Sometimes, the worst thing you can do to somebody is to say, “You can’t hang out with us.” Several years ago, some of my friends on the internet were having trouble with this one guy. His behavior was really erratic, particularly with women. Eventually, we asked him not to hang out with us anymore and told him that he should pick another lobby. When he refused, we got the admins to ban him from our lobby. He took this bit of social rejection so sorely that he spent the next ten years stalking and harassing our social group. It really kind of ruined his life. He was arrested twice for violating a restraint order a woman in our group from St. Louis put on him. He moved from Georgia to Tennessee to Texas, trying to stay ahead of some of the trouble he caused for himself, all because we said we didn’t want him to hang out with us.
Social rejection has always been a problem at Millsaps. The Greeks have always been the social lions on campus, and the students who weren’t involved with them have many times felt under-served. It particularly becomes a problem when you consider that the Greeks are overwhelmingly white, leaving independent black students with limited social options sometimes. There’s really no way to deny that they had a very different experience at Millsaps from the white kids who were in a Greek Letter social organization.
I don’t know how many of you remember the great war between George Harmon and Kiese Laymon, but that’s what it was about. Kiese wrote articles in the Purple and White campus newspaper about the differences in the social lives of white Greek students and black independent students like him. Most of his criticism seemed to focus around the idea that the Greeks were loud and they were drunk. Speaking as somebody who used to get drunk and fire off cannons at three o’clock in the morning, I can say he was probably pretty accurate. (That’s one of those stories where some people will say, “You’re full of shit, Boyd, nobody shoots cannons at three a.m.,” while others will say, “Man! I miss those days.” So believe what you will.)
The white part of campus took what Kiese wrote as a sort of accusation. For a bunch of nineteen and twenty-year-olds to have anybody question how and where they spent their free time probably sounded like a return to high school. The idea of “I’m grown; I can do what I want!” was probably foremost in their mind. They even had a town hall about it. I don’t think KIese meant it that way. I think he just wanted to write what he saw and be as truthful about it as he could. That being said, there were other people on both sides of the issue who decided to use what he wrote to stoke the flames of their own pet issues, but, in my mind, that’s not really his fault either.
Ironically, one of the people who agreed with Kiese’s position the most was George Harmon. Since Harmon came to campus, he wanted to limit the power and growth of the Greek organizations. He considered them a serious distraction from the school's primary purpose. He also considered them a huge pain in the ass. The board, on several occasions, held back some of his efforts to limit the Greeks. My dad, even though he had been Number One of the KAs and most of his adult friends had been KAs with him, either at Millsaps or Ole Miss, was pretty open to Dr. Harmon’s ideas about putting the breaks on the Greeks. Part of that was because, as chairman of the board, he’d get a call every few years from somebody saying, “My precious daughter just failed out of sorority rust. I’m gonna sue Millsaps, and Chi Omega, and George Harmon, and Jim Campbell. You can’t do this to me!” Then Daddy would call Bill Goodman and say, “We got another one.”
I’ve known a lot of lawyers. Bill Goodman was probably the most impressive. He was the lead counsel for Millsaps, and he was the lead counsel for the state of Mississippi in the matter of Jake Ayers vs Bill Waller, one of the longest-running, most influential legal cases in Mississippi history. By the time the case was settled, it was Ayers vs Kirk Fordice to give you an idea of how long the case churned in the Mississippi legal system. Privately, Goodman would tell you Mississippi didn’t have a very defendable position. Publicly, he successfully defended Mississippi’s position against some remarkable pressures for over twenty years. The settlement he eventually brokered was not only mutually beneficial but opened an entirely new chapter in the history of public HBCUs in Mississippi.
For my part, this was a time when I had returned to campus for the state purpose of working on my writing–only what really happened was I became something of an unpaid assistant for Lace Goss. From the time I was a teenager, Lance was somebody that meant a lot to me. On my return to Millsaps, I immediately became aware of and concerned about the fact that, as he got further and further from sixty years old, Lance lost more and more of his confidence in himself.
