Champion of Civil Rights: Judge John Minor Wisdom

8. Showdown in Mississippi: Standing Up for James Meredith and to Ross Barnett

1. “Resolute Mississippian: James Howard Meredith,” New York Times, September 21, 1962, 13, col. 1; Walter Lord, The Past That Would Not Die (New York: 1965), 36–37; William Doyle, An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962 (New York: 2001), 18–20. 8 Showdown in Mississippi Standing Up for James Meredith and to Ross Barnett Located at mile marker 160 on the Natchez Trace amid central Mississippi farmlands, the city of Kosciusko is best known for its pure drinking water. It also, however, is the birthplace of the son of a cotton and corn farmer and grandson of a slave whose persistent, courageous, and ultimately successful campaign to gain admission to the state’s segregated flagship university as the result of a Fifth Circuit decision authored by John Minor Wisdom, was a defining moment in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s that forever changed the face of American society. The sixth of ten children, James Meredith left his family’s eightyfour -acre cotton and corn farm in Attala County after his high school graduation to enlist in the U.S. Air Force, where he was one of the first black soldiers to serve in the recently integrated American armed forces.1 But the challenges and rewards of being in the vanguard of an integrated air force paled in comparison to the impact generated eleven years later when this one “man with a mission and with a nervous stom- 148 Champion of Civil Rights 2. Meredith v. Fair, 305 F.2d 343, 358 (5th Cir.1962). According to Time magazine, “of the Southern states that have avoided even token compliance with the Supreme Court’s 1954 schooldesegregation decision, none has thundered ‘never’ louder than Mississippi.” “A Negro in Ole Miss,” Time, July 6, 1962, 37. 3. James Meredith, Three Years in Mississippi (Bloomington: 1966), 58. 4. Ibid., 59. 5. Ibid., 56. 6. Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts (New York: 1994), 35. ach” faced off against the combined military and political might of the most segregated state in the nation and integrated its foremost public university situated in the heart of the Old Confederacy.2 On January 21, 1961, the day after John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as the thirty-fifth president of the United States, Meredith requested an admissions application to the University of Mississippi. Ten days later, he submitted his application with an attached photograph and a cover letter explaining that he was unable to meet the requirement of furnishing the names of six alumni “because I am a Negro and all graduates of the school are white [and] I do not know any graduate personally.” Instead, he offered five written testaments to his moral character from “Negro citizens of my state.”3 Meredith’s application generated a telegram from Robert B. Ellis, the registrar at Ole Miss, informing Meredith that his submission could not be considered since it had been filed after the deadline for applying for admission to the spring semester. With the assistance of a civil rights attorney in Jackson, Meredith contacted Burke Marshall, the U.S. assistant attorney general who headed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Marshall communicated his department’s keen interest in Meredith’s situation and willingness to provide assistance.4 Meredith also wrote to Thurgood Marshall, director of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, asking for legal assistance in a fight he was prepared to pursue “all the way.”5 Marshall assigned one of his staff attorneys, Constance Baker Motley , to work with Meredith.6 Motley, a tough-minded, deliberate, and relentless courtroom combatant, had just secured a noteworthy victory in obtaining a federal court order compelling the University of Georgia to admit its first two African American students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes. Motley wrote Meredith on February 16, advising him to recontact the university registrar and to request that his original application be considered a continuing application for admission at the earliest possible time, including either the summer 1961 term Showdown in Mississippi 149 7. Meredith, Three Years in Mississippi, 62–65, 77. 8. Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 319. 9. When this case reached the Fifth Circuit, Wisdom expressed his own deeply felt skepticism at the need for such a lengthy interruption, noting that “the Attorney General’s Office is wellstaffed ” with nine lawyers, including three who were working directly with Mr. Shands on the Meredith case. Meredith v. Fair...