The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss

Introduction

Introduction ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ After his first night in his dormitory room, James Meredith rode in a riotbattered border patrol car to the Lyceum building at the center of the University of Mississippi campus. Escorted by agents of the U.S. Justice Department, he observed the debris from the previous evening’s conflagration as he entered the Lyceum at 8:15 a.m. to register for classes. His enrollment on Monday, October 1, 1962, made him the first black student formally admitted to the school popularly known as Ole Miss, and indeed the first to breach racial segregation in the state’s system of higher education. The story of his struggle for admission to the all-white university also involves white Mississippi’s long defiance of racial change at Ole Miss. Meredith’s venture at Ole Miss exhibited several characteristics atypical of other desegregation e√orts. In his initial overture to the university, Meredith acted alone, not as part of any organized movement; only later did he receive assistance from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp). The evening before Meredith registered, his challenge precipitated a deadly riot on the university campus. The president of the United States deployed the army to restore order. The resistance to integration was so intense because Meredith waged his crusade in Mississippi, perhaps the most intransigently segregationist southern state, and because he targeted Ole Miss, an especially powerful symbol for white Mississippians. The most violent confrontation over school integration evolved from many complex historical factors, and it occurred at the University of Mississippi in 1962 for reasons peculiar to that time and place. Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi completed a campaign that he initiated with his first letter to the university in January 1961. Though not at first sponsored by any civil rights group, Meredith’s quest became an important event in the wider black freedom struggle. During his service in the air force from 1951 to 1959, Meredith missed the emergence of the civil rights movement and its increasing momentum after the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision and the Montgomery bus boycott. The movement that revolutionized race relations occurred unevenly across the South, and though Mississippi had a majority-black population as 2 i n t r o d u c t i o n late as 1930 and the largest black population percentage of any state in 1960, the freedom struggle came late to his rural, recalcitrant home state. naacp branches had existed in Mississippi since the 1910s, but only after World War II did they begin to prove e√ective. In the late 1940s the state naacp fought for equal pay for black teachers and for the right to vote for all blacks. Voter registration increased after the war, and naacp branches developed in many towns across the state. Black indigenous activism increased, and after the Brown decision blacks took tentative steps toward school integration. Whites quickly retaliated. Started by Mississippi whites in the summer of 1954, the Citizens’ Councils waged a campaign of repression against any challenge to white supremacy and racial segregation. In 1955 the notorious lynching of Emmett Till evidenced the dominant power of whites. Between 1956 and 1959 ten blacks were killed by whites, and in 1959 Mack Charles Parker, charged with raping a white woman, was lynched in southwestern Mississippi. The violent, repressive tactics of white segregationists blunted the e√orts of the naacp, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, and other black activist groups and delayed the emergence of the Mississippi movement. In her memoirs, Myrlie Evers, the widow of murdered naacp leader Medgar Evers, maintained that the movement had ‘‘stagnated’’ in the ‘‘backwater’’ of Mississippi until the spring of 1961. In April of that year Tougaloo College students staged a sit-in at the Jackson Public Library, and the next month the Freedom Rides arrived in Jackson.∞ The previous January, James Meredith had contacted the university and begun his assault on white supremacy. By the time of Meredith’s application to Ole Miss, the long process of desegregating southern higher education had been underway for more than two decades. Begun in the 1930s, it had progressed slowly. Although nearly all southern colleges remained segregated at the time of the Brown decision, a few colleges in twelve of the seventeen southern and border states had desegregated . The admission of blacks occurred initially in graduate and professional programs, and first in the border and peripheral southern...