Women aren’t supposed to get angry, no matter what people do or say to us. We’re supposed to be feminine, compliant and silent about what insults us, hurts us or gets under our skin. Our lovely lips are supposed to be continually stiff, and for God’s sake it’s not ladylike to talk back, even to call out lies told about us, our loved ones, or even our state and our history.
This women’s curse of compliance bounced through my brain last week when I read Torsheta Jackson’s Feb. 25 story about the threatening letters the White House sent out to educational institutions including my alma mater Mississippi State University demanding that any policy remotely friendly to diversity, equity and/or inclusion had to end post-haste. Today’s powers-that-brood are bent on ending any consideration of “race as a factor in admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, scholarships, prizes, sanctions, discipline or other institutional practices,” our education reporter wrote.
“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate nor segregate students based on race nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” the feds commanded in the letter.
My alma mater held its maroon baseball cap carefully in hand when it released a statement in response: “MSU will be assessing our compliance in light of these new interpretations over the next few days. As we always do, we will include leadership from across our campus community throughout this process. While some changes and adjustments will be required, our people—our students, faculty and staff—will remain our top priority as we work together through any needed changes and adjustments required by these new federal directives.” My friend (sometimes frenemy, depending on the story I’m doing) Sid Salter, from my hometown of Philadelphia, Miss., is the vice president for strategic communications at State; he declined further comment to my reporter. To be fair, he and other university leaders are in a tough spot here. I get it.
This effort by the feds to tell my alma mater to try to stop making up for its own abysmal race history makes me angry, but for an even deeper reason than you might suspect. It angers me because Mississippi State, like most universities in the country, lied to me by omission when I was a student there about its founders’ and leaders’ history of denying equal access to education and opportunity to Black Mississippians—not to mention those leaders’ role in intentionally creating and promulgating the exact intentional inequity that DEI programs are designed to help lessen.
For instance, State’s founding President Stephen D. Lee was one of the nation’s most vicious and loquacious leaders in the movement to rehabilitate the image of the Confederacy and to censor textbooks in U.S. schools and colleges. And he led efforts to fire academics who wanted to just teach the truth.
Organized, Upper-crust Power Moves
Neither my classes at State—even in Lee or (James Z.) George Hall—or any of my professors there in the early 1980s used my university’s history to teach me and my fellow students about the perils of the racist systems built on that campus. They didn’t use it to show the perils of handing the reins of our future over to megalomaniac bigots who somehow think it’s a good idea to hide and bury real history. I knew and had written plenty about the University of Mississippi’s historic race controversies, but nary a fact about MSU’s had entered my consciousness until 2020 after I co-founded the Mississippi Free Press just before a supposed racial and historic reckoning swept the nation.
My anger over being lied to about my people’s violent history started when I was a teenager, when I became livid over finding out local white men—including the man who repaired my birthstone ring or the distant cousin who pumped our gas and gave me Nabs—had viciously murdered three civil-rights workers and largely gotten away with it. At a young age, I realized nobody was teaching me vital history lessons about my own hometown. I mean, what the hell?
So when freelancer John McGee started working on a story about an effort to face racism in Starkville in the present day, I told him I would poke at the area’s race history. Now, I knew I’d find violent bigots who systematically denied Black people opportunities to overcome the legacy of slavery and discrimination. That’s true in all 82 Mississippi counties and in all these 50 states.
What I didn’t expect to find was just what a horrific racist MSU’s founding hero president was—not garden-variety bigotry, but organized, upper-crust power moves to put an expensive boot on Black people’s necks and force subservience (and thus cheap labor) for generations.
In my part of our 2020 story, I wrote in detail about what my history deep-dive revealed about Stephen D. Lee, as I remembered passing his bust everyday on the drill field and even gathering for a midnight meeting in front of him when I was a member of the university Senate there. I quickly reached the conclusion that his bust in such a place of honor is far worse than the unnamed Confederate sentinel then guarding the gate of that university up north whose nickname is also that of the white slave mistress. Lee was a real man, not a random statue, and his efforts hurt many people. Honoring him is a direct hit.
The Stephen D. Lee bust guards over a tradition of keeping a real man’s history quiet. Put simply, he wanted the war to defend and expand slavery turned into a badge of honor, and it wouldn’t do to allow textbooks and historians to tell the truth about it. I wrote then: “Stephen D. Lee’s work to censor textbooks and classrooms was a resounding success—and it went further than false equivalency of the two sides of the Civil War and why they fought. It was openly about embedding white supremacy into the historic ethos of the United States.”
