Three connections with David Sansing over the years provide immense joy in remembering the illustrious university historian.
Sansing, professor emeritus of history at the University of Mississippi, died July 6 in Oxford.
In 1996, I was assigned by the newspaper in Albany, Ga., to cover former President Jimmy Carter’s weekly sermon at his church in nearby Plains. Near the front row of Maranatha Baptist Church sat David and his sons, David Sansing Jr. and Perry Sansing. They had journeyed some 400 miles to hear Carter preach.
“You don’t know me, but I know who you are,” I told David. He made me feel like we were long-lost buddies with his return greeting. I had never met the man before that day.
The second encounter was on the 100th anniversary celebration of Mississippi’s New Capitol building in 2003. Some right-thinking person had made the momentous decision to ask Sansing to give the keynote address. As a legislative staffer I eased my way to the front to hear arguably the best speech ever delivered in Mississippi. No one could have topped his effort.
I later had opportunities to call him for historical information, but the last time I saw David was in early 2010 at a signing for my book about McComb held at Square Books in Oxford. I was stunned a day or so before the event to get a call from him asking if he could introduce me.
My response was to tell him I’d pay him to do that. He said that wasn’t necessary. He talked half an hour about the book, my late father-reporter, Charles B. Gordon, and McComb native and longtime Ole Miss coach and athletics administrator Warner Alford, who was in the audience. He told pertinent stories on us all.
David G. Sansing above everything else was a gentleman who treated people the way he wanted to be treated. He also was renowned as a professor and scholar on Mississippi’s history and authored many books on that subject, including one titled “Mississippi Governors: Soldiers, Statesmen, Scholars, Scalawags.”
Further, he was a lover of the Ole Miss Rebels, a fact even people at his alma mater of Southern Miss and rival Mississippi State didn’t seem to hold against him.
There’s an endearing story about how he and his Ole Miss faculty bud, the late writer Willie Morris, climbed atop the roof at the Oxford airport late one night as cheerleaders to welcome home the Rebel football team after a game. His sense of humor was as cherished as Morris’.
His books and that New Capitol speech set Sansing apart in not only love and respect for Mississippi but as a realist when it came to the state’s renowned defects on race relations and lack of total support for public education.
Although he would castigate the state for its many ills, he always came back with a defense filled with truisms about the large number of writers and other artists produced in Mississippi. He called this “The Other Mississippi,” the title of his final book released in 2018.
Sansing’s speech on June 3, 2003, on the steps of the New Capitol raised expectations that Mississippians would begin to “chart our future,” not just wallow in a past that has been predominantly illustrated by “our hostility to outsiders.”
“My most ardent ambition for Mississippi is that we will let go of yesterday, so we can take hold of tomorrow. The future is ours, it is our Promised Land, and I can see it with my heart, if not my eyes. It is over there, just beyond the rise. Come and go with me,” he said in the address.
Sansing ended it: “Thank you and God bless Mississippi.”
Mac Gordon is a native and part-time resident of McComb. He is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.
