Late in the afternoon of February 24, 1970, in the University of Mississippi cafeteria, forty students of the recently chartered Black Student Union (B.S.U.) lined up in front of the cafeteria before it opened for dinner. The forty protesters grabbed their food, and each of them took over a separate table as the white students stared back at them silently, or left their seats, or placed their trays on the cafeteria’s conveyor belt and walked out. Kenneth Mayfield, then a second-year student, grabbed his mini stereo, and the students found themselves eating to the strains of Eldridge Cleaver’s cry for Black Power on “Soul on Wax.” The B.S.U. members had already attempted a form of protest. Members of the B.S.U. presented a list of twenty-seven demands to the university’s chancellor, Porter L. Fortune, Jr.; the demands included hiring black faculty, forming a black-studies program, establishing more scholarships for black students, and eliminating Confederate imagery at official university gatherings. Next, the group brought a Confederate flag—then an unofficial symbol of the university—into the cafeteria, where they burned it. (In 1972, abuse of the Confederate flag was illegal in Mississippi, though this law was largely unenforced.)
Undaunted, the B.S.U. members moved from the cafeteria to the Ole Miss campus-security office to file a complaint. “They handed each one of us a form, and we filled it out,” Mayfield said. “I put my name on the form,” he said, “and I wrote the source of my complaint, in bold print, as ‘racism.’ ” His classmates did the same. It was one of those balmy days in Mississippi in late winter, just before spring arrives. Again, white students happening past mostly ignored the protesters.
The evening after the cafeteria protest and flag-burning, Mayfield recalled, “We were in a Black Student Union meeting and somebody commented, ‘We’ve got a group that’s performing right here in Mississippi—it is international and interracial.’ ” The group was Up with People, the wholesome and positive travelling revue. In the spur of the moment, the students—sixty-one in all—decided to march to Fulton Chapel, where admission to the Up with People concert was two dollars. “I remember somebody saying, ‘Step aside, we’ve already paid our dues—we’re going in,’ ” Mayfield said. Once inside, where Up with People had already taken the stage, the B.S.U. members started to chant, “What you gonna do? Do it to him. What you gonna do? Do it to him”—the “him” being the Ole Miss administration. Soon Up with People invited the protesters to join them onstage, where the students offered a Black Power salute. A few began grabbing the microphones. As the musical group launched into one of their most famous songs, “What Color Is God’s Skin?” (“Black, brown, it’s yellow, it’s red, it is white. / Every man’s the same in the good Lord’s sight.”), Mayfield tried to yell into a microphone, “He sure ain’t white, he sure ain’t white.”