OXFORD, Miss. -- Amid the flurry of Confederate flags, the beat of the school's marching band and the traditional shouts of "Hoddy Toddy!" that filled the town square, 18-year-old Gaines Williams was a picture of dread.
There he stood with several friends on the very edge of the pep rally, a lanky fellow with arms folded, eyes scanning the exuberant throngs. He was new in town, here to begin his college career at the University of Mississippi, but his mind was filled with other things.
He missed his home in Indianapolis, 400 miles to the north. He missed his girlfriend even more. But worst of all, he felt horribly isolated, he said. It went beyond homesickness to something much more basic and unmistakable, something reflected in the makeup of the crowd.
Williams and his three friends were the only blacks.
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"Up north, they joked about it when I told them I was going to Ole Miss. They said, 'Watch out. You're gonna go down there and get lynched,' " said Williams, whose prowess in the 400-meter run earned him a full athletic scholarship to the school. It was the best offer of several he received.
"I knew it wouldn't be that bad, but I really expected more black people," he said.
"It's not bad, Gaines. It's the best school in the South," boasted a friend, Melvin Dean, a cheerful, 21-year-old senior from Tupelo, Miss., who was taking the younger man under his wing. "If you're black and you come here you're going to get an education -- one in books, one in life."
Nearly a quarter of a century after a senior named James H. Meredith endured tear gas and gunfire to become the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi, the process -- the adventure -- of racial integration goes on here. This year there are 526 blacks in Ole Miss's student body of 9,053 and in many ways they form an integral part of campus life.
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Amid the magnolias, oaks and Ponderosa pines that grace this historic campus, blacks and whites saunter to and from classes, their mere presence together a sharp contrast to the tension and mob violence that marked the autumn of 1962 -- a year that predates the births of most of today's students.
Yet there is still tension here. It is much less stark or measurable but nonetheless profound. It is a natural, modern and perhaps even healthy tension bred by a mingling of races and social classes whose history has been marked by exceptional conflict.
Ole Miss is the kind of place where many of the South's brightest and most ambitious young black minds come face to face with power for the first time. Many find occasional friction, hostility and loneliness in that meeting. But just as many seem to emerge with dignity and strength.
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At first glance, it seems like any other state university. Blacks are represented at the forefront of achievement here. One of last year's leading scholars was a black student, Damon Moore, now in his first year of medical school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The Ole Miss Rebels' football team is led by a black quarterback, Chris Osgood.
Even the women's six-member cheerleading squad -- the school's most visible vestige of white exclusivity -- is on the verge of integration. Lori Williams, an 18-year-old sophomore from Starkville, Miss., was recently elected an alternate member.
But to be black here is to also understand how deeply the experience of race still runs. While blacks make up just 5.8 percent of the student body, the faculty and administration are even less integrated. The university has only 18 black professors in a faculty of 383.
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An entrenched system of 23 Greek fraternities and sororities that provide the mainstream of social life is all white. The cafeterias and other student meeting places generally are segregated by choice. The only places blacks and whites converge in a common purpose seem to be the classrooms and the athletic fields.
"The intensity of the black experience is what sets Ole Miss apart," said Ronald Bailey, the university's director of Afro-American studies, who has also taught at Cornell and Northwestern universities. "Most of the blacks are from small towns in Mississippi and the contiguous states, and many of them are first-generation college students. I think most have had some interaction with whites, but my sense is they come here and find a different class of whites."
BMWs and Mercedes in the student parking lots make the point. Ole Miss is known to many as the "Country Club of the South."
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"There's more wealth and money here than I've ever seen. College kids with these kinds of cars. Most of us don't even have cars," said Nadine Dunlap, a junior from Bay Springs, Miss., whose mother, a housekeeper, "made me feel proud of what I did have, even if it wasn't much . . . . "
"It makes you wonder why do some whites have so much and blacks have so little," adds Stacey Bracey, 21, a senior from Pembroke, Ky., who is vice president of the Black Student Union. "Maybe somewhere along the way they took it from my grandparents, but I'm not going to sit here and brood about it. I'm here to learn what I can . . . . "
At the pep rally held the evening before the school's first football game of the season, Dean, the senior, turned to Williams and a visitor and said, "You see, these are mostly rich kids. Their parents give them everything. We gotta stand on our own."
