Ya know? I thought there was something wrong with Haley Barbour’s memory when he suggested that his generation attended integrated schools in Mississippi and didn’t think twice about it.
It’s hard to believe that Haley Barbour and Verna Bailey attended the same University of Mississippi in 1965, and even sat next to each other in a class.
Barbour, who’s now the governor of Mississippi and a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, recalls that time — when Ole Miss was being forced to integrate — as “a very pleasant experience.”
Bailey does not. At times, she said, “I thought my life was going to end.”
Why doesn’t that surprise me? Verna Bailey was the first black woman to attend Ole Miss.
[Barbour] said she was “a very nice girl” who “happened to be an African-American, and, God bless her, she let me copy her notes the whole time. And since I was not prone to go to class every day, I considered it a great — it was a great thing, it was just — there was nothing to it. If she remembers it, I would be surprised. She was just another student. I was the student next to her.”
Bailey, reached by phone, reacted to Barbour’s story with surprise that bordered on confusion.
“I don’t remember him at all, no, because during that time that certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience for me,” she said. “My interactions with white people were very, very limited. Very, very few reached out at all.”
Bailey is now the principal of an elementary school in Beaverton, Ore. While she may have seemed like just another student to Barbour, history hasn’t viewed her that way. For her role in the civil rights movement, she was inducted into the Ole Miss Alumni Hall of Fame and has a scholarship named after her.
And how welcome did Bailey feel at Ole Miss?
Bailey said she finished her undergraduate degree in three years, not because she was a great student, but because she wanted to get out of Oxford, Miss., as fast as she could.
She recalled dancing in Oxford Square once with another black student at a school celebration when a crowd of whites began pelting them with coins and beer. “It was just an awful experience. I just saw this mass of anger; anger and hostility. I thought my life was going to end.”
A campus minister, one of the only whites she remembers showing her kindness, took her by the hand and led her to safety. She said the minister was ostracized.
During her undergraduate days, she was inundated with intimidating phone calls to her dorm from white men. “The calls were so constant,” she said. “Vulgar, all sexual connotations, saying nigger bitches needed to go back to the cotton field and things of that nature.” She’d complain, have the phone number changed. Then the calls would start again. Funeral wreaths with what appeared to be animal blood on them were found outside her dorm.
In one science class in a lecture hall, no one would sit near her.
That’s the kind of “pleasant experience” Verna Bailey had at Ole Miss in the mid-to-late sixties.
