Mississippi: The Closed Society

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

A Note from the Author From the White House at eight o'clock on the night of September 30, 1962, John F. Kennedy began to plead eloquently with Mississippi students to understand that they must not interfere with the court-ordered admission of Negro James Howard Meredith to their University. Unknown to the President, at almost exactly the moment his sober face appeared on television screens across the nation, tear gas was being fired by United States marshals into an unruly crowd in front of the Lyceum Building on the Ole Miss campus. Choking and gasping, the spectators fell back across the Circle toward the Confederate monument, pursued by the marshals as far as the flag pole. Within ten minutes, five or six green army sedans, each carrying six white-helmeted marshals, came over the Illinois Central bridge, which spans Hilgard Cut between the campus and the town of Oxford, and moved toward the Lyceum. As they made the slow turn to the right at the Confederate monument , they were assaulted with a hail of bricks thrown at close range. Windshields and car windows were smashed. My wife and I could see the men inside huddling to protect themselves from the splintering glass. The pounding of the bricks on the cars and the screams—"The sons of bitches have killed a coed." "We'll kill the bastards." "We'll get the God-damned marshals!" —these, plus shrill cries of filth and obscenity, proved that eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students had suddenly been turned into wild animals. My wife and I suspected then that we were in for a night of terror. Earlier in the afternoon, warned by our nine-year-old daughter Gail, who had heard the news over the radio, we had driven out to the airport to watch the arrival of the marshals Vll viii Mississippi: The Closed Society and Justice Department officials, little dreaming of the agony in store for us. As our University-owned home is only a half mile from the administration building (Lyceum), which had been requisitioned for federal headquarters, we could not have avoided the excitement had we wished to do so. In front of that majestic ante-bellum structure, both of us did what little we could to help maintain the calm that prevailed until after six o'clock, partly by carrying to those assembled the Chancellor 's message that the marshals and the Mississippi Highway Patrol were acting in concert to keep order. Governor Ross Barnett had finally capitulated to federal authority; had, in fact, selected Sunday for the admission of Meredith—that was the word. The hour before eight was filled with apprehension and foreboding as demonstrations and violence increased, and once the tear gas was fired we moved slowly back, comfortably out of range, past the flag pole to the old Science Building. When the army cars came by, we were sitting on the edge of the Cardinal Club memorial; I was nursing a couple of cracked-open knees, having been accidentally tripped and knocked to the concrete crosswalk by a large Confederate flagstaff carried by a young man in more of a hurry than we. Already the students were yelling about regrouping to attack and about keeping up the attack on the marshals until their ammunition ran out. It is not my purpose to recount the frightening events of that unbelievable night of passion and fury. Separated more often than not, my wife and I were once more together between two and three o'clock in the morning of October first, at the side of the Chancellor's house, facing the Grove. Two contingents of federal troops, about a hundred men in each, newly arrived from the airport, marched by in full battle dress. As they turned the Circle, away from the pre-Civil War "Y" building and toward the Fine Arts Center, these American soldiers were assailed with fire bombs. We saw two sheets of flame about the size of our small house fall among the troops. They hardly got out of step. Only a miracle kept any number from catching on fire. Thencolonel later said that if a single man had been seriously burned, A Note from the Author ix both squads would have wheeled and turned their guns on the rioters in the smoke-filled Circle. By this time the student insurrectionists were far outnumbered by other Mississippians, to whom had been...