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And they do. Smart, ambitious and energetic, most chose to come here instead of to nearby black universities such as Alcorn State and Jackson State that attracted previous generations of black students.
For many, the choice was as simple as recognizing that a degree from this school likely would carry more weight in their chosen professions.
"I know if I have children, I want to be able to give them a better life," said Dunlap, who is studying business management and plans to attend law school. "Ole Miss is the best place to start. This degree matters a lot."
At Ole Miss, southern lore and legend are impossible to ignore. The Confederate flag is a common sight in dormitory windows, and the school's most cherished landmark is a granite statue of a Confederate martyr. In the school newspaper, it is not uncommon to see advertisements for student meetings of the "Sons of the Confederacy" and "Old South" parties.
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Even the school's nickname, "Ole Miss," is rooted in a distant time and state of mind. Originally picked as the title of the school's yearbook in 1897, the term was taken from "the language of the antebellum 'Darkie' who knew the wife of his owner by no other title than 'Ole Miss,' " according to an October 1936 issue of the school newspaper, the Daily Mississippian. ". . . It connoted all the admiration and reverence accorded womanhood of the Old South."
In short, the school and this little town -- the home and last resting place of novelist William Faulkner -- form a rich web of heritage and history, a place of extraordinary contradiction where the present strikes a careful truce with the past.
"Some universities are just concrete and steel," said Gerald Turner, the school chancellor, a slender man given to punctuating his words with a chop of his hand. "Ole Miss is human life . . . . The whole range of human emotion has been played out here and it continues to be so today."
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No group of students feels that range more keenly than the black students. To ease their transition from home to the university, the school has set up a mentor program that pairs black freshman with teachers and administrators who help introduce them to the potentially alien social environment here.
Still, many of these students can recite incidents, gestures or remarks hurled their way that were patently racist.
"I'd never been called nigger by anyone in my life until I came to Ole Miss," said Stacey Bracey. "It was 3 in the morning, and I was walking from the computer center. A bunch of white guys in a jeep rode by and yelled, 'Hey, nigger girl!' I wish I had a brick. I said to myself, 'Okay, racism, here it is, smack in the face . . . . ' "
Senior Victor Shine, 22, a track runner, remembers the time he went out for a morning run last year and came across a young white fellow with a leashed terrier. "My dog don't like runners, and he don't like niggers," he said.
Lori Williams, the cheerleader, remembers just one racial incident. It happened last year when she was dancing with a school group known as the Rebelettes just before the start of a football game. Someone hollered, 'Hey, colored girl, don't you know it's too cold to be wearing that.'
"That didn't happen here, though," she said with an ironic smile. "That was at Notre Dame."
Phyllis Keyes, 20, a soft-spoken senior from New Albany, Miss., who heads the Black Student Union, recalls her first day as a freshman at Ole Miss. "I moved into my dorm and found my roommate was a white girl from New Orleans. We talked for a little while, then I went out for a few hours. When I came back, the girl and all her things were gone. She just moved out. I never saw her again.
"At Ole Miss you never forget who you are," Keyes said.
That feeling is perhaps better captured by the story of Keyes' relationship with Jimmy Manning, a white classmate who also hails from New Albany and was Keyes' best friend throughout high school. Their northeastern Mississippi homes were separated by a gravel road two miles long. They met in 1971 when the Union County schools were first integrated, Manning recalled, adding that their families' roots in northeastern Mississippi ran equally deep.
"A couple of years ago, we found out that our grandparents worked as sharecroppers for the same man," said Manning. "Phyllis and I were always competing in school, and both of us wanted to go to Ole Miss. We were really good friends for a long time."
