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JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The namesake of the University of Mississippi's journalism school is apologizing for his Facebook post that critics called racist.
Ed Meek posted photos Wednesday of two black women in short dresses, which he said were taken on the town square in Oxford "at 2 a.m. after a ballgame."
"A 3 percent decline in enrollment is nothing compared to what we will see if this continues ... and real estate values will plummet as will tax revenues," Meek wrote. "We all share in the responsibility to protect the values we hold dear that have made Oxford and Ole Miss known nationally."
Ole Miss Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter called on Meek to apologize.
"While we all want to ensure a safe, family-friendly environment at the university and in Oxford, I must condemn the tone and content of Ed Meek's post," Vitter wrote on Facebook. "The photos in his post suggest an unjustified racial overtone that is highly offensive."
Meek subsequently deleted his own post and wrote a new one late Wednesday: "I apologize to those offended by my post. My intent was to point out we have a problem in The Grove and on the Oxford Square."
The Grove on the Ole Miss campus is a gathering spot for elaborate tailgate parties before football games.
The university's Black Student Union said Meek's original post implies African-American women cause real estate values to drop. "His statement has clear racial undertones that must be addressed," the group said in a statement posted to Twitter.
Meek led Ole Miss public relations for 37 years, starting in 1964. A petition seeks to remove his name from the journalism school , which was named for him after he and his wife donated $5.3 million in 2009.
The university has struggled for decades to deal with its own history of troubled race relations. White mobs rioted on campus in the autumn of 1962 as James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss; military troops were called in and Meredith was escorted by federal marshals.
Mississippi's population is about 38 percent black, and black students made up 12.7 percent of the Ole Miss enrollment in 2017. Current figures are not yet available.
In an effort to promote racial diversity in recent years, the school renamed a street that had been called Confederate Drive and installed plaques to provide historical background, including on a Confederate soldier statue that has stood for generations in a prominent spot on campus
In July 2017, the university announced it would put up signs acknowledging that some buildings on campus were built with slave labor. The university also announced then that it would remove the name of James K. Vardaman from a building. Vardaman, a white supremacist, was Mississippi's governor from 1904 to 1908 and a U.S. senator from 1913 to 1919.
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This story has been corrected to show Ed Meek posted the photos and his comments to Facebook on Wednesday, not Saturday.
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