The University of Mississippi has launched a student conduct investigation after a video of mostly white male students jeering at a Black pro-Palestine protester went viral on social media.
In a letter addressed to the campus community on Friday, Chancellor Glenn Boyce said the university was aware of behavior that was “offensive, hurtful and unacceptable, including actions that conveyed hostility and racist overtones,” although he did not clarify who lodged those racist attacks.
“While student privacy laws prohibit us from commenting on any specific student, we have opened one student conduct investigation. We are working to determine whether more cases are warranted,” Boyce wrote.
On Thursday, pro-Israel counter protesters overwhelmed a small demonstration in support of Palestine, which had been peacefully assembled on the grassy area of campus. Counter protesters surrounded the fenced-off protest area and chanted things like “Hit the showers!” and “Your nose is huge,” the nonprofit news outlet Mississippi Today reported.
The jeers were especially vicious toward a Black female protester who separated from the rest of the protest encampment. Video showing a group of mostly white male counter protesters mocking her quickly went viral after they hurled taunts like “Lizzo!” and “Lock her up!” as she was guided away by police. One man made monkey noises and jumped up and down in a crude imitation of an ape as he heckled her.
In his message, Boyce said that kind of harassment was unacceptable.
“We will not tolerate discrimination, intimidation, harassment or bias of anyone in our campus community. To be clear, people who say horrible things to people because of who they are will not find shelter or comfort on this campus,” Boyce continued.
Elected officials said otherwise. Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) proudly reposted the video and captioned it, “Ole Miss taking care of business.” Governor Tate Reeves tweeted his approval with footage of the counterprotests.
“Warms my heart,” he wrote.
The confrontation drew comparisons to the 1962 protests, when its white student body found themselves in uproar over the decision to admit a single Black student, James Meredith. Ole Miss, which has long been entwined with Confederate history, continued to be a site of cultural conflict through the late 2010s and 2020s, when students rallied to remove Confederate monuments from campus that they argued were glorifying slavery.
It’s a legacy the school—which takes its nickname from enslavement era language—still grapples with. In his Friday message, Boyce faintly alluded to the school’s ties to the Confederacy without naming it.
“While we are a modern university with a vibrant community of more than 25,000 people, it is important to acknowledge our challenging history, and incidents like this can set us back,” Boyce wrote.
Though Black Mississippians make up nearly 40 percent of the state’s population, they are vastly underrepresented at the university, where Black students make up only 11 percent of the student body.
