A NEW DAY IN DIXIE

Back in 1969, Rob Evans wasn’t thinking about becoming the first African American basketball coach at the University of Mississippi as he raced the sunset down Interstate 55 through Batesville toward Jackson, past the ghosts of black men who disappeared into murky bogs.

Emmett Till had come south from Chicago in the summer of 1955, made small talk with a white girl in a grocery store and was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River with a 74-pound cotton gin fan wrapped in barbed wire around his neck.

In June, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith hunched in the honeysuckle and shot civil rights leader Medgar Evers dead in his driveway.

It took three trials and 30 years to get a conviction.

As Evans drove, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were still unleashing their vile crusades, waiting near off-ramps for rental cars to overheat.

Then a young recruiter on Lou Henson’s staff at New Mexico State, Evans used to telephone his girlfriend, Carolyn, after he reached his motel room: “You could cut the atmosphere,” he would tell her.

What Evans was thinking about as he crisscrossed Mississippi: Get off the road before darkness; Vicksburg is no place to be righteous; remember, 21-year-old black men from New Mexico don’t just pull into the nearest diner for supper.

“It was dangerous to travel as a black person in the state,” Evans recalls from his office couch. “I could only stay in hotels owned by blacks. I traveled during the day and not by night, because you could get in trouble not even trying to get in trouble. There were a number of things I really don’t want to dredge up.”

Once, Evans visited Indianola, Miss., to recruit a prospect named Coolidge Ball, neither man with a notion of the history they would make.

Evans didn’t sign the player.

Instead, in 1971-72, Ball became the first black athlete to play sports at Ole Miss.

Twenty one years later, in 1992, after 24 years as an assistant coach at New Mexico State, Texas Tech and Oklahoma State, Rob Evans joined Ball in Ole Miss history when he was named the school’s first black basketball coach.

It wasn’t a token hire, but it was motivated.

Mississippi clearly needed someone to lead it out of the whiteness.

“I felt they were intent on hiring a black coach,” Evans says.

Because of its sullied image, Ole Miss was losing top black athletes to other schools.

“The competition uses a lot of that against us,” Don Kessinger, Mississippi’s assistant athletic director for internal affairs, says of the school’s racist stigma. “It’s more difficult for the competition to use it against us with an African American coach sitting in their living room. But that’s not the reason we hired him.”

It was reason enough. Evans’ hero is Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodger great who broke major league baseball’s color barrier 50 years ago. Evans, who was raised in Hobbs and played on the New Mexico State team that lost to Lew Alcindor’s UCLA Bruins in the 1968 NCAA tournament, embraced the chance to break down barriers Robinson couldn’t get to.

Like baseball, Ole Miss had come late to civil rights. It took tear gas and National Guard intervention to get James Meredith, the school’s first black student, to his first class--Colonial American History--in October 1962.

“I knew national attention would be on this job,” Evans, 50, says. “I almost took my name out of the hat a couple of times.”

His friends weren’t much help.

“They said it was a graveyard,” Evans remembers.

They didn’t know Mississippi the way he knew it. Evans returned to recruit in the state, year after year, and took careful note of the social progress.

“Mississippi is probably better off than a lot of places because of its history,” he says. “They had to make some positive changes where a lot of people haven’t had to make it.”

Ole Miss had one way to go: up.

Civil rights aside, the basketball program had been historically dreadful since beginning play in 1908-09.

Before Evans, the Rebels had never even won a regular-season conference title.

Even the school’s most famous basketball player, Kessinger, is best remembered as a shortstop for the Chicago Cubs.

Mississippi’s potholed past makes remarkable what Evans has accomplished in five years at Oxford. The Rebels (19-7) cracked the Associated Press national rankings for the first time in history this season, won the Southeastern Conference’s West Division title and earned the school’s second NCAA tournament berth. Ole Miss’ only other NCAA appearance came in 1981 after the Rebels won the SEC tournament.

“Rob Evans is the national coach of the year,” Louisiana State Coach Dale Brown says.

After the Rebels defeated Tennessee at Oxford in January, Volunteer Coach Kevin O’Neill offered some unsolicited postgame comments.

“I hope people here appreciate what the hell he’s doing,” O’Neill said of Evans. “If I was everybody, I’d be going around collecting money before it’s too late.”

