The nomination of Sen. Barack Obama isn’t the only drama of racial reflection taking place in this year’s presidential contest.
The first presidential debate of the 2008 general election is scheduled for September 26 at the University of Mississippi, and Ole Miss is looking forward to the nationally televised event as a prime opportunity to show how much things have changed in Oxford, Miss., since the days of Jim Crow.
“It won’t be lost on anybody that this was the site of the integration of higher education in the South in 1962,” the chancellor of the flagship university, Robert C. Khayat, told reporters yesterday during a tour of the Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts, where the debate will be held.
“And here we are in 2008, with the first African-American candidate for president of the United States, who will be on this stage at Ole Miss,” Mr. Khayat said, according to the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
The university has made “a dramatic and sweeping change in the racial atmosphere on campus” unlike any other university in the nation, said David G. Sansing, author of The University of Mississippi: A Sesquicentennial History.
Mr. Sansing, a former history professor, arrived eight years after the university’s integration began with the 1962 admission of James H. Meredith. “I do not know of another university that has been more conscientious to make [black] students feel more a part of the community,” Mr. Sansing told the campus’s student newspaper, The Daily Mississippian.