But something happened soon after they arrived at Ole Miss. "We went on seeing each other, but one day my roommate told me, 'Look, people just don't do that around here. You're gonna get a reputation. If you want to join a fraternity, it's gonna to hold you back . . . . '
"But it works both ways," said Manning, who originally hoped to join a fraternity but ultimately decided not to try. "Phyllis caught some trouble from a few black students because she had a white friend. We've had to put up with a lot just to stay friends here."
Morris Lewis, a senior from Milwaukee who heads Phi Beta Sigma -- the only black fraternity house on campus and a hub of black social life -- said such pressure to conform or exclude is not always bad. "The thing about Ole Miss is that it makes you appreciate the need to band together as a race," he said, loosening his thin black tie. "Keeping your identity is really important."
In contrast to the rows of stately, antebellum-style houses that lodge the white fraternities and sororities, Phi Beta Sigma is a tiny one-story frame house beside of a busy highway several blocks from the center of campus.
"Black students in general are on the outskirts here, but don't get the wrong idea," said Lewis, a second cousin of Meredith who is 53 now and works as a financial planner in Cincinnati.
"I love Ole Miss. We need to encourage more blacks to come here. It's so easy to give the place a bad rap because of its history, but it's no worse than any other school as far as race, and probably much better than many up north.
"At least here we're honest about it," he went on. "I believe in 'separate but equal' because basically you have to ask yourself, what do you have in common? I think there's only so far you can integrate."
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner, one of the finest chroniclers of race relations in the South, declared, "I decline to accept the end of man. I believe that man will not merely endure: He will prevail." Those words are engraved in the facade of the school library.
To David Sansing, a witty, white-haired professor with arching eyebrows who has taught southern and Mississippi history at the school for 20 years, blacks at Ole Miss are the finest embodiment of Faulkner's belief. He also thinks racial integration has reached a particularly difficult stage.
"Things are a lot better now than they used to be, but it still isn't easy here for blacks. Twenty-five years ago, people were preparing to dig foxholes here. That's how serious it was. Now the racism is simply personal. White students don't mind having black students on campus, but they don't have to associate with them . . . .
"During the football and basketball games, I'm constantly amazed at how hard they can whoop and holler and wave that flag for the black athletes, but once the game ends that separatism returns . . . .
"Blacks who come here have got a lot of guts," Sansing went on. "They are going to be the 'prevailers,' as Mr. Faulkner said. They've got to have a lot of guts and self-confidence to survive here."
A few moments later, Sansing invited a visitor to question the 40 or so students in his history course about race relations at Ole Miss. They sat on three tiers in the lecture hall and were reticent at first. But after a couple of minutes, the class, which included three blacks, sprang to life.
"At Kent State, they made a memorial for those students who were killed protesting Vietnam. Back in 1962, [two] people were killed here when James Meredith came, but they just patched up all the bullet holes and went on like it never happened," said a white senior from Falls Church, Va.
"Why should anybody want to remember something as ugly as that?" came a voice from another corner.
"Because it's history," a third white student quickly replied. "There's blacks here, and blood was spilled to make it happen . . . . "
"Everybody . . . thinks people in Mississippi hate blacks. You look at Ole Miss, and you'll see this place is a leader in making the transition from the Old South to the New South," came still another voice. "I'm proud to say I'm from here because so much progress has been made . . . . We may be a little scared of change, but we aren't ignorant here and we're not savages."
A moment later, in response to a question about the origins of racism, a bespectacled white student in the last row stated, "If there is separation at Ole Miss, it's by choice. I think there's a lot of unwritten rules about race here . . . that still determine how you're supposed to act."
"But that starts long before Ole Miss," answered a blond youth from Laurel, Miss.. "My parents put me in a private academy when I was in the fourth grade. I remember going to the headmaster's office and seeing this picture of [Confederacy President] Jefferson Davis. That's the kind of place it was.
"One day in biology class we had a discussion about crocodiles," he went on. "The teacher asked, 'Can you tell me what crocodiles are good for?' You know what he said? 'They're real good at keeping niggers from fishing in your pond.'
