Reconciling Spirit of Will Campbell Raised as Flag Lowered at Ole Miss
By David Waters
The pole from which the Confederate-shadowed Mississippi state flag was lowered Monday is near two chapels on the Ole Miss campus. The old Fulton Chapel, opened in 1927 and now an auditorium, sits about 100 yards north of the flagpole. Paris-Yates Chapel, which opened in 2001, stands a few hundred yards west of the campus flagpole.
The two chapels stand as testaments to the South`s ongoing struggles between race and grace, and to the reconciling ministry of former Ole Miss Chaplain Will D. Campbell. Campbell, a white Southern Baptist preacher from Amite County, came to Ole Miss in 1954. He left two years later amid death threats for his integrationist views.
Last month, the plaza outside Paris-Yates Chapel was named in his honor. But Fulton Chapel was where Campbell sat for several days in 1956 in silent protest, "meditating upon the things that had brought us to such a sad day."
That "sad day" was the one in which the Ole Miss chancellor made the decision to rescind a speaking invitation to a white Episcopal priest from Ohio named Alvin Kershaw. Rev. Kershaw, a college professor and jazz musician, had gained attention for winning $32,000 on a TV game show. He had said he would donate the money to various organizations, one of which was the NAACP. Campbell had invited Kershaw, as well as several others involved in the fledgling civil rights movement, to speak at the 1956 Religious Emphasis Week program at Fulton Chapel.
"Everyone at the university understood that race was not to be discussed," Campbell wrote years later in his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly. "If racial justice could not be discussed in the classroom, then it would be proclaimed from the podium of the religious forum," Campbell wrote.
It was not. After Kershaw`s invitation was withdrawn, the other speakers, including a Jesuit professor from New Orleans, declined to participate. Several hundred students, faculty and local citizens joined Campbell in his silent daily protests.
Campbell kept pushing. While at Ole Miss, he visited an integrated farm in Holmes County. He also got into trouble for playing ping-pong with a local black minister who wanted to enroll in an Ole Miss correspondence course. A few days later, Campbell found his lawn covered with ping-pong balls painted half-white and half-black. After receiving numerous death threats, Campbell left Ole Miss and took a race relations job in Nashville with the National Council of Churches.
He was the only white person invited to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. A few months later, he helped escort black students through angry crowds at Central High School in Little Rock. He counseled and accompanied Freedom Riders; he joined the boycotts, sit-ins and marches in Birmingham during the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, era.
But, as Campbell said and demonstrated over the decades, his ministry wasn`t about racial integration. It was about Christian reconciliation. He sang and prayed with racists. He befriended Ku Klux Klan members. He visited James Earl Ray in prison.
"With the same love that we are commanded to shower upon the innocent victim, the church must love the racist," he wrote.
Campbell died in 2013 at the age of 88. His ministry influenced countless Southerners, including former President Jimmy Carter and former Ole Miss Chancellor Dr. Dan Jones. Last month, in his final official act as chancellor, Jones dedicated the Reverend Will Davis Campbell Plaza outside Paris-Yates Chapel. “Campbell taught us how to love people who were different from us and people who disagreed with us," Jones said during September`s dedication ceremony.
Before he died, Campbell had a stroke that took away his ability to speak or write, but he did sing at his funeral. His family recessed from the church to the recorded sound of Campbell performing “Mississippi Magic,” the song he sang to his dying brother, Joe, in Brother to a Dragonfly. “That Mississippi madness, be Mississippi magic again," he sang. "’Fore we was born we was all kin. When we dead we`ll be kinfolks again.`"
For a few moments on Monday, as a flag was lowered near two chapels on the Ole Miss campus, we caught a glimpse of Will Campbell`s Mississippi magic.
David Waters is a local news columnist for The Commercial Appeal. He writes about people, places and issues that have an impact on the community. This article first appeared in The Commercial Appeal on October 26, 2015 and is used here with permission of the author.
