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17. Confrontations: September 26–30, 1962 ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ‘‘ E verything all right down there?’’ Robert Kennedy asked Ross Barnett early Tuesday evening, shortly after the governor prevented Meredith’s attempt to enroll at the trustees’ o≈ce. The governor assured Kennedy that the crowd had only booed Meredith and cheered himself. When Barnett said that Meredith had not registered, Kennedy replied that Meredith ‘‘is going to show up at classes tomorrow.’’ Caught o√ guard, Barnett asked if that meant in Oxford and how Meredith could go to classes without first registering. He confessed, ‘‘Well, I don’t know what will happen now. I don’t know what we will do. I didn’t dream of a thing like that.’’ When Kennedy urged him to prevent violence, the governor wavered: ‘‘There was no bloodshed today— tomorrow or any other day I can’t guarantee it. I can’t stay up at Ole Miss.’’ But he promised to encourage everyone to avoid violence.∞ In a rambling appeal, the agitated governor said, ‘‘If you knew the feeling of about 991⁄2 percent of the people in this thing you would have this boy withdraw and go somewhere else. I’m sure though . . . you don’t understand the situation down here.’’ Once again he blamed the Communist naacp for stirring up ‘‘hatred among the races,’’ and he beseeched Kennedy, ‘‘I wish you would talk to them about the South. Get them to let us alone down here.’’ After allowing Barnett to vent his feelings, Kennedy reminded him that Meredith would be in Oxford the next morning. The governor thanked him for calling.≤ Pressured by the attorney general, the governor had to decide what to do next, but he faced other cascading, conflicting, and uncontrolled events. The Kennedy administration groped for a peaceful resolution of the controversy, and the federal courts considered contempt charges against the governor and the lieutenant governor. At the same time the state legislature whipped up segregationist fervor, and outsiders agitated for people to defend states’ rights and segregation in Mississippi. Governor Barnett, who had supplanted the trustees and the Ole Miss administration, had to contend with the competing forces to negotiate his way through the controversy. A few minutes after his first call, Kennedy telephoned again to ask if 10:00 a.m. would be a good time for Meredith to arrive; the governor agreed but appealed, ‘‘General, why don’t you keep that boy away?’’ Referring to the rule 320 f o r t r e s s o f s e g r e gat i o n fa l l s of law, the attorney general replied, ‘‘Hell, it’s my job and my responsibility.’’ Barnett still contended, ‘‘You can never convince me that the white and Negro should go together,’’ but Kennedy insisted that the question did not involve their personal opinions. When the governor objected that Meredith had been convicted of a crime, Kennedy reasserted that Barnett objected ‘‘because he is a Negro.’’ Barnett then shifted to the ‘‘simple and unmistakable’’ claim that the Brown decision was ‘‘not the law of the land,’’ but Kennedy ignored him and said, ‘‘But anyway, Governor, they will be down there at 10 o’clock.’’ Barnett closed with an invitation to ‘‘come by to see us.’’≥ Within a few hours, the legislature met in an unusual night session. One reporter compared its anger to the ‘‘pre–Civil War scenes from ‘Gone with the Wind.’ ’’ John McLaurin of Brandon complained that the ‘‘President and his little brother’’ should instead be dealing with the communists in Cuba, while another called on the administration to focus on northern cities ‘‘where they rape young women every night.’’ To great cheers, Laurel’s E. K. Collins declared that Meredith would not enter Ole Miss ‘‘as long as there are red corpuscles in bodies of true Mississippians.’’ The fervor of Barnett’s supporters reduced his options: he could not yield to the naacp, the Kennedys, or the courts. In New Orleans that evening, federal judges ordered the governor into court on Friday to explain why he should not be held in contempt for his directive to arrest federal agents and for his refusal to admit Meredith. After avoiding a showdown , the government now called him to account for his actions. According to the New York Times’s Claude Sitton, the conflict ‘‘threatened to bring the most serious Federal-state controversy since the Civil War.’’∂ The next encounter came Wednesday in Oxford. The campus had settled...

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