David Sansing gave me hell when I was at Ole Miss. It didn’t help that he knew my parents and probably assumed it part and parcel of his high consideration of them to single out their wayward son for what he doubtless considered the academic equivalent of “tough love”, but no matter how attentive I was in class or how good my grades (I always managed an “A”) I always felt targeted for seemingly innocuous but loaded questions.
Soon enough, I realized I wasn’t the only slacker he picked on; in retrospect, I think Sansing considered it his God-given duty to inspire every student he taught with a profound respect for the Muse of Mississippi History (bless her tattered soul). He was a marvelous teacher, and what made Sansing even more formidable in the classroom is his leonine demeanor, the high, noble brow framed by curling swept-back hair; he was the very picture of a powerful academic, who if he should ask what the Black and Tan Convention was, and you respond with “a craft beer festival,” you likely won’t live to tell of it.
The title essay of Sansing’s The Other Mississippi: A State in Conflict with Itself (the title echo’s Faulkner’s famous dictum that “The only thing worth writing about is the heart in conflict with itself.”), a collection of articles, speeches, and lectures given throughout his career, confirms Sansing’s command of his subject in sturdy prose that crackles with authority and sets forth this theme: “Poverty and prejudice and illiteracy have kept Mississippi back, and backwards, but The Other Mississippians have battled poverty and prejudice throughout our history. And for every Mississippi politician who has shamed its name, there have been others to make it proud.”
Sansing’s dissertation at Mississippi College (1959) was “A History of Calhoun County, Mississippi,” (my native county, as it happens) which could be said to be a precursor to his 1974 lecture. “History of Northern Mississippi,” presented as the opening lecture at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in 1974, where in the opening passage Sansing describes the singular mystique of the state he loves:
“Any standard historical atlas of the United States will indicate to the most casual observer that there is a political and geographic subdivision designated Mississippi. There are fifty such subdivisions, and collectively they constitute the United States. However, Mississippi is not just a state of the Union. It is a state of mind; it is more than a constituency, it is a condition.”
This lecture, along with a later essay “Professor B.L.C. Wailes: A Forgotten Man of the Old South” represent two of the finest examples of historical writing to be found in our literature, a subject that also comes under Sansing’s expansive attention along with the Meredith Crisis, the Mississippi state flag, the University of Mississippi and tributes to the likes of L.Q.C. Lamar, Arch Dalrymple III, John Leslie, Bill and Carroll Waller, Professor Guyton and the definitive history of the Ole Miss/Mississippi State football rivalry.
Former students will hear Sansing’s voice soaring off the pages and students of Mississippi history across the globe would be tragically remiss if this edifying, authoritative, and, for the connoisseur of historical prose, absorbing work doesn’t find a place on their bookshelf. You will find yourself picking up David Sansing’s The Other Mississippi again and again for great writing and detailed, erudite history.
