The DM 07.11.2019

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THE DAILY

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MISSISSIPPIAN

T H E S T U DE N T N E W S PA P E R O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F M I S S I S S I P P I | S E R V I N G O L E M I S S A N D OX F O R D S I N C E 1 9 1 1

DAVID G. SANSING, 1933-2019

‘He changed our world’

Friends and family remember Sansing’s legacy KENNETH NIEMEYER thedmnews@gmail.com

PHOTO COURTESY: ROBERT JORDAN/ UM COMMUNICATIONS

The Incurable Optimist His hopeful vision for a tortured state DANIEL PAYNE

thedmnews@gmail.com

D

avid G. Sansing saw the bigger picture. His list of accolades is long, but the moment those close to him particularly remember his pride swelling was when his eldest son, who also taught history, was taking the legacy of being a community historian on for himself. His namesake’s career as a high school history teacher mirrored his own: bringing history to life by telling compelling stories about the path that led to the present. Sansing Jr.’s name was coming up more in some circles than his father’s. “That made my father smile,” said his other son, Perry, who is the special assistant to the chancellor for governmental affairs at Ole Miss. David Sansing was focused on future generations, especially his own children. That’s why he looked to the past. “We do have an inheritance,” he said at a presentation on campus in 2013. “But I think the great issue is not our inherritance but the inheritance we leave for our children — their inheritance. And that’s what we should

concentrate on, I think. We have come so far from there to here, and yet we have a ways to go from here to there. But, knowing Mississippi as I know it, and knowing the people that I know, we’ll get there.” Perry Sansing said that among his father’s accomplishments — including authoring definitive Mississippi histories and teaching them to students who would continue talking about his classes for decades — his love for the people and state that inspired his work can be too often overlooked. David Sansing himself believed that historical information itself could overshadow the good it may do in a community. “We may know more about some Civil War skirmishes and the economic consequences of a capricious cotton market than we actually need to know,” Sansing wrote in his book, “Making Haste Slowly : The Troubled History of Higher Education in Mississippi.” “But southern historians have left the relationship between the schoolhouse and the society that SEE SANSING PAGE 6

Family, friends, faculty and former students were moved to tears on Wednesday as loved ones gave their accounts of historian and professor emeritus David Sansing at his memorial service in Paris-Yates Chapel. Sansing impacted the state of Mississippi and helped shape its historical understanding through chronicling the history of the University of Mississippi and the state as a whole. Ronnie Agnew, Executive Director of Mississippi Public Broadcasting and a 1984 UM graduate, spoke at the service on behalf of Sansing’s former students. Agnew said that as an African American and son of sharecroppers, he often felt uncomfortable at the changing university, but Sansing’s encouragement allayed his unease. “Ronnie Agnew … you belong,” Sansing told Agnew when he was a student at the university. “This school is just as much yours as anybody’s.” Sansing’s textbook “A Place Called Mississippi” is still used in high schools across the state. Agnew credited Sansing for being unparalleled in chronicling the history of the university and the state of Mississippi. “I do believe that history will show that Dr. Sansing was without peer for telling Mississippi’s complicated history,” Agnew said. The funeral was arranged by Waller Funeral Home and Cremation Services, which was founded by Don and Patsy Waller, family members of former Mississippi Gov. Bill Waller. Sansing worked with the former governor to create a history of the then dilapidated Governor’s Mansion. After his book “A History of the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion” was published in 1977, the Mansion was restored, and the National Park Service designated it as a National Historic Landmark.

SEE MEMORIAL PAGE 5


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