This season, Ole Miss has defeated Kentucky, the defending national champion, and swept Arkansas, the 1994 NCAA titlist.

As surprising as the basketball turnaround, perhaps, has been the welcome the Evans’ family has received in the Oxford community.

Carolyn Evans, the young girlfriend who became Rob’s wife in 1970, had her doubts.

“I knew things were not as they were in the ‘60s, but I didn’t know if enough time had elapsed where I would feel comfortable in the setting,” Carolyn says.

The Evanses brought to Oxford a daughter and son and the burning images of civil rights film footage.

The first thing Carolyn did when she arrived was visit the nearest country club.

“I didn’t meet with any unpleasant encounters,” she says. “I was looking for something different.”

The next hurdle was housing: Carolyn and Rob chose a home in Woodland Hills estates, an all-white neighborhood.

When Carolyn walked down the street with the real estate agent, she noticed a man glaring at her from his porch with a Confederate flag draped over his lap.

Carolyn stared right back.

“You know how looks can convey an awful lot?” Carolyn asks. “I conveyed with my looks that it will not bother me. I was not going to back down.”

Carolyn eventually met the man and the two became friends. All it took was a little Southern hospitality.

Damon, the Evans’ son, was one of the first blacks to be accepted by Ole Miss’ Sigma Chi. Carolyn hosted annual Christmas parties for the fraternity in her home. Damon graduated in 1996 with a degree in business administration.

Amber, the Evans’ daughter, is a freshman majoring in broadcast journalism.

Rob Evans set out on his own community outreach program. One of his first acts as coach was to address an alumni banquet in Jackson. A booster asked him how he was going to respond to the playing of “Dixie.”

“I can handle it,” Evans told them.

Evans’ home phone number is listed in the Oxford directory and he attempts to answers all his calls--crank, praiseworthy, racist or otherwise. The night Mississippi beat Kentucky, he had 44 congratulatory messages on his machine.

Rob Evans was the toast of Mississippi.

“Yes, it has a history, it has a very dark history, a history I do not condone,” Carolyn says. “But Mississippi has made great strides to change the perception. It can’t change the past, but it certainly has made strides to change the future.”

Oh I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times that are not forgotten. . . .

Some traditions die hard.

It is Jan. 22, half an hour before tipoff against Tennessee. Colonel Reb, a bulbous-headed mascot of obvious Confederate lineage, does a court-side jig as the Ole Miss band breaks into a melancholy rendition of “Dixie.”

The virtually all-white crowd at C.M. “Tad” Smith Coliseum rises.

Carolyn Evans remains seated.

“We do not participate in that particular number,” she says later. “We understand why it’s near and dear to the hearts of older alumni. But I do not stand, clap, sing or otherwise vocalize to Dixie.”

The Evanses have made their feelings clear; that the stigma Ole Miss still has to outsiders will endure as long as symbols of a racist past continue.

“Everything is history, as I tell them,” Rob Evans says, “and all history is not good.”

Evans speaks the words from his campus office, adjacent to Confederate Drive.

“It’s a concern,” Evans says. “To a certain segment of the community, it’s offensive; to another segment, it’s a tradition.”

Kessinger says change in Mississippi takes time.

“I was here for James Meredith,” Kessinger says. “I was a sophomore when that happened. It was a black day in our history.

“But the school fight song really isn’t ‘Dixie.’ Obviously, it goes back to the nickname ‘Rebels.’

“I think anything that is offensive to people we should not do. At the same time, people don’t play Dixie for anything other than it’s our school.”

Kessinger pauses, then concludes.

“Some traditions need to be broken.”

Oxford--home to William Faulkner, Ole Miss, a folksy town square and world-class bookstore--is a picture postcard Southern college town.

Coolidge Ball, Ole Miss’ first black basketball player, loved Oxford so much he made his home here, opening a sign shop in town.

He still follows the basketball program intently.

“I am thrilled to death for Coach Evans,” he says.

Ball says he never experienced problems as the first black athlete at Ole Miss, which was chartered in 1844. But, like Evans, he knew he was different.

“I knew I was an example,” Ball says. “I knew I had to excel. I didn’t want to fail, so they could say, ‘I knew it was going to happen.’ ”

Ball recalled an early encounter with a white student.

