In 1970, when about half of the University of Mississippi’s Black student population peacefully protested on campus, UM administrators responded by calling in the Mississippi Highway Patrol. Eighty-nine protesters were arrested on breach-of-peace and trespassing charges—with some being held in Parchman State Penitentiary—and all of the arrested students were either suspended without hearings or expelled.
In 1983, hundreds of white UM students surrounded a historically Black fraternity house, heckling its residents with racial epithets. In 2000, during Black History Month, students set the bulletin board outside of a dorm’s residential assistant’s room on fire and threw asphalt through his window with a note calling him a “N—ger lover,” wrote slurs in a dormitory bathroom, and covered the dormitory’s bulletin Black History Month calendar with a flyer of a monkey eating an apple in front of a Confederate flag.
No one was arrested, suspended or expelled in either case.
On Sept. 10, 2025, UM employee Lauren Stokes reposted social-media content critical of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk following his assassination. UM administrators fired Stokes from her position as executive assistant to the vice chancellor within days.
UM Chancellor Glenn Boyce announced Stokes’ dismissal without naming her in a public statement, calling the post “hurtful” and “insensitive.” During the February hearing, Boyce did not appear and the defense called no witnesses, entered no evidence and did not provide a closing argument.
Dueling Cultures
The University of Mississippi’s decision to fire Lauren Stokes is just another chapter in the university’s long history of selective viewpoint discrimination, University of Mississippi employees argued in an amicus brief submitted to a federal court on July 24 in support of Stokes’ wrongful termination case against UM. That brief is one of two submitted in her favor.
The employees’ argument is that the university has two dueling cultures. One culture suppresses speech and punishes supporters of equality, while the other culture has a robust history of defending controversial, even deeply offensive speech. Stokes’ firing, they argue, was an example of the former.
The briefs the UM employees and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression submitted come after Stokes and her legal team appealed a federal judge’s dismissal of her wrongful termination lawsuit against the university.
Stokes’ case is the only of its kind to be dismissed in the nation, FIRE senior litigation attorney Greg Greubel told the Mississippi Free Press.
Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals does not have discretion over which cases it accepts, Georgia-based lawyer Andrew Canter told the Mississippi Free Press.
“The 5th Circuit has to consider the case, so we will get a decision—pro or con, win or lose—either way, in probably a few months,” Canter, who helped the UM employees submit their brief, told the Mississippi Free Press.
Chancellor Boyce’s legal team, led by James Cal Mayo Jr., originally had 30 days from Stokes’ July 16 appeal filing to submit a brief in opposition to Stokes’ brief under 5th Circuit rules. On Aug. 6, Boyce’s legal team applied to have their deadline extended to Sept. 26, which the court approved.
Interested parties can still submit amicus briefs, intended to provide input from expert witnesses to courts, “Everybody gets a chance to chime in,” Canter said.
Complex History of Free Speech on Campus
Sociology professor James Thomas, senior composition and rhetoric lecturer Wendy Goldberg, and history and international studies assistant professor Graham Pitts worked together to write the brief in support of Stokes’ appeal.
The three UM employees’ amicus brief detailed 70 years of free-speech history at the University of Mississippi. The professors argue that the university has presented two types of culture, both willing to take on free-speech concerns. The first is what they called the “Ole Miss” culture, which has a history of maintaining white supremacy and punishing faculty and students who spoke up for equality.
The second is the “University of Mississippi” culture, which the employees argue has a strong history of defending the right to express controversial, even deeply offensive viewpoints. The employees argue that when the university fired Stokes, it was an example of the “Ole Miss” culture suppressing speech.
The professors’ historical analysis began in March 1956 when the Mississippi Legislature established the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an executive branch commission designed to “‘maintain segregation in the State of Mississippi’ and wreck ‘the NAACP and any other organization … attempting to advocate integration,’” they wrote in their brief, referencing Yasuhiro Katagiri’s 2001 book on the commission.
In 1963, the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning hired a private investigator to follow Professor James Silver, author of “Mississippi: The Closed Society,” after he gave a speech criticizing Mississippi’s commitment to segregation at the time. The professors referenced the 2008 academic text “Making Haste Slowly: The Troubled History of Higher Education in Mississippi.”
When about half the Black students at UM participated in a peaceful protest on campus in 1970, the Mississippi Highway Patrol arrested 89 of them for breach of peace and trespassing at the request of UM administrators. Authorities sent about half those students to Parchman Farm Penitentiary for two days, and all 89 were either suspended without hearings or fully expelled.
“Ole Miss’s actions in this era mirrored the State’s resistance to integration,” the professors wrote in their amicus brief. “They were designed to silence and intimidate faculty and students who wished to speak on a matter of public concern. This posture changed over time, to be sure … Yet progress was uneven.”
