A staunch segregationist will no longer be the namesake for the University of Southern Mississippi’s football stadium after the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning approved the decision to rename M.M. Roberts Stadium to Renasant Stadium, known as “The Rock.”
Malcolm Mette Roberts, a Hattiesburg attorney who once chaired IHL, once described his racism during a campus speech at USM.
“But as I’ve gone along through the years and looked back, I’ve said to myself really that I am a racist. Every time I read a definition, I say, ‘Well, that’s me.’ I have no apology for it, though. It’s me,” Roberts said, as cited by former USM political science professor Monte Pilawsky in his 1982 book, “Exit 13: Oppression and Racism in Academia.”
IHL approved the name change on Thursday, Aug. 20. The new namesake under a 10-year, $13.7 million naming-rights agreement is the Tupelo-based Renasant Bank. The plan says that the stadium will be named Renasant Stadium through June 30, 2036. Southern Miss’ new football season will begin on Sept. 5 at Renasant Stadium in a game against Alcorn State University’s team.
‘The Good Lord Was the Original Segregationist’
In August 2020, the Southern Miss football team—made up of a diverse, multiracial cast of players—marched out of the M.M. Roberts Stadium together as part of a Black Lives Matter demonstration against police killings of Black men. They headed to the campus entrance in Hattiesburg to demonstrate as cars passed by on Hardy Street.
“We live by a brotherhood. … We cannot be silent to instances of racial injustice in our country any longer,” the team announced in an Aug. 28, 2020, statement. Jay Hopson, the head coach, showed his support for the team in a tweet.
Several players the Mississippi Free Press spoke to on the day of the protest said they were unaware of M.M. Roberts’ legacy of racism. The stadium had been first named for him in 1975, three years after his 12-year-long tenure ended.
After graduating from USM in 1918, when it was called the Mississippi Normal College, M.M. Roberts pursued a law degree at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, graduating with Ross Barnett in 1926.
When voters elected Barnett, a segregationist Dixiecrat, as Mississippi’s governor almost 34 years later, Roberts quickly worked with him to install reliable opponents of racial equality throughout the state government. The new governor was a Baptist Sunday school teacher who claimed that “the good Lord was the original segregationist.”
Gov. Barnett packed the IHL Board of Trustees with racists in his first year, including Roberts as its new president. Roberts took his task seriously, voting in 1963 to withhold a degree from James Meredith—the first Black student admitted to the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Three years earlier, Barnett had sought to block Meredith, a Kosciusko, Miss., native, from entering UM at all.
Roberts was willing to deny Meredith the diploma he had rightfully earned, even though some members feared the federal courts would respond by stripping Mississippi’s universities and colleges of accreditation. A bare 6-to-5 IHL majority opposed the move, though, but mostly out of fear of the repercussions. That same year, Roberts worked with the racist Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which was attempting to have UM Professor James Silver fired for speaking out against Mississippi’s racist “closed society.”
Even after Barnett’s term expired in 1965, his hand-picked IHL president continued to wage an anti-civil rights crusade. In 1966, Roberts wrote and the IHL passed a policy that became known as the “Aaron Henry speaker ban,” referring to the state NAACP president at the time who had spoken at Mississippi State University that same day. It ordered universities and colleges not to invite “speakers who will do violence to the academic atmosphere” or “persons in disrepute in the area from whence they came” or “those charged with crimes or moral wrongs.”
The policy barred Henry from speaking at UM in 1967 because he had been convicted of “disturbing the peace” in Bolivar County. The NAACP would continue “disturbing the peace” for years to come, later introducing the earliest bills to change Mississippi’s then-Confederate-themed state flag as a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives in the 1980s.
Roberts’ policy also barred civil-rights activists Martin Luther King Jr. and Charles Evers, the brother of slain voting-rights activist Medgar Evers. In 1969, the MSU Young College Democrats sued IHL in federal court, angry that they could not invite Charles Evers to speak to their group on campus.
Judge J.P. Coleman, a former Mississippi governor, ruled that the IHL speaker ban was unconstitutionally vague and could “never be enforced.” The court, though, allowed IHL 60 days to write a more specific list.
Roberts produced that list. The new regulation banned speakers who “might incite riots” or “whose presence might cause a riot,” Monte Pilawsky wrote in his 1982 book, “Exit 13: Oppression and Racism in Academia.”
“Unlike the old speaker ban policy which was very unclear and very illegal, the board’s new one was very clear and very illegal,” Pilawsky wrote.
Roberts Opposed Hiring Black Faculty
M.M. Roberts’ skills as an attorney proved unhelpful when he returned to court in December 1969 to defend the revised ban, as he claimed that Evers’ speech could “do violence to the attitude of the fathers and mothers who send their children to school.” As a last resort, the IHL president told the court that Evers’ speech was on the same day as his own birthday and “that if Evers were allowed to speak, he, Roberts, would not have a happy birthday,” Pilawsky wrote.
The court quickly ruled Roberts’ policy unconstitutional again. That same month, he drew fire from USM students over remarks he made at an American Association of University Professors meeting at the Hattiesburg campus. During the speech, he talked about his more than nine years on the IHL board.
“The first real task I had for myself was to try to decide what to do with (James) Meredith going to the University of Mississippi, and I said, ‘No, he won’t go.’ I felt like he would go over my dead body,” Roberts said.
The IHL head also exhorted the professors gathered before him not to push for USM to hire large numbers of full-time Black faculty. There was no chance of it happening, he said.
“I think if you want to be a stupid idiot, just stir for that kind of thing,” Roberts said. “That’s a thing that’s destructive, and no one who thinks it seriously in his heart ought to get out of here and get out of this institution, because you don’t belong in our society if you think that is necessary—a thing we’ve got to do.”
The speech, which drew national attention, sparked a backlash among residents and college students and officials across the state.
United Press International reported that the segregationist Citizens Council, which then Delta Democrat-Times Editor Hodding Carter Jr. dubbed “The Uptown Klan,” defended Roberts as “a staunch defender of law and order.” The segregationist former governor who had appointed him, Ross Barnett, said that “conservatives in Mississippi and throughout the nation” were “proud” of his “unyielding stand” against civil-rights speakers on campus, UPI reported.
But the speech drew a rebuke from the USM Progressive Student Association, which days later passed a resolution, offering “that Dr. Roberts, not being in agreement with the majority sentiments in the United States, accept our offer of two hundred eighty one dollars and one cent to help purchase him a one-way airplane ticket to the Union of South Africa.”
Segregation was official state policy then in apartheid South Africa. But Roberts was not done, and did not take the students up on their offer.
A day after Charles Evers—who died July 22, 2020—spoke to the MSU Young Democrats in Starkville in March 1970, the IHL president wrote a letter to his fellow trustees expressing his “feelings of despair.” He concluded with a brazenly racist remark about Evers’ planned luncheon with the MSU Young Democrats.
“I know they enjoyed it. I hope he smelled like Negroes usually do,” Roberts wrote.
Despite his blatant racism, Roberts remained on the IHL board until his stint expired in 1972, though he stayed on as its attorney.
In 1975, then-USM President William McCain, who was also a segregationist and a member of the Citizens Council, dedicated the school’s new $6-million stadium in Roberts’ honor, praising the Jackson County native for helping fund the school during his time at IHL.
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