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3 Chapter 1 “stop this violence!” University of Mississippi, September 1962 Late in the evening of September 30, 1962, the Rev. Duncan M. Gray Jr. mounted the base of the Confederate monument on the campus of the University of Mississippi. A slight, balding man in glasses, he shouted to be heard above the din. “General! General! Speak to these students! You can persuade them! Tell them to stop this violence and rioting! Tell them to go back to their dormitories!” The “General” whom Gray addressed was the same Major General Edwin Walker who, at President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s orders, had led U.S. Army troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School seven years earlier. More recently, he had been disciplined for insubordination. In response, he had resigned from the army in public protest over what he had described as the Kennedy administration’s “collaboration and collusion with the international Communist conspiracy.” Still more recently—indeed, only four days before his appearance on the university campus—he had given a radio speech in which he apologized for being “on the wrong side” in Little Rock and had called on supporters to rally to the campus to help resist the admission of the first African American student—James H. Meredith—to the University of Mississippi.1 Now Walker ignored Gray. Instead, he continued his harangue of the crowd as tear gas fumes swirled around them all. “I want to congratulate you on what you are doing here this evening!” he cried. “You have every right to protest. Stand fast, stand firm! There are thousands who support you. You will win in the end! The federal government is encroaching on your rights as American citizens. It is your duty to resist!”2 4 “Stop This Violence!” Gray persisted, however. “General, please try to quiet these students! Ask them to stop their rioting and go back to their dormitories.” Walker paused for a moment. Then he spoke again to those gathered around him who eagerly awaited his words. “There’s a man here. . . . I am an Episcopalian, but there’s a man here tonight, a man wearing the cloth, a man who makes me ashamed I’ve ever called myself an Episcopalian.” He pointed at Gray. Quickly taking advantage of the crowd’s attention, Gray spoke to the group composed partially of student but largely of outsiders, many of whom had come to the university in response to Walker’s radio plea. Although Gray knew the attitude this group was likely to have toward his words, he pleaded with them. “Stop this violence! You’ll only get hurt and you’ll hurt the University and the community!” But the crowd, inflamed by Walker’s rhetoric and eager for a target, howled in reply. “Get the bastard!” “Kill him!” “Kill the s.o.b!”3 Swiftly they pulled Gray down from the monument and pushed him to the ground. As some members of the mob began to rough him up, other members of the crowd almost as quickly surrounded him. Two students and a deputy sheriff, an avowed segregationist but, unlike some others in the crowd, a man reluctant to stand passively by in the face of potential murder, began to move Gray from the center of the throng to its edges.4 The deputy shouted, “You’ve got to get out of here, preacher, or they’re go’n get you!” He and the students escorted Gray several yards away from the crush to the steps of the nearby YMCA building and relative safety. Just at that moment, two other members of the crowd, also students, approached Gray as Walker continued to hold forth to his listeners. These two, however, came with apparently good intentions, if not perhaps the most careful judgment. “Reverend Gray! Come on back. We think that crowd will listen to you!”5 Yet as Gray and the student turned to head back in Walker’s direction, Gray realized the cause was lost; the mob, bent on violence, moved in the direction of the already embattled federal marshals President John F. Kennedy had ordered in to protect Meredith and the university campus. * * * By the time twenty-nine-year-old James H. Meredith, an Air Force veteran and Mississippi native, enrolled at Ole Miss on the morning of October 1, he had been pursuing his quest to gain admission to the university for twenty months. One of ten children, he was...

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