In 1983, hundreds of white UM students surrounded a historically Black fraternity house, shouting racial epithets until the police dispersed the mob.
During Black History Month in 2000, students wrote racial epithets in a dormitory bathroom and covered the dormitory’s Black History Month calendar with a flyer of a monkey eating an apple in front of a Confederate flag. The bulletin board outside the dorm’s residential assistant’s room was set on fire, and asphalt was thrown through his window with a note calling him a “N—ger lover.”
A university task force later found that the incidents were racially motivated and that the school did not act quickly or decisively to address the issue—but did not determine who the perpetrators were or seek disciplinary action, the professors said in their brief.
“Despite that history, in the past three decades the University of Mississippi has made a concerted effort to turn the page and comply with the First Amendment,” the professors said in their brief.
Modern Improvements to UM Speech Policies
In 2003, a sex column in the university’s newspaper drew attention from the American Family Association, based nearby in Tupelo. UM administrators received an estimated 2,000 messages from AFA email campaign participants but stood by their student journalists, declining to give way to dissenters’ demands.
That same year, the founder of Mississippi-based white-nationalist Nationalist Movement Richard Barrett spoke on campus while dissenting students, faculty and staff protested peacefully on campus, the professors said in their brief, referencing a Clarion-Ledger report from October 2003.
Six years later, a group of hooded Ku Klux Klan members gathered on campus protested UM’s choice to stop playing the song “From Dixie with Love” during home games ahead of a football game against Louisiana State University, the professors said in their brief, referencing an October 2009 article from the Associated Press.
A decade later, neo-Confederate activists planned a march on campus to protest the potential removal of a Confederate statue from campus. University administrators urged students to avoid the area of the protest. The protesters moved the planned counter-protest and some classes and events were cancelled due to safety concerns.
The same year, Mississippi’s Institutions of Higher Learning deliberated denying sociology professor James Thomas’ tenure in response to backlash against his social media activity. Concerned parents and alumni sent the IHL hundreds of emails calling for Thomas’ firing.
Instead, the IHL approved Thomas’ tenure, “act(ing) in accordance with its obligations under the First Amendment, and granted him tenure as merited by his research and teaching,” the professors’ brief said. Thomas was a witness in Stokes’ case in February, prior to its dismissal.
Controversy over free speech at UM arose again in 2019 after white students posted an image on social media showing them posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled memorial to 14-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till. Their fraternity suspended the three men from membership and the FBI investigated the incident, but UM did not seek disciplinary action.
“University officials recognized that the students’ photo next to the Till memorial was “offensive,” but did not take any disciplinary action against them,” the professors said in their brief. “In this case, the Chancellor could have said the same about Lauren Stokes and let it blow over.”
Later, in 2021, protesters opposing the mandate for UM employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine disrupted the school day.
“None of these First Amendment activities, whether on- or off-campus, and entailing different degrees of actual, material disruption to campus business, warranted casting aside the Constitution,” the professors said in their brief.
‘A Heckler’s Veto to Public Employment’
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s amicus brief in favor of Lauren Stokes’ appeal focused on relevant legal history. FIRE is a non-partisan First Amendment law firm.
FIRE has been tracking similar cases of university faculty and staff across the country punished over social-media posts following conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, senior litigation attorney Greg Greubel told the Mississippi Free Press.
“We are saying this is basically a Heckler’s veto to public employment,” Greubel said. “… The rule is that you should not be listening to the loudest people when you’re talking about making employment decisions for public employees, and this is a really dangerous precedent to set to allow online backlash against what somebody says to count as disruption under the Pickering balancing test that applies to govern personal rights of public workers.”
The Pickering balancing test, also known as the Pickering-Connick Test, is a test established under the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Pickering v. Board of Education. The case began after an Illinois school board fired a teacher for writing a letter to a local newspaper criticizing the school district’s financial decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the teacher’s favor.
The resulting balancing test weighs government employees’ right to free speech against disruption of the work environment, Greubel said.
“When you take a job with the government, you do not lose your First Amendment right to have an opinion on your own time unless it actually disrupts the work environment, and here the real like disruption—I’m using finger you know parentheses for disruption—the disruption that the district court relied on was really just people disagreeing with what the plaintiff said … if you allow that reasoning to infect the Pickering balancing test, then any time a public worker says something that gets a big response on the internet, they’re likely to lose their job, and that’s really not what Pickering was about.”
Greubel referenced 25 different cases supporting Stokes’ appeal in his amicus brief, in addition to five other texts.
University of Mississippi Chancellor Glenn Boyce and his legal representation, Thomas Bellinder, did not return messages requesting comment.
Disclosure: Grace Marion worked as an intern cataloging student newspapers for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in late 2022 and early 2023.
Follow the Mississippi Free Press’ coverage of Lauren Stokes’ lawsuit and read past stories here.
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