Wright Thompson / ESPN.com

When I was 5 or 6, because of my dad’s political activism in the Mississippi Delta, local white supremacists burned a cross in our front yard. My parents had a decision to make: Wake me up or let me sleep. They chose sleep. On that night, hate and fear would not be passed to another generation.

In the years that followed, my parents raised my brother and me to leave old prejudices behind. They enforced strict rules that made our home something of an oasis. Respect all people. Understand other points of view. And, of course, no N-word, ever, under any circumstance. That certainly made our house different from many in town. My dad ran the local Democratic Party, so I grew up around whites and blacks, which also made me different from many of my friends. Still, there were things never discussed. We never really talked much about the civil rights era, about things my parents had seen. The South during the ’60s was like that cross in our front yard: something they experienced but wanted to shield their children from.

Once I grew up and moved away, I began to study the history of the South. The 1962 Ole Miss football team fascinated me. That year, perhaps because of the school’s near self-destruction over integration, or perhaps in spite of it, the team managed the most remarkable season seen in Oxford before or since. The star quarterback, Glynn Griffing, was born near my family’s farm, which his uncle managed, and my dad idolized him growing up, wearing No. 15 as a high school quarterback to be just like Glynn. It was the team that made my dad love football. It was also a team not discussed much, just a quick story here and there. They seemed forgotten, their legend small despite big accomplishments, and I wanted to find out why.

A few months back, I dove into the Ole Miss library’s special collection, containing records and artifacts from the 1962 riots. Each page changed the way I looked at the place around me, the way I looked at the places inside myself where I love my state and its traditions. Why hadn’t I been taught any of this in school? I’d had an entire Mississippi history class in junior high. We talked mostly about Indians. More recently, my aggravation had been stoked by ignorant election e-mails from my great-uncle in Jackson, ones that seemed to be from a time long past.

I came upon a box containing two small notebooks used by the soldier tasked with guarding James Meredith, the first African-American student at Ole Miss. They were Nifty brand, cost a dime and were filled with descriptions of suspicious characters, of license plate numbers and names. I flipped through the pages … until a familiar name stopped me cold.

My great-uncle, the e-mailer’s brother. Last name: Wright.

Two questions went through my mind:

What is the cost of knowing our past? …

And what is the cost of not?

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