Was the debate schedule gamed for Obama too?

We now know that the DNC did everything in their power to make sure Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee for President. Never mind what the voters wanted, this is the year the DNC decided to nominate a black man. Anyone who thought Hillary Clinton was the better candidate was screamed at, called a racist, and told to either stand aside or get out of the Party. The DNC even scheduled their convention so the winner would accept the nomination on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Accident? I don’t think so.

Now I see that the first presidential debate this Friday between Barack Obama and John McCain will take place at “Ole Miss”–the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. Could there be a more favorable site for Obama? It looks like the Debate committee decided to give us another “teachable moment” on race (h/t Riverdaughter). The cable networks must be salivating at this opportunity to give their favorite candidate another boost.

In 1961, James Meredith was attending Jackson State University. He applied for admission to the University of Mississippi, and was rejected twice. With assistance from the NAACP and Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice, he sued the university, arguing that he was being denied admission because of the color of his skin. After a long legal struggle, Meredith finally won. The U.S. Supreme Court decided on September 10, 1962 that Meredith had right to attend Ole Miss. Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, a rabid segregationist, vowed to prevent Meredith from registering.

For months Barnett’s defiance of a court order to admit Meredith had rallied public support throughout the segregated South. Finally, after three attempts to register were blocked by state officials, Meredith arrived again on campus, at 4 p.m. on Sept. 30, 1962, a Sunday, accompanied by 173 U.S. marshals dispatched by President John F. Kennedy.

By 8 p.m. the Lyceum, an 1848 building that housed the administration, was surrounded by a mob of 2,000 students and segregationists calling for Meredith’s lynching, according to the author William Doyle in “An American Insurrection” (Doubleday, 2001). The threat was real: Historically there had been more recorded lynchings in Mississippi than in any other state, Doyle wrote.

In the ensuing riot, two people died, 28 U.S. Marshals were shot, and 160 people were injured. This was a serious battle which could have spiraled into civil war. In the end, Governor Ross Barnett secretly negotiated with JFK to allow Meredith to register. Meredith finally registered at the university on October 1, 1962 and graduated in 1964.

Hosting the first debate of 2008 with the first black candidate as a participant, provides a golden opportunity for the university to distance itself from its long history of racial prejudice and segregation. Black students now make up 16% of the university’s enrollment, but racial hostilities are still a problem. Even the name “Ole Miss” comes from the name that slaves used to address mistresses of plantations.

Over the past decade, Chancellor Robert Khayat has pushed Ole Miss through a grinding transformation. After taking over in 1995, he banned Confederate flags at football games, provoking an unsuccessful federal lawsuit and death threats that led him to hire a bodyguard. A beloved Ole Miss athlete in the late 1950s, Mr. Khayat, 70 years old, also removed the venerable sports mascot, the Confederate Colonel Rebel.

“It was a virtual war,” Mr. Khayat said.

He approved a new campus institute for racial reconciliation that helped organize blacks and whites to formally demand prosecutions in the unsolved 1964 civil-rights murders, a move that led to the 2005 conviction of a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 2002, on the 40th anniversary of Mr. Meredith’s admission, the school for the first time honored the surviving soldiers who had subdued the mob.

And then in 2006, the university put up a statue of James Meredith on the campus. According to the Wall Street Journal, former Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant and his old friend Curtis Wilkie, who also used to cover politics for the Globe and now works as a journalism professor at Ole Miss, originated the idea for the university to host a presidential debate.

The debate schedule was set in November, 2007. The university had obviously applied long before they new the Democrats would nominate Barack Obama, but at the time the supposedly nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates made their decision, it was clear that Obama would be running. Whether the choice was deliberate or not, it seems to me that Obama will benefit from the publicity surrounding the event.

This man who has done nothing to advance the cause of African Americans in this country, who allowed poor black tenets to freeze in slumlord Tony Rezko’s tenements in Obama’s own state senate district in Chicago, is about to be lionized as a “historic” candidate. How ironic. Remember, this is the man who refused to attend The State of Black America Conference hosted by Tavis Smiley in February of this year. Obama also declined to appear at the events marking the 40th anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King. And amazingly, in his acceptance speech on the anniversary of King’s “I have a dream” speech, Obama never mentioned King’s name.

And what is James Meredith up to these days? Meredith will lead one of eight HIV/AIDS protest caravans from around the country that will converge on Oxford, Mississippi on September 26, the day of the debate.

“We have no national AIDS strategy plan,” said Campaign to End AIDS Spokeswoman Alice Leeds. “This country has supported and given money to countries all over the world to establish their own national AIDS plan, but we have none of our own.”

One of the caravans will be arriving from Chicago. Did Barack Obama do anything to support the marchers from his home city? I couldn’t find any evidence that he did.

James Meredith will be part of a small group marching from Jackson to Oxford, Mississippi, to reprise a one-man “march against fear” that Meredith made in 1966. During this solitary protest against racism, Meredith was shot and badly wounded by a sniper. When Meredith was hospitalized, civil rights activists Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and others finished the march to Oxford in his honor.

Of the AIDS issue, Meredith said

“I consider this to be the most important thing since the Martin Luther King assassination.” ….

James Meredith helped rally these marchers and he plans to appear in Oxford.

Let’s hope the Obama-obsessed media will stand aside and let James Meredith and his fellow marchers hold both candidates’ feet to the fire over the AIDS issue. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen. I expect Wolf Blitzer, Candy Crowley, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews will be all over this, cynically exploiting the historic events that took place in Oxford, Mississippi in the 1960s to advance their chosen candidate. I hope I’m wrong.