Mississippi's Crusading Gadfly
While others maintain the fight is over, attorney Alvin Chambliss continues to breathe life into Mississippi's famed college desegregation case.
By B. Denise Hawkins

HOUSTON

Attorney Alvin O. Chambliss Jr. says that as long as the Ayers v. Fordice case is alive, there's hope for Mississippi's three historically Black universities and for the liberation of Black America. Chambliss should know. For more than a quarter century he stubbornly has breathed life into Ayers, the protracted legal battle over the desegregation of Mississippi's higher education system.

Last spring, just as a $503 million settlement was approved by the 2002 Mississippi Legislature, signed by a federal judge and poised to put the litigation to rest, Chambliss decided to vigorously resuscitate the higher education desegregation case he has been synonymous with for 27 years (see Black Issues, May 10, 2001).

Late last month when most people were counting down the days until Christmas, Chambliss was ticking off the 29 days before he would file "the big brief" in mid-January. "When it comes together, this appeal will represent everything that we ever did in the Ayers case," Chambliss says.

The filing date is symbolic. It was 28 years ago this month that Jake Ayers Sr. filed the lawsuit in January 1975 on behalf of his son and other Black college students in Mississippi. Ayers, a factory worker and local civil rights activist from the tiny town of Glen Allan, Miss., accused the state of operating a segregated higher education system. He argued that Jackson State, Mississippi Valley State and Alcorn State universities were unequal, neglected and woefully underfunded compared to the state's five majority-White universities. In 1986, Ayers died never having seen the case reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Department of Justice, long critical of Mississippi's higher education system, sided with the plaintiffs. U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers Jr. ruled in 1987 that the state had done enough to end segregation in higher education. But in its 1992 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court called the predominantly Black institutions inferior and underfunded. The high court then ordered Mississippi to remove all vestiges of its dual system.