When poring over past volumes of yearbooks at the University of Mississippi, the strong Confederate character and white supremacist worldview that plagued the campus for decades come clearly into view. In the 1937 edition of The Ole Miss yearbook, a member of the Delta Psi fraternity is dressed in Klansmen’s robes, with Delta Psi heralded as, “hooded figures of the night;” Kappa Alpha Order fraternity members are described as, “gentlemen of the Old South — the knights of the Confederacy.”
The Confederate battle flag is a constant sight, emblazoned across yearbook covers and waved in photographs by crowds of Rebel football fans. Colonel Rebel, a caricature of a Southern plantation owner and the university’s former mascot, made his first appearance on the cover of the 1937 yearbook.
Scattered among the pale faces and Confederate banners, the last person you would expect occasionally appears in photographs of the segregated university: a Black man. He is showcased orating to large crowds of freshmen, intermingling with white students in the stadium bleachers and standing around with a sign hanging on his neck that says: “Blind Jim: Ole Miss Freshman Dean on the road with the Rebels. A donation will keep him traveling with the team.”
James “Blind Jim” Ivy was a peanut vendor who came to UM in 1896.
The son of a former slave, Ivy was blinded while working on the Tallahatchie Bridge when hot tar got in his eyes. He became an “athletic talisman” for the university in 1896 when his enthusiastic cheers were credited with turning the tide for the Ole Miss Baseball team against the University of Texas. Students would bring Ivy on the road for football games.
At the same time that the Ole Miss marching band and Rebelettes performed in Confederate regalia, a Black man was being hailed as the unofficial mascot of the school. Many cling to this as proof that the university was an institution proposing an alternative vision of racial harmony. Some use Ivy’s story to defend symbols and remnants of the Old South today and continue to tokenize him as a mascot.
The Colonel Reb Foundation, an organization that has been advocating for Colonel Reb’s reinstatement since 2003, has a page dedicated to Ivy on its website. Former Ole Miss Historian David Sansing suggested that Colonel Reb may have been based on Blind Jim.
“If you look at the photo of ‘Blind Jim’ in the three-piece suit, with the hat, there’s a striking resemblance. The original Colonel Rebel emblem is a spitting image of ‘Blind Jim’ Ivy, except for white skin,” the website says, quoting Sansing.
Brandon Griffin is a UM alum and the 2022-2023 president of the Colonel Reb Foundation student organization. When he was a student, he frequently donned a Colonel Reb suit at football games. Griffin believes that Colonel Reb is neither inherently a racist symbol nor a Confederate symbol.
“For some people that reality (that Colonel Reb is a racist symbol) is true, to them that could be what Colonel Reb stands for,” Griffin said. “I do not personally see Colonel Reb as a Confederate symbol because Colonel Reb was started in 1937, which was nearly 70 years after the Civil War had ended. Colonel Reb is an inanimate mascot and logo and not a living creature from the 1860s.”
While symbols are up for subjective interpretation, it is undeniable that the character Colonel Reb emerged from a culture steeped in longing for the Confederacy. One needs only to open the very same yearbook in which the former mascot first appeared to find an image of a horse-mounted Klansman carrying a torch.
Stephen Monroe, associate professor and chair of UM’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric, wrote a book titled “Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities,” part of which delves into Ivy’s history. He believes that Colonel Reb, like other Old South and Confederate symbols, is far past his expiration date.
“As just one member of the UM community, I feel strongly that we should officially and unofficially retire Old South words and symbols. The cartoon of Colonel Rebel is an example. It was officially retired years ago, but it still remains highly valued and visible amongst some in our community,” Monroe said. “Instead, I think we should gather around inclusive and unifying symbols. We need to express our school spirit for the university of the present and future, not of the problematic past.”
UM is undergoing something of a mascot crisis. Since Chancellor Robert Khayat removed Colonel Reb as the official mascot of the university in 2003, a black bear mascot temporarily held the title in 2010 until 2018, when the university introduced Tony the Landshark.
Despite the university’s official disassociation from Colonel Reb, he has stuck. Nowadays, images and merchandise of Colonel Reb seem to outnumber those of Landsharks 10:1, both at games and in unofficial merchandise stores. The lack of a popularly accepted alternative mascot has created space for fans to reappropriate Colonel Reb merch, and so fans search for ways to justify the character’s problematic origins.
One picture from the 1954 yearbook encapsulates the tone of Ivy’s relationship to Ole Miss. Snickering freshmen with haphazardly shaved heads (a defunct campus tradition) removed their hats and bowed to Ivy, who wore a stoic expression, unable to see and therefore receive the students’ jeering accolades.
“The relationship between Ole Miss students and Blind Jim was genteel racism in its purest form and it broke none of the codices of white supremacy, but their fondness for him was genuine,” Sansing said.
Ivy died on Oct. 30, 1955, and he was memorialized with his own page in the 1955 yearbook.
“Never has there been on the Ole Miss campus a truer Rebel fan than Blind Jim,” the memorial page reads.
Funds initially collected to pay for Ivy’s medical treatment were instead directed towards the foundation of a scholarship in his name for Black Mississippians to attend one of Mississippi’s segregated Black universities, not UM. James Meredith would not desegregate UM until 1962, only seven years after Ivy’s death.
The memorial page and its glowing description of Ivy’s relationship to the university portrays a sanitized version of his story, though. It highlights the genuine fondness shared between Ivy and students that Sansing alluded to, but it fails to truly capture the racial dynamics at play.
Unfortunately, only photos remain — photos unable to communicate a full picture of the man James “Blind Jim” Ivy