The year before, Lance produced “A Few Good Men.” It was the last new play he ever directed. Everything else he directed from then until the day he died was a repeat of something he’d done in the sixties or seventies, his “golden age.” I spent between an hour and two hours every day talking with Lance, but we rarely ever talked about the future or even the present; all we talked about was the past.
Repeating shows he had done decades before, Lance usually wanted them done the exact same way he and Frank Hains did it back in 1968. I think this was a source of frustration for Brent Lefavor. Brent never knew Frank, but everybody who knew both men knew that Brent was more versatile and more talented as a designer and technician. There were a few times when Brent made it pretty clear that he was the more talented artist and pushed Lance to try something new, but most of the time, he just swallowed his pride and did it the way Lance wanted to.
I felt like the right people were in place to handle the Kiese thing. I liked and trusted his faculty advisors. I liked and trusted the Dean of Students. People would always make a face when I said I liked and trusted George Harmon. He was a remarkably difficult human being, but he was also brilliant, and nearly every decision he made worked out well for the college.
George Harmon had a short temper, and he considered students’ social complaints, no matter what they were, an annoyance he shouldn’t have to deal with. Sometimes, being his Dean of Students could be a thankless position because of that. Had he stopped to consider it, he might have seen that he and Kiese wanted the same thing, but he didn’t stop to consider it. Once the Purple and White ran into financial mismanagement problems, having spent their budget for the year in two months, he shut it down for the year and hoped it’d go away. The open conflict went away, but the hurt feelings didn’t.
The next year, Charles Sallis had lobbied for a while to delay the Greek Rush. Harmon thought we should have it the second semester or just not have it at all. He’d been quoted a few times as saying, “Why can’t we just pick the names of who goes into what fraternity?” After much hand-wringing and negotiation, they ended up moving rush into the Middle of the Fall Semester. That must not have worked out very well because they didn’t keep it that way very long.
Bid Day finally came. Bid Day for girls is about white dresses, giggles, and hugs. Bid day for boys is more than a reasonable amount of alcohol, stripping down to your gym shorts and painting your body either purple or your fraternity colors. The KAs had a tradition called “The Great Wazoo,” which I, and some of my larger friends, were a part of.
For people not a part of the Greek system, I can see how this would have been a major annoyance. There were cannons firing, music blaring, and over a hundred half-naked boys covered in greasepaint causing problems. One of those problems ended up being with Kiese's girlfriend. Words flew back and forth; threats were made, and security was called. Normally, just the fraternity boys would have gotten in trouble, but Kiese went into his room, got what they called a baseball bat, and brandished it as a weapon. To me, it looked more like a police baton or something that size. Apparently, it was something like the bat they use for kids' T-Ball. Had it been a full-sized baseball bat, he might have been able to stand his ground, but with what he had, I was glad he didn’t use it because the fraternity guys would have swarmed him, and a bad situation would have been worse.
George Harmon was already on campus. He would often hang out in his office on Bid Day, just in case it went to shit, which it almost never did, but on that day, it really did. By lunchtime, he was on site. By four o’clock, Bill Goodman showed up to get the story from the security guys and see what, if anything, the security cameras caught. For the moment, everybody was suspended, and everybody was sent home.
This was on a Saturday. By Tuesday, Bill Goodman brought Ruben Anderson in to help negotiate the case, and everybody said, “Oh shit.” Kiese and his girlfriend were represented by Chokwe Lumumba Sr., and even he said, “Oh, shit.” Bill Goodman was a brilliant strategian. One of his tactics was to take away the opposition’s weapons before they had a chance to use them. George Bush called this “shock and awe.” Bringing in Judge Anderson on a case like this was Shock and Awe. It was as if Bill Goodman had brought a shotgun to a card game and laid on the table saying, “Y’all play nice and friendly-like.” Nobody on either side was going to question Anderson’s presence or his judgment in this matter, nor would our alumni or the press. It was, or should have been, a finishing move.