‘The guy told me, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever had a conversation with a black,’ ” Ball says. “He said, ‘I thought you could just talk about basketball.’ ”

The only trouble Ball encountered was on the road at Auburn, Ala., when he was refused entrance to a whites-only pool hall.

What Ball remembers most is that his white teammates came to his defense, refusing to enter the establishment.

Ball says school rituals never bothered him.

“To be honest, I couldn’t care less about Dixie,” he says. “I was not going to lose sleep over Dixie.”

Yet Ball concedes Ole Miss’ devotion to traditions is probably why Oxford’s blacks stay away from athletic events in droves--even now, as a black coach and seven black players lead the program to the NCAA tournament.

“A lot of it goes back to the flag, and Dixie,” Ball says. “I was hoping we could get that resolved. But blacks here in Oxford just don’t support basketball.”

The stigma has hurt recruiting. Evans has fought hard to convince young blacks to attend the university, never so hard as he battled for Ansu Sesay, the team’s present standout forward.

Sesay is from Houston. When he told his mother Marie he wanted to play for Evans at Ole Miss, she said, “No,” flatly and succinctly.

“She was thinking Oxford, Mississippi, the past,” Sesay says. “She was just going on that.”

It was typical of what Evans heard from parents of black recruits.

“Everybody in the country tried to talk him out of coming, including his mother,” he says.

To convince Marie Sesay, Evans set up a conference call with some of the school’s top faculty members, many of whom were black.

At the end of the teleconference, Carolyn Evans got on the line and said she would not have sent her own children to Ole Miss if she didn’t think it was safe.

“If we’re going to send them to Ole Miss,” Carolyn said, “there’s got to be something good about it.”

Marie Sesay finally relented and Evans was able to secure the cornerstone for his current team.

Evans rebuilt the program brick by brick, starting with defense.

“If you don’t play defense, you don’t play,” Sesay says.

After laying the foundation, Evans was able to recruit offensive stars such as Sesay and Joezon Darby.

“There was not ever a kid who absolutely wanted to come to the University of Mississippi,” Evans says. “Now, we’re beating people on kids.”

Evans is getting into houses he never could before. This year, he recruited two players from Arkansas who chose Ole Miss over Tulane, Alabama, Tulsa and Oklahoma.

How far has the program come?

In Evans’ first season, 1992-93, the Rebels went to Florida and were pummeled by the Gators, 94-47.

“Probably the sickest feeling I ever had because we couldn’t do anything to stop it,” Evans says.

Evans announced at the time, “When I get my soldiers, I’ll be back.”

A Florida columnist wrote that Mississippi was the worst Division I team he had ever seen.

Evans clipped the article and kept it for future reference.

Before a rematch against Florida in the SEC tournament later that season, Evans handed the newspaper snippet to an assistant.

“I didn’t say a word,” Evans says. “I told the assistant, ‘Just make a copy of this and give it to every player.’ ”

The Rebels did not lose by 47 points a second time.

Ole Miss won, 67-62.

“That, to me, was the start of our program,” Evans says. “That was the building block.”

Evans still marks the Florida game on his calendar. The Rebels probably secured their NCAA berth this year with a Jan. 23 victory over the Gators in Gainesville.

Evans had come back with his soldiers.

“Yeah, I reflected on that,” Evans says of the pledge he had made four years earlier.

When Ole Miss returned from Florida to Oxford, 400 fans met the team at the airport. Fans lined up to buy tickets for the team’s next home game, against Louisiana State, at 7:30 the next morning.

“Those things hadn’t happened before,” Evans says.

The question now is whether the school will heed the words of Tennessee’s O’Neill: “I hope the people here appreciate what the hell he’s doing.”

Evans is considered a leading candidate to replace Brown, the outgoing LSU coach.

Evans has had contract discussions with Pete Boone, the Ole Miss athletic director, but remains mum about his future.

Evans: “We’ll just have to wait until the season is over.”

If Evans does go, he won’t need directions to Baton Rouge. It’s right down Interstate 55, past Batesville, through Jackson, west on I-12 once you cross the Louisiana border.

Evans has been down that road before.

It’s just a safer drive now.