippi Legislature chartered the university in 1844. It opened in 1848 with a first class of around eighty students and four faculty — for years the only public university in the state. The Lyceum, the columned building at the head of the Circle, dates from that opening and is the oldest structure on campus. Keep it in mind; it comes back into this story more than once.
The student body enlisted almost to a man
When Mississippi seceded, the students formed Company A of the 11th Mississippi Infantry — the University Greys. So many enlisted that enrolment collapsed and the university simply closed for the duration of the war. The campus became a military hospital; a Confederate cemetery on the grounds holds the dead from it.
The university reopened in 1865. It is not an exaggeration to say an entire student generation did not come back.
The most consequential thing that ever happened on this campus
For its first 114 years the university admitted only white students. In 1962 James Meredith — a Mississippi native and nine-year Air Force veteran — won a federal court order compelling his admission. Governor Ross Barnett personally blocked it and was found in contempt.
On the night of 30 September 1962, as federal marshals escorted Meredith onto campus, a mob of several thousand attacked them. The riot ran through the night around the Lyceum. Two people were killed — Paul Guihard, a French journalist covering the story, and Ray Gunter, a local repairman — and hundreds were injured, many of them marshals. President Kennedy sent in federal troops. Meredith registered the next morning and attended class under armed guard.
He graduated in August 1963 with a degree in political science.
The columns of the Lyceum carry bullet scars from that night. They were never patched over.
Since 2006 a statue of Meredith has stood near the Lyceum, walking through a limestone doorway. The university that fought to keep him out now marks the spot where he walked in.
A long, public reckoning with symbols
Much of the last quarter-century here has been spent deciding which parts of the past to keep. Colonel Reb was retired as the on-field mascot in 2003 — a landshark eventually took the job. The band stopped playing "Dixie" in 2016. In July 2020 the Confederate monument that had stood at the Circle since the early 1900s was relocated to the Confederate cemetery elsewhere on campus.
None of these were quiet decisions. All of them were argued about loudly, for years, by people who love the place. That argument is part of the history too.
The town the campus sits in
William Faulkner lived here. He attended the university only briefly and never graduated — he later worked, badly and by his own account unhappily, as its postmaster — then wrote the Yoknapatawpha novels a mile away at Rowan Oak and won the Nobel Prize in 1949. The house is still standing and still open.
The Square is the centre of town. The Grove — ten green acres in the middle of campus — turns into one of the more famous tailgates in American college sport on autumn Saturdays. Archie and Eli Manning played football here. John Grisham went to the law school.