Mississippi students to vote on controversial mascot

By Nick Allen in Los Angeles Published: 9:51PM GMT twenty-three February 2010

Colonel Reb at a game. Photo: AP

Colonel Reb, the mimic of a pre-Civil War southern gentleman, in wide-brimmed hat and 3 square fit and disposition on a cane, was forsaken as the mascot of their American Football organisation in 2003.

A check will right afar be hold on either to deliver an wholly new image, that would receptive to advice the last genocide knell for Colonel Reb.

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But the move has roused clever feelings on the Mississippi campus with outspoken supporters of the picture observant they will opinion to leave the organisation mascotless.

Donors who wish it backed are melancholy to stop giving money. There are "Save Colonel Reb" advertisements and the tyro physique has even perceived hatred emails.

The university, well known as Ole Miss, has prolonged struggled with how to say the traditions whilst shedding black of the Old South that widen behind to slavery, the Civil War, secular separation and the polite rights struggles.

In 1962 the campus was infamously the stage of rioting over the enrolment of the initial black student, James Meredith, and the US Army was called in.

Waving of the dwindle of the proslavery Confederate armed forces at university sporting events was finished in 1997.

Six years after that Colonel Reb was private from the sidelines at American Football games, and last year the rope stopped personification the strain From Dixie with Love that had desirous fans to intone "The South will climb again".

The university"s American Football organisation is still called the "Rebels". A movement of the Colonel Reb picture initial appeared in a university annual in the 1930s and is believed to have been formed on "Blind Jim Ivy," who was black, a believer who attended most of the university"s sporting events.

When students voted in 2003 on either to reinstate the mascot 94 per cent pronounced no.

However, the university administration department motionless Colonel Reb was a "Disney-like aged camp chairman not deputy of a complicated entertainment program." Koriann Porter, a black tyro who has picked up some-more than 1,700 signatures in await of a new mascot, pronounced most has altered on campus given the polite rights era.

The university right afar has clubs clinging to embracing the farrago and fifteen per cent of the 18,344 students are black.

But most on campus are still adamantly opposite replacing the old mascot.

The Colonel Reb Foundation, a organisation of students and alumni that supports reinstating it, claims over $50 million (�30 million) in donations were lost after the picture was dropped. It says it has distributed 160,000 "Save Colonel Reb" lapel stickers.

Hannah Loy, of the foundation, said: "The infancy of students I talked to feel they"d rather have no mascot if they can"t have Colonel Reb." Josh Hinton, a part of of the Associated Student Body, that authorized a new vote, pronounced a riverboat layer of odds might work as a new mascot.

He said: "We"re sleepy of carrying zero to paint us. We"ve gotten the strain taken away. We wish to have a little kind of convention back."