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211 17 CAMELOT, THE FINAL ACT As 1962 came to an end, Ebony’s editors cited as the “most spectacular breakthrough ” of the year, the “successful, military-backed attack on diehard Mississippi ’s color line in higher education” that culminated in the admission of James H. Meredith to the University of Mississippi.1 While the admission of one student might not seem a great achievement, it was a milestone in light of the “over-our-dead-bodies” resistance. Furthermore, it encouraged others to follow, both at Ole Miss and other all-white schools. The editorial noted that at the end of the year, there were more than 2,000 Negroes enrolled in formerly white colleges and universities in the South. Almost 300 public and private institutions of higher learning (including several formerly all-black schools) had dropped racial bars. At the lower education levels, desegregation continued at a snail’s pace, or on a token basis, except in still-defiant Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and some pockets in Virginia, where there was no movement to comply with court orders. I had reported in Ticker Tape USA that while the rants of the country’s leading exponent of segregation , Senator James O. Eastland, against the integration of Ole Miss were adding fuel to the fires back home, the solon enrolled his own son, Wood, in the recently desegregated St. Stephen’s School in Alexandria, Virginia. (Several other Dixie representatives had withdrawn their sons from the Episcopal church school the previous year, when the first Negro student enrolled.)2 In September 1962, the Kennedy administration had done everything it could to prevent what some would call “the last battle of the civil war” from erupting on the campus of Ole Miss when Meredith, after seven years in the military, attempted to enroll in the all-white institution. But neither political maneuvers nor reminders of the harmful image being projected overseas could move Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, much less the racist mobs that appeared ready and willing to burn down a good part of the school rather than integrate it. Camelot, The Final Act 212 I sent Jet Washington bureau reporter Larry Still to Oxford, while I covered the crisis from D.C. For Still, the assignment was more than challenging . Mississippi highway patrolmen warned him and Memphis photographer Ernest Withers away from the Meredith caravan as it sped toward the campus, and when the two arrived at Ole Miss, director of development Hugh Clegg, one of Hoover’s top men until his retirement in 1954 as assistant director of the FBI, barred them from covering Meredith’s attempt to register. Clegg told Still it wasn’t discrimination, but “with tensions as high as they are, any colored reporter might create a problem.” Clegg added, “We feel it would be better if they [JPC] sent a reporter of another race.” The two newsmen were turned around at the entrance to the campus by T. B. Birdsong, Mississippi commissioner of public safety.3 It didn’t stop them for a minute from doing their jobs. Still already had one exclusive interview with Meredith and would get another after he’d begun classes. Other parts of the story were unfolding outside the campus, and on the streets of Oxford. In Washington, one of the first challenges to the civil rights gains of blacks was playing out at the White House. It was clear that as much as he wished to avoid it, President Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, would finally have to send in the troops. God’s “truth” may have been marching on, in the stirring words of the Civil War battle hymn, but it was doing so behind a multitude of bayonets. Descending on tiny Oxford and its state university would be an incredible 30,000 American soldiers. The first question the administration faced was whether any of these troops should be black, or whether these integrated units should suddenly appear all-white when they hit the “front lines,” in a replay of the Eisenhower administration’s makeover of the 101st Airborne in Little Rock. At a top-level, White House policy meeting, several administration aides argued that just as in Arkansas, five years earlier, the presence of Negroes would “inflame the mob,” while two men, whom I identified in Ticker Tape as Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Hatcher and Democratic National Committee staffer Louis Martin, argued vehemently for maintaining an integrated force, the position that carried the day, at...

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