Anderson’s job was to negotiate between the parties and oversee sensitivity training for the fraternity boys. The idea was to demonstrate how seriously the school took this issue without risking damage to anybody’s academic career. As long as everybody kept their noses clean for the next year, nobody would get hurt.
In 1985, Bill Allain appointed Anderson as the first black judge on the Mississippi State Supreme Court. Bill Allain served in between William Winter and Ray Mabus. His governorship wasn’t a continuation of Winter’s policies, but it was pretty close. My dad, Rowan Taylor, and some other guys decided that they were gonna take this nomination of Anderson and really make it stick and inject him into every center of power in Mississippi they could reach.
Before Anderson had even been sworn in, I came home one day to see my mother preparing for a dinner party. She said it was for Ruben Anderson and his wife, Phyllis, to help facilitate some social introductions for them. I asked who the guest list was. She said Bill Winter, Rowan Taylor, Brum Day, Bill Goodman, Herman Hines, and Charlie Deaton.
I asked her if I could stay and help serve drinks with Johny Gore. Gore’s official job was with one of the downtown law firms as a sort of messenger, but what made him famous was knowing what every businessman in Jackson drank and their wives and their girlfriends. Besides Cotton at the Sun and Sand, Johnny Gore was probably the most famous bartender in the history of Jackson. Hiring Johnny Gore wasn’t cheap, and it demonstrated that whatever was happening at that party was pretty important.
I asked my mother what she was serving, and she said, “Shrimp and Grits.” I made a face. There was no way she was serving the judge grits for supper. What my mother knew, that I didn’t know, was that she and Jane Lewis had just read Bill Neal’s “Southern Cooking” cookbook, and they would be among the first to serve gourmet shrimp and grits–a dish that soon was on the best menus all over the South.
Back at Millsaps, The plan was for the fraternity boys to be on super, double-secret probation, and Kiese would be, too, since he had brought a weapon. I made a couple of visits to KA chapter meetings to make sure they understood this was serious business; if they fucked around, they would be gone from Millsaps without hesitation. Everybody involved, including me, believed it would be one of the fraternity boys to fuck up and get expelled. The thought was that once that happened, it might defuse the whole situation, and everybody would feel vindicated and justified, only that’s not what happened.
Kiese owed a bunch of money in overdue library fines and lost his library privileges until he paid them. He could still go to the library; he just couldn’t check anything out. His girlfriend asked him to bring her a copy of one of the school's old annuals from the library. I'm not even sure what she was thinking. It clearly wasn’t helping him stay out of trouble. Unable to check the book out, he tried to sneak it out and got caught. They even had him on a security cam.
The lawyers were again convened, and the feelings of the group were that they had set out the conditions of the probation. Everybody on probation from this incident knew what was at stake, and as much as it was a shame to waste such a promising student over a library book, he was expelled, lest the other students on probation charge the school with violating the agreement they made. And that’s how the story of Kiese Laymon went from him writing about limited social options for black students to him getting expelled.
I honestly think Dr. Harmon felt some sort of relief. The last two things he ever wanted to deal with were Greek stuff and race stuff, and this was both. His vision for the college had nothing at all to do with social issues. Some people would say that part of his success was due to his ability to put blinders on and block out everything except what he wanted. What he wanted here was to finish the refit of the student union and the PAC and NOT to deal with any of the social issues of the day.
A protest was organized under the potted oak in the bowl. Kiese was not present, but his friends were. It was pretty clear they were outnumbered. I think the idea was that other black students would stand up for him, and some did, but not that many. The press came, but it wasn’t a very big story. One of my friends made it a mission to get the phone number of the woman sent from WAPT and did. I think she kind of liked him, but young reporters get moved around a lot, and pretty soon, she was moving to New Jersey.
