The following is an article Lewis Grizzard, columnist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution penned on his trip to Oxford for the Ole Miss - UGA football game. I am not saying this is a bad thing or a good thing. I'm just saying my University has indeed changed since the late 1980's.

Lewis Gizzard on Ole Miss

I lost count of just how many times the University of Mississippi band
played "Dixie" last Saturday while the Rebels were upsetting
Georgia, 17-13. The number had to be in the double figures,
however. There were 31,000 at the game. Everybody who wasn't
from Georgia had a Confederate flag.

Before the game began, there had been a prayer. And the two guys
sitting in front of me each brought in a bottle of Jim Beam. All this
prompted my friend Bugar Seely, a veteran Georgia fan, to say,
"They still wave the flag, still sing 'Dixie,' they can still pray and
they can still bring liquor into the game. No wonder they beat us."

It hasn't been easy being Mississippi, I was thinking. You read those
surveys and Mississippi always seems to come up a loser in such
things as education and poverty levels. And then there was the
movie, "Mississippi Burning," which portrayed the entire state as a
roost for drawling, ignorant racists.

The University of Mississippi once at least had good football teams
to help the self-image. Those were the days of national
championships and major bowl games. But that all went away, too.
Ole Miss football has been in a mostly tattered state the last 15
years. I guess that's why they celebrated as they did here Saturday
when Georgia had fallen.

An Ole Miss football game in Oxford is a trip in a time machine. A
trip backward. Said a Georgia fan, "I was walking through the
campus and I saw fraternity boys in coats and ties with their dates,
who were in heels. Then, I heard somebody playing 'Dixie' on a
trumpet. I kept looking around for Michael J. Fox in 'Back to the
Future.'"

The Georgia band doesn't play "Dixie" anymore. And fear of an
American Civil Liberties Union suit has stopped public prayer before
Georgia home games. If you brought a Confederate flag into Sanford
Stadium in Athens, Ga., there'd be a march on the president's office,
and security guards check to make certain nobody is bringing any
cheering booster into the stadium, too. After the game here Saturday,
students and alumni gathered in a shady lane called the Grove. Ten
or so members of the band joined them. And the Ole Miss people
were still waving those flags and the little band was still playing
"Dixie." It was 1958. So I asked a guy, "How can you people get
away with playing 'Dixie,' waving your flags, praying before the game
and bringing booze in?" "We're not supposed to," he replied. "But we
do it anyway." And where do black people fit into all of this?

The football team was filled with blacks, two members of the
mini-band were black and there was a black family standing outside
their van, eating chicken and taking an active part of the post-game
celebration. I'm no sociologist, but does it say anything that
everybody in that scenario seemed to be getting along nicely?

Maybe Mississippians, both black and white, have it figured out. The
key to any sort of co-existence is tolerance, even of symbols that
once stood for hate.

Good luck, Rebels, for the rest of the season.