Last week, amidst a lot of other things going on – applications, classes, my floundering social life – I made a point to do something I have not done since the winter break.
I started reading a book for fun.
The book, “Forty Acres and a Goat,” was written in 1986 by Will D. Campbell and is a memoir of his life during the civil rights era of the 1960s, interspersed with his eccentric humor and stories about his goat named Jackson.
Thinking about Campbell’s life and work serves as an opportunity to reflect on and recalibrate many of the arguments going on around campus today.
Though you may have never heard of him, Campbell played a significant, albeit short, role at the university as the director of religious life from 1954 to 1956.
A couple years after his 2013 death, the plaza outside of Paris-Yates Chapel was named to memorialize Campbell’s time here.
Despite being raised in rural Mississippi in the first half of the 20th century, attending segregated schools and, according to The Washington Post, a church where the Bibles bore the insignia of the Ku Klux Klan, Campbell was an ardent white supporter of the growing civil rights movement.
Campbell was ordained a Baptist minister at 17 years old and then attended Wake Forest, Tulane and the Yale Divinity School before returning to Mississippi.
At Ole Miss, Campbell sought to bring tolerance and reconciliation to a hostile and closed-off racial environment. But Campbell seemed to only encounter problems: harsh criticism for visiting an integrated farm in Holmes County, the university’s refusal to allow a white Episcopalian priest and NAACP member to speak on campus after Campbell invited him and death threats for his attempts to improve race relations on campus.
Campbell even got attacked for playing table tennis with a black minister in Oxford. After the match, Campbell’s lawn was covered in black and white pingpong balls.
Eventually, Campbell felt wholly unwelcome and left Oxford.
After departing Ole Miss, Campbell became well-known as an oddball preacher without a church, the only white minister invited by Martin Luther King Jr. to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a brilliant, unconventional memoirist and thinker.
Notably, Campbell held to the theological principle that Jesus died for all sins, even those committed by bigots, and he preached equally to supporters of civil rights and KKK members.
Too often in discussions of controversial topics on campus, such as the state flag or contextualization efforts, we tend to dichotomize the argument and other the opposing side. The other side is not distant, but rather comprised of our peers, and we must truly love them and listen to them before allowing a discussion to devolve into accusations and unproductive bitterness.
When you walk by Paris-Yates next, think of Campbell. Grab one of his books. Let Campbell’s wisdom about empathy be a guide through the conversations of today.
Liam Nieman is a Southern studies and economics major from Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania.
