The movies lied to us. In 2001 mankind was not flying Pan-Am to the moon. Pan-Am had ceased to exist 7 years ago, but we were still debating if the state of Mississippi should continue to have the confederate flag be part of the state flag, the one that flies all over the place.

And we did debate. We debated in person. Loudly. In Jackson, Mississippi. At Millsaps College.

Millsaps College. Yes, it has a reputation as a bastion of the most liberal Mississippians, but in 2001, Millsaps fraternities were still getting in trouble for things like “making a black frat pledge attend a Confederate-themed Olde South Ball as… a slave.”

That’s right. After we’d beat Y2k, a group of frat boys, who had gotten into trouble for blackface and racism in the past, made an actual black guy, one who they knew and saw daily, one they probably still call “my black friend,” go to a dance. A dance full of Confederate Generals and Southern Belles. As a slave. At least he didn’t have to go blackface.

Yes, our governor was once a member of this fraternity. No, he was not there when this happened. Yes, I am younger than Tate Reeves. No, it doesn’t look that way.

In the lead-up to hosting this debate, before the popular vote on the flag, Millsaps recruited a number of students to give a pro-flag or anti-flag speech during the “referendum.” As it was a long time ago and we didn’t record everything back then, I don’t know exactly how many students they required. I think it was four: two on either side, as is tradition, which states that everything must be balanced, no matter how wrong one side is.

The anti-flag slots were filled instantly, no doubt with Millsaps’ most towering intellects, any number of future Rhodes scholars or prominent professors or ground-breaking ministers would have been on hand to jump in.

Filling those pro-flag slots? Well, that proved to be a little bit more difficult. Hiding away at an old plantation while you wear Confederate Grey is a little less daunting than standing in front of a crowd of hundreds and saying “That flag? Sure. Fine. I see no problems here.”

You see, YouTube was still 4 years away. Mark Zuckerberg was two years away from the idea of allowing Harvard students to compare faces to see which one was hotter than the other. If you wanted to be racist in front of a lot of people, you had to do it in person.

So as the referendum grew nearer and the pro-flag slots had yet to be filled, the net widened. Millsaps couldn’t have just any ole racist up there, after all - they had recruiting to think about.

No, they needed someone with a prodigious vocabulary. Someone skilled in the rhetorical arts, like making your points in threes. Someone who loved an audience.

And so they came to me.

Now, to be fair, I applied. I went to an official of the college I was attending and signed something, with my hands, in person. I put my email on a list of people who would absolutely get up in front of an auditorium packed with black and white faces, in Jackson, Mississippi, and say “Ladies and gentlemen, may I politely suggest … the confederacy.”

But I was not their first choice. It was close to the day of the referendum when they came to me. Others had dropped out. They were probably wiser than me, though in those days, that was easy. The fact that they were resorting to a C student freshman may tell you what you need to know. Maybe they thought they were throwing the debate, that this underachieving weird freshman would tank the pro-flag side. I don’t know why they picked me, and I don’t care, but if they thought I would flop, they were wrong.

I didn’t have much time to prepare. Maybe three days. That's three more than I needed and two more than I spent. You see, I was ready. I was a graduate of an institution designed to churn out genteel racists, a school where a coach ranting about affirmative action counted as a civics class. A broken down little aluminum hut where the teachers skipped the chapter on evolution and the history class was mostly by Shelby Foote. The maps still had the USSR on them, and half the urinals didn't work.

When you hear “private school,” this is not the school you think of. There are expensive private schools with planetariums and soccer fields, with kale in the cafeteria and multimedia labs. This was not one of those schools. This was a Segregation Academy, it was a segregation academy just like the others, but this one was nothing more and nothing less.

So I do what I usually did back then, what that education had taught me I could get away with. The night before, I scribbled a few notes, practiced a few pithy lines in the mirror, and figured no one would show up, or really care.

Then the big day comes, and the hall is packed past the 450 seat capacity, news cameras are crunched across the stage, and a half dozen reporters have notebooks and fancy little digital tape recorders. People have, in fact, shown up. Fortunately, I was overconfident, even for a white teenage boy who was tall and wanted to be a preacher.

So there’s the invocation, and a prayer, and I do believe they let that brilliant young Millsaps student go first. I recall the tone, if not the words. It was the good stuff, the appeal to those higher angels. Or maybe it was facts, angles about brain drain and investment and marketing. Maybe it was both. It was probably both. It was probably brilliant and beautiful, and it should have moved me to some act of brave defiance, like changing my mind instantly, or refusing to rise from my seat, but it didn’t, because I knew I was right.

Even better than knowing I was right, I knew what “right” sounded like. It sounded like what I was about to do. If they had invented the phrase “virtue signaling” back in 2001, I’m sure I would have used it, or at least said it to myself to get psyched up for that antsy crowd of people waiting their turn to speak.

