How Khayat Dealt With Confederate Flags at Rebel Games

Robert Khayat

In a recent post in the Daily Beast former Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat tells an ingenious story about how he dealt with the vexing issue of the Confederate flag at Ole Miss games. This is a subject worth considering as the current University of Mississippi administration is attempting to refine it’s own policies on potentially derisive symbols. 

The article starts out this way:

In my childhood home in Moss Point, Mississippi, two small, vividly colored Confederate flags hung over my bedroom door. I saw them every morning when I awoke and every evening when I climbed into bed. I didn’t know anything about the history of the flags, but I loved the red and blue colors. As I grew and started to follow football, I associated the flag with the great Ole Miss football teams of the ’40s and ’50s. And as a teenager, when I heard the term “Johnny Rebel,” I naively assumed the reference was to Johnny Vaught’s Ole Miss Rebel football squad.

Those of us who grew up in the white South, and particularly Mississippi, were so accustomed to Old South songs and sights and symbols during sporting events that the origins of the emblems weren’t carefully considered. Nor was the pain they caused others.

For the rest of the article click here.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast