Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote

EPILOGUE

Z 234 Z ePILOgue It was September 30, 2002, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston’s Columbia Point, the night before James Meredith was to return triumphantly to Ole Miss to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of his inteZ grating the Rebel campus. But there was a moving celebration at the library as well. James MerZ edith, Burke Marshall, and John Doar were all speaking, with the CZSPAN cameras rolling.1 Stephanie and I were there with Jim Groh, who had flown in from Arizona. Doar described his initial confrontations with Governor Ross Barnett and Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson as he attempted to enroll Meredith and his concern that more and more rednecks from all over the state and as far away as Alabama were converging on Ole Miss. Marshall called them “a rag tag mob of rioters.” The question period was half over when a white man in his early sixZ ties, with white mustache and goatee and wearing a black sports shirt and jeans, reached the microphone. Don Byrd had driven up from Rhode Island where he then lived. He told the crowd that he had been one of those redZ necks Doar was concerned about: a potential rioter against James Meredith in the fall of 1962. Byrd was born near Mobile, Alabama, the oldest of seven children. He finished high school in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and then enlisted in the army in July 1958, serving in the military police in that racially tense time. Discharged in May 1961, Byrd hitched up Route 49 to Pearl River Junior College, then to Mississippi Southern where he studied journalism with a midwesterner, Frank Buckley, the department head. James Meredith, unassuming and quiet though he really was, was viewed as a strident gadfly or opportunist. Even in the journalism departZ ment, some students wanted to go up to Oxford and “knock the nigger on the head.” Byrd was the older guy in the group, and he had a car. He was Z 235 Z epilogue not against joining in at Oxford. He, of course, did not know two would die there. But he just did not want to drive six hours and have his car shot up. Then Buckley assigned Byrd to attend the contempt trial of Theron Lynd in Hattiesburg. Byrd likened John Doar in court to a High Noon lawman. Standing in the crowded auditorium at the Kennedy Library forty years later, Byrd addressed Doar about what he felt at the voting rights trial Doar conducted in Hattiesburg at the federal courthouse. I experienced an epiphany by going there. I had never, ever in my life understood what all the hoo-hah was about, and how you presented that case and bringing in those educated black people who qualified in every possible way to be able to vote and counterposing them with literally ignorant people who had no education and no ability to be able to understand the constitution of Mississippi, which was one of the things they had to be able to talk about. I experienced probably one of the most fundamental changes in my life by watching you do that . . . I came here tonight to thank you, sir. I will always remember the intensely focused look on John Doar’s face as he listened to this unexpected tribute. NPR’s Juan Williams, the lively moderator, asked John if he remembered the trial. Burke interjected, “Oh, yes,” and John confirmed dryly that he had not forgotten United States v. Lynd. John then spoke with deep eloquence about what had existed in Forrest County and that he and the young lawyers who worked with him had to teach the country: that no matter how educated a black person was in Mississippi it was very unlikely that he would get a chance to vote, and, if you could breathe and you were white, you voted. That message over a four or five year period in case after case similar to the Hattiesburg case, helped to change the country until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed and that really broke the back of the caste system in the South. That was why I had joined the Civil Rights Division—to help break the southern caste system. That was why I left for Mississippi on Friday afternoons. ...