A Cautionary Tale: NYT pens story of a liberal Ole Miss student activist

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Mr. Coon is aware that black people aren’t looking for a white savior. And he is acutely aware that his surname, which doubles as a racial slur, can teeter like an unexploded bomb on the lips of every Mississippian who dares to mutter it.

Yet none of that impeded Mr. Coon’s transformation into a full-blown campus celebrity in October 2015, when he helped lead the student movement that brought the Confederate-themed state flag down from the university’s main flagpole. The episode transformed Mr. Coon into a kind of stock campus character: Student agitator. Hero and villain. Subject of catcalls. Subject of memes. Someone many students loathe and many others deeply admire.

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What role should he play in this new opposition? Certainly not White Jesus. How scared should he be now with his high profile and African-American girlfriend (also an activist) and habit of not shutting up?

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For Mr. Coon, there is another, more personal challenge. His critics may dismiss his convictions as P.C. posturing, but he arrived at them after witnessing the lingering prejudices that still marble the Mississippi experience, despite all of the state’s progress in the last half-century. It is a variety of political awakening that happens to some white people in the South, like a switch that flips within. Sometimes it is hard to turn off.

“I hate to say this because it sounds manic, but I can’t go through a day without obsessively thinking about race,” Mr. Coon said. “I think about it all the time, to the point that it sometimes harms my relationships with people.”

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The fight over the flag was the kind of college experience that Mr. Coon had hoped for three years ago when he left Petal, a white-flight suburb of Hattiesburg, and enrolled at Ole Miss, founded in 1848 to educate the scions of the Mississippi planter class. As a middle school student, Mr. Coon had been a Confederate apologist, he said. But by the 12th grade, his obsession with race and racism was in full bloom, and Ole Miss beckoned to him as an American problem — one in his own backyard, one that he believed needed solving.

Ask him what flipped the switch, and he offers a laundry list: Listening to the hip-hop group N.W.A. Discovering “The Colbert Report.” The Trayvon Martin case. An act of racism by someone close to him still too raw for him to publicly share.

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His two best friends were black men, and their best times were often spent crammed in a car together, where Mr. Coon was steeped in their jokes and music and passions and fears — particularly the fear of rogue police officers.


They called themselves Coon and Friends. “The joke was which one’s the coon and which one’s the friends,” one of them, Chris Stewart, 21, recalled.

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“Coon was not constantly combating that narrative of the white savior,” she said. “When they’d say, ‘You’re so wonderful,’ he wouldn’t do that. He’d just accept the praise and go about his business.”

Mr. Coon is still contemplating such criticism and what it means for his future. Though he had announced that he would reintroduce his sanctuary campus bill in the student senate, he walked the idea back in an interview this month.

“It does eventually become problematic,” he said, “that a white man is leading the charge.”

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Mr. Trump’s election has pushed him further left. “I’ve been exposing myself to much more radical politics and ideologies,” Mr. Coon said. “I follow some anarchists and socialists on Twitter.”

In Oxford, there are certain places he will not go anymore — football games, the town square — because he has learned that the likelihood of an ugly confrontation is too great. But he is not an outcast on campus. His social circle consists mostly of black students and activists — the alternative Ole Miss.

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