It was one of those balmy days in Mississippi in late winter, just before spring arrives.
“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. “They handed each one of us a form, and we filled it out,” Mayfield said. members moved from the cafeteria to the Ole Miss campus-security office to file a complaint. (In 1972, abuse of the Confederate flag was illegal in Mississippi, though this law was largely unenforced.) Next, the group brought a Confederate flag-then an unofficial symbol of the university-into the cafeteria, where they burned it. 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.
presented a list of twenty-seven demands to the university’s chancellor, Porter L. members had already attempted a form of protest. 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.
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. 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 front page of the Daily Mississippian from February 25, 1970, with a picture of the student protest from the previous afternoon.
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