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In all, 89 students were
arrested, the fifty or so who took part in the walk across
the stage, and several dozen fellow travelers. Most of the
students in the county hail were released after 24 hours,
the ones in Parchman after 48 hours. The state dropped
charges, but the University of Mississippi was not so
forgiving. Eighty-one students were suspended for a day and
placed on academic probation. Eight students, the ones who
could be identified as ring leaders in the photographs, were
expelled.
One of those eight
students was Linnie Willis, now a long-time Toledo resident,
former executive director of Lucas Metropolitan Housing
Authority, current first lady of St. Paul Missionary Baptist
Church and the lone senior among the group of eight.
Linnie Willis, formerly
Linnie Liggins, was a “hometown girl,” she says, having
grown up not far from the Oxford, Mississippi campus of the
state university and having witnessed, in her early teen
years, the very famous integration of the campus by James
Meredith in 1962.
After high school, Willis
headed off to Tougaloo College. Her plans changed after her
freshman year at Tougaloo when her grandmother talked to her
about transferring to Ole Miss.
“I would be the first in
my family to graduate from college,” she recalls. “And
because I was a hometown girl, it does send a message. This
was something I should do because I could do it.”
When Willis arrived on the
Oxford campus, she was one of about 200 black students, but
such a number doesn’t reflect the lack of interaction Willis
would have over the next three years with people who looked
like her. A number of those 200 were graduate students, the
undergraduates were in different classes, different dorms
and had different majors.
Willis had a black
roommate, in an otherwise all-white dormitory. She rarely
saw other black students in her classes or in the dining
hall. A black student union was the way in which the
students could meet, interact and, express their
frustrations with an institution that declined to recognize
them.
Gathering with the other
black students gave Willis a sense of hope – “this is an
atmosphere I can survive in,” she felt.
Bur her initial optimism
faded during her three years as she witnessed the university
failing to to make any progress towards incorporating the
black students into campus life. Black students were not
included, for example, in the Associated Student Body, the
campus student organization that interacted with
administration and faculty and voiced student suggestions
and concerns.
“We were on the campus but
not a part of it,” she says.
Ultimately, Willis and
others in the Black Student Union put together a list of 27
demands that they presented to the administration – requests
for black professors and counselors, opening the athletic
programs, for example. Their demands were ignored.
In February 1970, the
university brought in Up With People for a concert
performance. Up With People was a group formed in the late
1960s – a feel-good assembly of young performers of
different ethnic and racial backgrounds singing songs of
peace, love and harmony.
For the black students,
the concert smacked of hypocrisy on the part of the
university administration that was, at best, indifferent to
the needs of its own students of color even while Up With
People asked “What Color Is God’s Skin?”
In the aftermath of the
university’s decision to expel the eight, appeals followed,
a drawn-out process. Willis continued to attend classes and
take exams and, before the final decision was made, she had
completed her degree work that spring of 1970. She was
denied a diploma, but she left Oxford with her transcript
intact, showing her completed work and her bachelor’s
degree.
Willis soon thereafter
moved to Toledo to counsel low-income families seeking
affordable housing, married James Willis, raised a family,
became executive director of LMHA, visited her family in
Oxford regularly and never seriously contemplated that Ole
Miss would try to make things right.
Ole Miss did, however, try
to make things right. This past February, 50 years after her
arrest by the state Highway Patrol, Willis and her fellow
students were invited back to the campus and she was finally
presented with her long-overdue diploma in a ceremony
outside Fulton Chapel.
A few university faculty
and administration members made an the effort to correct the
decades-old injustice led by Garrett Felber, a white
assistant professor in the history department who, as part
of his critical prison studies, came upon some Parchman
Prison paperwork that referenced the university students.
Everything about her
recent experience was an eye opener for the returning
students, particularly for the expelled eight – two doctors,
a university professor, the head of a huge public housing
project and four lawyers. Willis, for one, never expected
an outreach from the university and never sought any
reconciliation.
And as pleasantly
surprised as she was by the invitation and the long-denied
diploma, Willis, as she stated during her speech at the
ceremony, is not yet full of warm, fuzzy feelings for her
alma mater. Maybe that comes later.
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