The part of this story I don’t tell very often is that I was a witness to the whole incident that led to everybody getting put on probation. I had parked myself on the veranda of Ezelle to watch the Bid Day antics, and it all played out to my right.
The way I see it, Kiese and the current governor have both staked their reputation on what happened that day, and I’m more than willing to let them battle it out. Their version of the story is far more important than mine. At the end of the day, nobody really cares about the perspective of an older, moderate white guy. There’s nothing I can say that will bring any more satisfaction or justice to anybody involved. I’ve told a few people what I saw and heard. Dr. Harmon, of course. Bill Goodman, my sister, and her husband, Lance Goss and Doug Man. I don’t think I’ll ever commit it to writing, though. I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job of chewing and digesting this over the years as a community, and I’m willing to leave it that way without trying to change anybody’s mind.
This was almost twenty years ago. Since then, George Harmon retired and died. Lance Goss retired and died. We’ve had two presidents since then, and we’re getting ready to start with a third. We still have an issue with balancing the social opportunities of black and white students, though. It’s gotten better, but we’re still far from getting rid of it.
The second oldest building on campus is a structure that’s been known as “The President’s House,” “The Dean’s House,” and “The English House.” In preparing for this year’s homecoming, there were a number of invitations to tour the “Black Student Union,” which is the current designation for that structure.
The last time I was in that structure, it was pretty ragged, so the first thing I asked Keith Dunn on Saturday at homecoming was, “‘what kind of shape is the building in.” He assured me that, before turning it into the Black Student Union, they had gone in and reworked all the major systems (plumbing, electrical) and that the building was in pretty good shape. That made me happy. It’s a beautiful old house, and now it has a pretty significant history of its own. There have been a couple of times along the way when it was slated for destruction.
I’m guessing that the Black Student Union will function like sort of an all-gender fraternal organization in an attempt to provide as many options for social gatherings for black students as there are for white students. It also gives people who are interested a place to celebrate their cultural uniqueness and maybe organize community involvement.
Sometimes, trying to provide an organized social experience for students doesn’t work out so well. For the most part, most students basically want somebody pretty to make out with, someplace to party without getting in trouble, and somewhere to play Fortnite without getting disturbed. Trying to provide a wholesome alternative to that can backfire, and nobody shows up. Sometimes, it works great, though, and becomes a real asset to the community for quite a while. Don’t be dismayed if the success or failure of this venture fluctuates. Every four years, you get a new batch of students, and everything is new again.
Ultimately, I’d like to get to the point where there’s no real difference between the social life of white and black students. It’s better now than it has ever been, and the Greek system is more integrated than it’s ever been, but it’s clearly not enough. Fraternal organizations tend to be very culturally based. I don’t know if there’s a way around that other than to continue to blend the cultures.
I think it's important that the school be proactive on issues like this. As the black middle class and upper middle class grow, they’re going to be more and more of a significant part of the Millsaps community. There was a time when most of the black students at Millsaps were the first generation of college students in their families. While that still happens sometimes, more and more of the kids I meet at Millsaps are second and third-generation college students in their families, and that sort of thing is a real sea-change.
There have been times when I felt pretty bad that we weren’t able to provide a more equal experience between white and black students at Millsaps. We have pretty good luck with white and Asian students, particularly Indian students, but the gulf between white and black is still a significant challenge. My entire life, we’ve had people, deep in the heart of Millsaps, working on these issues. I guess I always thought it would progress faster than it did, but I’m very grateful for the progress we have made.
I used to complain to my dad about the size of a task before me, and he’d say, “You know how you eat an elephant, don’t you? You eat them one bite at a time.” At Millsaps, as far as race and culture goes, we’ve been eating that elephant, one bite at a time, for quite a while now. Whenever I don’t feel satisfied with the progress we’ve made, I remind myself that it was an elephant to begin with, and a bunch of it is eaten already.
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