A half-century later, students at the University of Mississippi reckon with the past

Kenneth Mayfield was in the Black Student Union at the University of Mississippi in 1970. Members of the group were jailed after protesting token integration on the Ole Miss campus. Mayfield, now an attorney in Tupelo, Miss., was also one of eight students expelled. (Timothy Ivy for NPR)

OXFORD, Miss. — Many a Black history lesson includes the story of James Meredith, the man who integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962.

But that wasn't the end of efforts to dismantle entrenched segregation on the college campus most associated with the Old South. Even the school's moniker — Ole Miss — derives from the term enslaved people once used for the mistress of the plantation.