Black law dean ushers in a new day at Ole Miss

Ebony, August, 1995 by Kevin Chappell

Louis Westerfield heads for the bedroom of his modest Southern ranch house after his wife, Gelounder, encouraged him to change from his stuffy black work suit to something more comfortable. After returning in an even dressier gray suit, he sheepishly asks, "How's this? I can put on a brown one."

Westerfield--the first Black dean at the once staunchly segregated University of Mississippi--later explains his reluctance to relax. "One of the reasons I don't take off my suit too easily is because when I take off my suit, I become just another Black man in Oxford, Mississippi," the 46-year-old scholar says. "To a certain extent, that changes my status. That's a shame, but that's reality."

If Westerfield seems a little apprehensive, he has a right to be. Beginning his second year as head of the university's School of Law, he realizes he's breaking new ground in a state that historically hasn't taken too kindly to change. The University of Mississippi was at the center of the resistance to integrate schools during the '60s. Although the school has made progress, some things haven't changed much since 1962, when federal marshals escorted the university's first Black student, James Meredith, onto campus as Whites hurled objects and racial epithets at him. Today, some Black students say they still don't feel too comfortable at the school where "Welcome to Ole Miss" signs and rebel flags greet visitors. Even Westerfield, on his morning jogs, has been the target of racist names and thrown objects. And once, a young White woman told him that he was walking on the wrong sidewalk.

While the dean considers his suits the great equalizers to lingering racial tensions, they also make for great irony. if someone would have told him--the grandson of Mississippi sharecroppers, one of seven children raised by a mother who was a domestic, a boy who studied by oil lamplight and walked three miles to the nearest highway to catch the school bus--that as an adult he would have a problem wearing suits too much, he probably would have thought more along the lines of prison jumpsuits.

As a youngster, Westerfield always figured he would live his life on the wrong side of the law. After all, lawlessness was all he saw when, at age 1 1, his family moved from rural Mississippi to New Orleans' tumultuous Fischer projects. The housing development crawled with junkies, pimps, pushers and punks. His friends told him he would be one of the four, the extent of the career options at Fischer. "There were times when we would sit on the steps and talk to the guys who had been to Angola prison and they would tell us how to survive in prison because it was a foregone conclusion that one day you were going to end up there," Westerfield recalls. "So you took [survival] lessons."

While he listened intensely and learned what he thought he needed to know, Westerfield knew it wasn't street smarts but book smarts that would get him ahead. He remembers being just tall enough to pull down the newspapers with which his grandmother used to line the mantlepiece, and having her well at him when he did it. But he didn't stop. He couldn't stop. He was so mesmerized by the photos and articles that soon he began to do something rare around the Fischer projects and on the cotton farms of Mississippi --he began to dream. "Ever since I can remember I could read," he says. "I used to sit in the pasture and look up at the sky and wonder what would I be and where would I go. I was different. I vas labeled as different. I was a little more cautious about getting involved in certain situations than other kids. They would called me 'Scary' and would tell me I better stop all that reading or I was going to go crazy."

Even today, people tell Westerfield to slow down or he's going to go crazy. His staff calls him "Superman" because of his hectic schedule. As dean, he's on the road at least two days a week, driving his "old Chevy" throughout the state or flying throughout the South. When he's not working on the supplement to his evidence book or teaching a seminar at the law school, the dean is presiding over graduations, and receptions, or talking to students, parents, alumni, attorneys and judges.

Westerfield talks about the value of education, diversity, hard work and how he overcame great odds. "It might sound corny, but I take being a role model very seriously. I'm proud of my background. There are people who ask, 'Why you always say you have people who were sharecroppers in Mississippi and you came from the projects?'" he says, mimicking those who question his honesty. "Because I wear it like a badge of honor. I came from there, but I'm dean here and I'm in charge."

But that take-charge attitude wasn't always there. Westerfield admits he "was a little unsure" of himself following the announcement that he would be the law school dean. He says he was being criticized in the student newspaper and by some faculty members, who questioned the vote and even called for a recount and a new search for a dean. Then there was the rumor that he was planning to fire all of the White staffers and replace them with Blacks. And Westerfield was even being confronted by some Blacks who were telling him he must be an Uncle Tom to be a dean at the University of Mississippi.