Oxford town in the afternoon

Everybody’s singin’ a sorrowful tune

Two men died ‘neath the Mississippi moon

Somebody better investigate soon.

                      —Bob Dylan’s Oxford Town, from his Freewheelin’ album

Ole Miss — the University of Mississippi’s Meek School of Journalism — was designated as an historic site for journalism Wednesday by the Society of Professional Journalists.

There, in 1962, the only journalist to die while covering the U. S. Civil Rights movement of the 20th Century, would be killed in the riot that erupted with the arrival for admission of the university’s first black student.

Former CBS news anchor Dan Rather and The Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell were speakers for the event that recalled the death of French reporter Paul Guihard who was found shot in the back after an apparent execution-style slaying behind the Lyceum Building after the 1962 riot.

“’The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”, Rather said, quoting the opening line from Leslie Poles Hartley’s The Go-Between.

As Rather recalled his experiences as head of the CBS news team on the Ole Miss campus during those early days of television news, I recalled as a 14-year-old following those historic events unfolding with dramatic violence only 20 miles to the east. Rather asserted, I believe correctly, that the insurrection at Ole Miss crystallized the focus of the nation and the world on the developing Civil Rights movement in the South.

“People are not at all aware of the enormity of their gesture, of its repercussions and of the interest it is creating all over the world,” Guihard wrote from Oxford shortly before his death. He described the events he saw developing there as “the most serious constitutional crisis ever experienced by the United States since the war of succession,” and then added, “the Civil War has never ended,” according to the Internet source, newseum.org.

Television news, Rather and his fellow journalists of the nascent television news age, brought it into living rooms all over the world including Mississippi. One consequence of the television coverage that I think has always been little understood is that it had an effect not unlike that of making us look at ourselves in a mirror.

Many Mississippians did not want to look like what we were seeing on television — not like the people who chanted and snarled mob-mentality hatred before the cameras nor like the people responsible for bombings and murders whose aftermath we saw on the nightly news. I think that television coverage during the era modified behavior if for no other reason than people became aware of how they themselves might look if their own images were similarly broadcast.

The print media’s role was more circumspect and in-depth. It was Look magazine that broke the story about the behind-the-scenes deal Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett was trying to make with the Kennedys as the powder keg was developing on the Ole Miss campus. Barnett knew he couldn’t win in a faceoff, so he tried to convince the Kennedys to demonstrate a show of force so overwhelming that Barnett could be seen by his segregationist constituents as having to back down in the face of such odds.

Barnett had stoked the crowd at the Ole Miss/Kentucky game the night before the riots, “I love Mississippi … I love and respect our heritage.”

In a live radio address on the day of the riots he urged Mississippians to resist “by all legal means and any other means.”

It was Barnett who was least “aware of the enormity” of his gesture.

And it is investigative reporter Mitchell who continues behind-the-scenes, in-depth coverage in the era’s aftermath. His stories in the Jackson newspaper have helped to put four klansmen behind bars for crimes committed long ago.

On Wednesday, Mitchell reminded the students and visitors in the School of Journalism’s Overby Center that somebody out there knows about Guihard’s murder. (And the murder of Roy Gunter, a bystander from Oxford who was also murdered, execution-style, during the rioting.) There may still be living witnesses, Mitchell said. The murderers themselves may still be living and yet carrying a heavy burden of guilt from that dark night, violent almost 50 years ago.