PROFESSOR'S ACCOUNT OF RACIAL DEMONSTRATION IS IN JOURNAL

A Southeast Missouri State University English professor has written a behind-the-scenes account of a 1965 racial demonstration at the University of Mississippi.

The account has been published in the Journal of Mississippi History.

The essay by Robert Hamblin, English professor, titled "The 1965 Southern Literary Festival: A Microcosm of the Civil Rights Movement," recounts the attempts of a biracial delegation from Tougaloo College to participate in the annual meeting of the previously all-white Southern Literary Festival. The presence of the Tougaloo group on the Ole Miss campus precipitated a violent demonstration involving about 500 students.

Hamblin was a graduate student at Ole Miss during this period and was a participant in the Literary Festival, serving as the campus guide and driver for Robert Penn Warren, one of the principal speakers. Hamblin's personal recollections of Warren's reactions to the festival incident were published last year in the Southern Literary Journal.

Hamblin discovered the larger story of Tougaloo's integration of the Southern Literary Festival Association while completing the article on Warren. Ole Miss officials granted Hamblin access to their administrative files about the incident, and he also interviewed several people involved in the event, including Kenneth Dean.

Dean is the executive director of the Mississippi Council on Human Relations and is a Baptist minister in Rochester, N.Y. He has called Hamblin's article, "the best essay I have ever read on the Mississippi race situation in the 1960s."