"I know I've got prejudice," he said softly. "That's where I come from."
The three black students generally remained quiet until a young woman in the back row said, "To tell you the truth, I transferred here this year from Alcorn State, and I've never been around white people. All I can say is Ole Miss is a culture shock . . . . "
On a recent Friday night, that mix of culture was displayed at an old saloon in town known as The Gin. The place was packed with students dancing to the reggae music of a white foursome known as "The Blue Beats."
"Those blacks, they can play the sports, but they don't mix," said Joe Polk, a freshman whose father is a Cadillac dealer in Hattiesburg, Miss. He sat at a table sipping beer with two friends. "Some folks are just raised that way. I haven't run into many blacks since I've been here, except at the frat house. We got some good cooks there."
Upstairs, meantime, tapping her feet against a railing, a 21-year-old black student named Rosemary Taylor recalled how her father, grandfather and uncles worked at Ole Miss most of their lives, cutting grass, cleaning the cafeterias and maintaining the grounds long before integration.
"I think my family is really proud of me," she said over the din, standing with several white friends. "I have a lot of relatives really close by, but I grew up in Chicago. My folks moved there in 1958. My father told me he helped build some of the dormitories here. When I told him I was coming down here to school, he just smiled and said, 'You know, those dorms weren't built for people like you, Rosemary.' I could tell he was really pleased."
The next evening students, alumni and faculty converged on Jackson, a three-hour drive away, for the football game against Memphis State. It is traditional for Ole Miss partisans to dress up for the opening game, and many showed up in suits and ties and evening gowns. During most of the contest, the bleachers seemed a sea of red, white and blue Confederate flags.
At one point, when Osgood, the sophomore quarterback, fumbled the ball, a loud, drunken snarl tumbled from Section 6. "I told you, Ray! I told you that nigger'd mess up!" The young man shouted the phrase twice more before several friends told him to quiet down.
"People act stupid when they start drinking," said Denise Howard, 20, a pre-med student from Water Valley, Miss. one of only a few blacks in the crowd. "Stuff like that can happen anywhere. You never really get used to it, but this is the real world here . . . . "
An informal survey of 50 Ole Miss students in the stands revealed that about half didn't know who James Meredith was. John Atkins was one who did. The 21-year-old senior from Ruston, La., merely smiled and nodded when a stranger asked if he recognized the name.
"My grandfather was Ross Barnett," he said, naming the former governor of Mississippi who seized control of the school in 1962 in a vain attempt to prevent Meredith from enrolling. "I think my family will always know that name . . . . When I think about it, it just seems like ancient history."
All of the black students in the crowd instantly recognized the name and knew what it stood for, none more so than a shy senior named Robert Cole who was seated several rows above Atkins.
A starting centerfielder on the Ole Miss baseball team last year, Cole, 20, transferred to the school in 1984 from a junior college near Meridian, Miss. He had never heard of Meredith till then.
"I took a history class and remember reading about him, all the stuff he went through just to make it here," he said. "I thought it was really brave. He set the trend for getting more of us in . . . .
"Later," he went on, laughing, "I had to take a test. I didn't do too well, but I'll never forget one question I did get right: 'Who was the first black person admitted to Ole Miss?' It felt good answering it."
Cole, the only black player on the baseball team, thought about that test last spring while awaiting his turn at bat during a game against Mississippi State in Starkville. Several white State students in the second row started heckling him unmercifully, he said, wincing on recollection.
"Hey, you! Hey, boy!" one fellow jeered. Cole said he listened, stiffened and waited, knowing that a racial slur was sure to come.
"Hey, I'm talkin' to you!" a second voice shouted louder still. Cole stiffened even more.
Then he heard a third fellow yell, "Hey you, James Meredith!"
Cole was so surprised, he broke out laughing. He lifted his head, turned to face his hecklers and proudly gave a wave of his hand, he said. He stood up and then headed toward the batter's box, still smiling as the first pitch was delivered.
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