Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour remembers the integration of Ole Miss in the 1960s as “a very pleasant experience.” Verna Bailey, a black woman who was among the students integrating the institution, and whom Barbour remembers fondly, does not. In fact, she doesn’t remember Barbour at all.
Here’s Barbour’s recollection:
He 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.”
Here’s Bailey’s recollection of Barbour:
“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.”
And Bailey’s recollection of Ole Miss:
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.
I think this is a profoundly telling story of how differently white people and black people see race. Barbour imagined this connection with a black person that affected him so deeply that he remembers it to this day. Yet he had absolutely no idea what she was facing, he was completely oblivious to the direct racial hostility that permeated the institution. While Bailey was being called a “nigger bitch,” Barbour was having a “pleasant experience.”
That fundamental disconnect occurred between two people in the midst of integration. Now think about how that disconnect is amplified, exponentially, by the mists of history. Barbour was clueless in 1963. How are people supposed to get it in 2010? How are we really supposed to understand what the country was like at a time when white supremacy was casually woven into the everyday American experience?
There’s another disconnect here, that’s tragic in two ways. First is the manner in which Barbour uses Bailey as his alibi–he remembers her not because he really knew her, not because he cared about what she was going through, but because she did him a favor. The favor wasn’t actually letting him copy off of her paper, that favor comes decades later, when he uses her as an alibi to exonerate himself from the South’s racist political past. Babour’s imagined intimacy comes as a result of what she can do for him, not as a result of any real emotional connection. It’s tragic for Barbour because he’s so completely unaware of his own white guilt, and it’s tragic for the rest of us because this dynamic, wherein black friendship is merely a means to white redemption, is so common that we’re still making movies about it. It’s not a Southern Republican thing, or even a conservative thing.
