Dixie fading at Ole Miss

OXFORD, Miss. - At the University of Mississippi, the past clings to the campus like kudzu. It’s in the face of the marble Confederate who stands over the entrance to the famed Circle. It’s in the Lyceum’s bullet-scarred columns, enduring reminders of the school’s bloody 1962 integration. It’s even in the school’s beloved nickname — Ole Miss.

But as the years have passed, the school has done its best to bring Ole Miss into the New South. It’s all but banished the once-ubiquitous Confederate battle flags from football games. “Dixie” has been scrapped as the unofficial fight song. And the annual spring bacchanalia is no longer known as “Dixie Week.”

Last month, the university ditched “Colonel Rebel,” the school’s barely reconstructed Confederate mascot, who for generations has cut a dapper figure with his wide-brimmed hat cocked to the side, snow-white goatee and signature cane.

His image, it seems, evoked a little too much history for administrators and the school’s booster club, which has paid a New York consultant $30,000 to study options for a new mascot.

“The Confederacy is behind us,” says Athletic Director Pete Boone. “I just think that it’s time for us to change our whole thought process, our whole image, our whole look and feel about being the team of the 21st century.”

And while Mr. Boone insists it’s only the mascot, not the name, that is being discarded, some alums believe it’s all but impossible to separate the “Rebel” from “Colonel Rebel.” They see it as only a matter of time before “Rebel” goes the way of the old Stanford Indian, Marquette Warrior and St. John’s Redman.

“If it remains unchecked, we will just be the Mississippi Wildcats or something,” Memphis businessman Perry Mangum wrote to the Clarion-Ledger newspaper of Jackson, threatening to cancel his season football tickets. “They are trying to get rid of the Old South imagery.”

The debate is another reminder of what Oxford’s most famous son, William Faulkner, once wrote: “The past is never dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”

Comical as it may sound today, Ole Miss became the Rebels because its old nickname, “the Flood,” had bad connotations.

Coming off a 1935 season in which the football team went 9-3, the editors of the campus newspaper, the Mississippian, decided a new name was needed to “catch the public eye and fancy.” It launched a contest.

Of the 600 entries, five finalists were put to a vote by 21 of the state’s most prominent sportswriters. Rebels garnered 18 votes, with Raiders a distant second with two. (Among the other finalists: Stonewalls and Confederates.)

The new nickname debuted in the fall of 1936 with a 45-0 thrashing of — of all schools — Union University. Colonel Rebel made his first appearance, in the school yearbook, in 1937.

By 1947, students were showing up at home football games in big black hats and string ties. Before he became a foam-headed caricature, the on-field mascot was a guy — always a Kappa Sigma brother — in an honest-to-goodness Confederate uniform, complete with saber and revolver. Sometimes he even rode in on a horse named Traveller, a nod to Robert E. Lee’s faithful steed.

At first, the rebel imagery signaled defiance at the notion that a Deep South college couldn’t keep up — athletically or academically — with the Harvards of the world.

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