Lee, a staunch southern Democrat, was commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans and a popular speaker at conventions as he worked to “reconcile” white Civil War soldiers from the north and the south behind a sanitized and bleached version of the Civil War. Forgotten in his telling were the southern declarations of secession, which make it crystal-clear why slave-owning leaders were rebel-yelling their way into war.
Near the Lee bust at State is George Hall, named for the execrable racist James Z. George who wrote the damn Jim Crow disenfranchisement laws, among other horrors—laws on the books until brave civil-rights volunteers forced a local and national reckoning that, in turn, caused a political-party switch over race after northern Dems supported civil-rights legislation. He, Lee and other of their buddy bigots, along with powerful women in the United Daughters of the Confederacy like racist Georgia doyenne Mildred “Miss Millie” Rutherford, conspired regularly to push Lost Cause lies, what I called in 2020 a “revisionist crusade … necessary for the sake of ‘our children and the world,’ as the college president put it.” (He meant white children, of course.)
Playing the Victim to Maintain White Supremacy
Suffice it to say, there are parallels between Lee’s crusade to hide history then; Joseph Goebbels’ book burnings in Berlin in 1933; and the Project 2025 plan to ban teaching of American history that does not please white people who want “to put it behind us” instead of face truth and, possibly, honest reconciliation as a nation.
Lee talked out of both sides of his mouth, claiming not to condone censorship; he was an education university prez after all. But the then-Mississippi A&M president said in one of his popular speeches, this one in Charleston, S.C., in 1899, that “we do strongly recommend that the influence of this Association be exerted in banishing from the schools any books which teach false lessons, either of fact or sentiment.” The “false lessons” were actually the exact uncomfortable truth; down was up as we’re seeing now.
I banged these words out angrily in 2020: “Lee, the UCV and friends targeted any textbooks or lessons that told the now-verifiable truth about Confederate motives, slavery and white supremacy, including their beliefs in ‘the premise of man’s innate inequality,” as historian Fred Arthur Bailey wrote in his 1991 Georgia Historical Quarterly piece about the core belief behind racism.” Again, we’re hearing these tropes about who should be born and who banned all over again today from men who should know better.
Of course, as racists have done throughout our history and still, Lee and friends played the wink-wink victim. That is, it was unfair for actual facts to show exactly what they fought for and openly tried to maintain, including through overt Jim Crow laws: white supremacy.
Today, we’re told that any possible effort at inclusion, reversing inequitable systems or even striving for basic team diversity (which is good for business, duh) are unacceptable and actually discriminatory toward the white people who have long benefitted from the actions back in Lee’s time, then throughout Jim Crow and into the present. Not to mention, we’re watching extremely unqualified people—often white men with horrifying pasts—taking over powerful and decisive jobs seemingly with the top goal of ousting anybody but white men and those who wash their feet.
Seriously, to What End?
So, yes, this leap back into the past makes me angry. It infuriates me that I come from uneducated white people in Neshoba County who bought into the power games of wealthy racists, and it never helped them one iota. It makes me angry that we’ve had Mississippi leaders of both major parties in recent decades who have used racist politics to either maintain power or try to wrest it away from the other party. It makes me angry that Mississippi leaders like Haley Barbour and Trent Lott helped nationalize the Southern Strategy of looking backward to get white votes in order for the powerful to thrive when they could have stepped up to lead us in a new direction. And it’s long made me angry how complicit so much American media have been as this unfolded before our eyes.
And it really makes me see red that these leaders, Democrats and Republicans over the years, have worked overtime to keep Mississippians, and Americans, from turning the corner on these horrific bigotries. (Bigotry has always been bipartisan and a power tool.) It seems every time we decide to work together, including to reverse horrific systems our ancestors embedded, here comes this clique of powerful white men again, ready to control, own and break it all. And it infuriates me that their pride seems to rise and fall over what today’s Americans think of great-great bigot granddads none of us never knew.
Instead, real men and lovers of true democracy would embrace the call—here and now in the 21st century—to be better than the sum of those people and their backward beliefs about other human beings.
If I can do it, why can’t they? What are they so afraid of?
More than anything, it royally ticks me off that those clinging to a violent, romantic past of controlling others are trying to indoctrinate new generations of Americans willing to follow them down a treacherous, hateful southern road that can destroy democracy and lead to death and destruction around the world.
Seriously, to what end? I want to believe we can be better than this.
Read Donna Ladd’s series of Democracy essays here.
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This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.