Found the story on the ESPN site. Interesting reading and this excerpt kind of sums up the situation nicely.
"Mississippi in the fall of 1962 is a doomed civilization at its
apogee. Enrollment at Ole Miss stands at an all-time high. The football
team has been to five consecutive bowl games, won three SEC
championships in the past decade, and gone 27-2-1 in the past three
years. In 1959 and 1960, Ole Miss coeds won back-to-back Miss America
crowns. Pageant moms around the country send their daughters to Oxford,
an invasion of leggy blondes whose influence can still be seen in the
state's gene pool.</p>
Of course, that's just half of the story. To be an African-American
in this world isn't much different than it was in 1861, and the
Mississippi of 1962 has been forming in earnest for 14 years, with
segregation becoming more and more formalized. In 1948, President Harry
Truman signed the first civil rights legislation. That year, something
new popped up at Ole Miss football games: Confederate battle flags. The
band started playing "Dixie." Someone commissioned the largest Rebel
flag ever for the band to carry onto the field. Vaught, in his second
season as coach, gave fans something to cheer about. The football team
might not have intended it, but to people in the state, the squad became
the last Confederate soldiers. "You see them moving away from this
larger national narrative," says D. Gorton, an Ole Miss student who
witnessed the Meredith riots and later became a photographer for the New
York Times. "They're no longer part of the United States. They really
saw themselves as an archipelago. That led to their great football. What
else would explain it?"</p>
Link to entire story</p>
You know it was really unfortunate for mississippi that their only era of football prominence happened to coincide with the south's ugly era of push-back on integration/civil rights because it led to a voluntary association of the two that still haunts UM to this very day.
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