Because it wasn’t just going to be Millsaps students speaking out. No, nobody would have come to that. This was a public forum. Sign up at the door. Take your turn. Tell them what side you want to speak for. You get two minutes.

I got up there, blinded by the stage lights, something I always forget happens, no matter how many times I’m on stage. I had my microphone just right. I was calm. I was loud. You could make out every word I said. I had my tight five, about political correctness and outside agitators and free speech and Big Government and The Real Racists and just who it is that knows what Mississippi needs. I don’t recall the specifics. It was, after all, just based on a few notes and improvised from rants and radio shows and op-ed pieces that I’d heard.

I do recall one scintillatingly stupid thing I said. That changing the flag was “a hand-out.” That it was akin to affirmative action.

This makes no sense. It is firmly in the grand tradition of ignorant analogies forever spouted by conservative bloviators. “Getting rid of the confederate flag is a hand-out, tearing down statues is historical affirmative action” that’s something you could hear Charlie Kirk say in 2020 or Sean Hannity say in 2010 or Bill O’Reilly in 2000 or Rush Limbaugh in 1990 or Pat Robertson in 1980 or George Wallace in 1970 or Ross Barnett in hell right now.

But you could have heard Patrick Jerome say it in the year 2001. Hundreds of people did, live and in person. Thousands more on their television screen. And they cheered and they clapped. They loved it. They loved it more than they loved that appeal to their humanity, than that evocation of history that had preceded me.

I sat down exhausted and exhilarated. I have always loved a crowd, especially when they like me. And you might chart an entire future for me from there: College conservatives, incendiary op-eds, internship with some famous Mississippi bigot, jobs, suits, paychecks. Working my way up with a flourish of the pen and that preacherly cadence. Book deals and radio shows or who knows, maybe one of those fancy parking spots reserved outside the capitol.

That’s not what happened, though. Not at all. A massive chunk of my political world was about to come crashing down around my ears. And it wasn’t because of what anyone said to dissuade me.

You see, after I once again remained unmoved by the fine fine words from the fine upstanding young students at Millsaps College, another young girl got up on that same stage I had used. She got behind that same podium and she stood where I had stood and she took up my position.

She was not genteel. She did not couch her opinion in Big Blogger Boy words and phrases she copied from Thomas Jefferson. She got up on that stage and she said some bullshit.

Now I hardly recall what I said, hell I don’t even recall what the black guy dressed as a confederate general said. But I remember that teenage girl’s face shaking with anger as she screamed that there were 49 other states “you people” could move to if they didn’t like the Mississippi state flag, and if they didn’t like them, well - they could go back to Africa.

She didn’t need a microphone. She was that mad. And the crowd loved her more than they loved me. And so it went, each time someone supporting that flag came to the stand. They’d either mince their words and say the right things and be politely applauded, or they’d shout dumb and loud, red faced and spit-flecked, they would fling that hatred and be boisterously lauded.

When it was over I had changed my mind. I had not been swayed by the soaring rhetoric of justice. If anything, I had been steeled by it. Of course I believed THAT. Who doesn’t believe THAT? Therefore, I don't have to change. Nor had I been won over by the tears of the oppressed or the terrible stories of what that flag stood for - of what that flag still stands for. Sure, I felt sorry for them. Yes, I would concede those points. But I would not change. I had my shield. I had my own ground to stand on. I had my confidence. Until that girl started shouting in agreement with me.

What killed my support for that flag was the people who agreed with me. That girl no older than me screaming “go back to Africa” to the same applause I’d gotten. The ever-hateful Jim Giles getting up there and talking about God and White America who owned those “Christian Values.” The endless parade of knowing looks and smug smooth hate that had only hidden from a naive young man because he wasn’t interested in looking too hard.

When it was all over I was stunned. It was perhaps the first time in my life I had been at a loss for words. Some reporter asked me a question, asked me if I had changed my mind. “I think we should… compromise.” I said, staggered like a man who’d taken a few blows. I was already embarrassed to have ever believed that the flag was okay. Even a few days later I’d throw out that nonsense “compromise” position. The current flag is already a compromise that never should have been made.

So my mind was changed. There’s no real moral here, you can’t do that thing so many thinkpiece people do and say “how can we use this?”

You can’t convert racists this way. It doesn’t scale, as they say. They can’t all be dragged somewhere their opinions are odious to those around them. They can’t all get a chance to see who is really on their side.

It’s harder than ever to spot the vile people around you. Those racists are more polished and featureless, now. Even in life they’ve applied search engine optimization to those ancient hatreds, put on new masks for a new millennium.

All you can do is what humans are best at: keep your eyes open and move if you have to.

FPJEROME