Dave’s World
Water Valley Mayor Donald Gray welcomed Dottie Reed and her friends and classmates to the city on Sept. 29. Their visit was part of activities marking 60 years of integration at the University of Mississippi.
With the exception of attending an occasional Ole Miss football game when a friend offers free tickets, my trips to the University of Mississippi’s campus have been very infrequent. I finished my four-year degree in 1998 after five long years – two at Northwest and three at Ole Miss. In reality I haven’t had a reason to go to the campus, but I always enjoy telling people that I’m not sure the statute of limitations has expired for the outstanding parking tickets I racked up as a commuter over 20 years ago.
I tested the water a couple of weeks ago when I attended the university’s events marking 60 years of integration. And I had a very good reason, Water Valley’s own Dottie Quay Chapman Reed was one of the featured speakers during the week-long events marking the milestone. Reed is a 1974 graduate of the University of Mississippi and her story was titled “Coming Full Circle: My Journey through the University of Mississippi, to Many Points Beyond and Back.”
There was standing room only in the third floor room at J.D. Williams Library as Ms. Dottie traced her steps through time in a journey that started at Water Valley.
My first introduction to Ms. Dottie was back in 2018 when she reached out in an email asking about the possibility of sharing stories of African American matriarchs who made a mark in Yalobusha County. Little did either of us know what that would lead to. Ms. Dottie launched a series of articles that preserved the history of so many. The articles were published in the Herald and later compiled in a book published by Ms. Dottie. Her work also led to a collaboration with the University of Mississippi for an oral history project that also preserved African American history in the county – hence the title of her talk “Coming Full Circle.”
For 30 minutes Ms. Dottie shared details about her lifelong journey and I learned how little I actually knew about her. Ms. Dottie graduated from Davidson High School in 1970 and, in her words, could not wait to leave Mississippi. She shared that she had no intentions of going to college. Instead, during the summer of 1970, Dottie and a friend went to Milwaukee. Her friend found a job and stayed in the city, but she was not as fortunate. Her mother then told her that her only choice was to come home and go to college.
She recalled the environment was tense as she started in the fall of 1970 when there were just over 100 African American students enrolled out of thousands of students at the University of Mississippi. She shared the hardships as a student for the next four years enduring harassment and racism. After graduating, she then served as the University of Mississippi’s first African-American admission college.
Her journey continued as she worked in the corporate world and had other successful career steps along the way. As I left the library I thought that of all the stories she shared on the pages of the Herald about others, her story is one of the most profound.
