Your Say: Outburst recalls ugly history

After news that President Obama was re-elected, a crowd of about 500 people protested at the University of Mississippi, some shouting racial epithets.

Comments from Facebook:

Yet more evidence that some folks just can't handle having a black man as president.

Bill Halstead

While I don't consider myself to be among President Obama's biggest supporters, I nevertheless find the thought that such a display of racial hatred could take place in this day and age disheartening and contemptible. What good is it, I ask, to spew such venom? It certainly can't change the results of the election. All it can serve to do is to drive us further apart and reinforce the stigma of racism that still today seems to haunt America.

David Harrington

It is significant also that the night after the protest, many University of Mississippi students gathered by candlelight and recited the University Creed. It is a shame that a minority of idiots gets a lot of attention, but the majority recognizes not only reality but the future.

That said, I am saddened that parents of my generation have not taught their children better.

Joe Cliburn

As a native of Mississippi, I am deeply embarrassed by what I thought my generation would leave behind while raising our children.

The people elected a president. Now we should put aside political party differences and move forward as a nation, not responding as if we were in Egypt, Libya, or some other extremist country. We must work together to build our country by bending the people we elected to work toward the best good for us within the system, not by mob rule.

J Larry Ware

One positive thing is the expression of this hate overtly, not through oppression of those who are viewed as inferior. Before we can get past this, we have to acknowledge it.

San San B

Letter to the editor:

One under-reported story of election night concerned the mini-riot on the campus of Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) in Oxford. Upon realizing that a new American demographic, representing a dwindling white majority, re-elected the first African-American president, about 500 students poured into Oxford streets shouting racial slurs directed at the president.

As riots go this one was quite tame. Only two people were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct.

It did however, give pause to the notion that we've eliminated public expressions of intolerance for African Americans. It also conjured up memories of one of the worst university riots in American history, which occurred at the same Ole Miss campus 50 years ago. The cause then was the admittance of the first black, James Meredith. In that one, angry segregationists fought hundreds of U.S. marshals and thousands of Army and National Guard troops. Two people were killed and hundreds injured.

Walt Zlotow; Glen Ellyn, Ill.