Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  Scribes and TV reporters are pursuing James Meredith across campus with handheld mikes and tape recorders and bulky film cameras. He’s flanked by his federal bodyguards. You can make out the university buildings in the middle distance. It’s not long since the night to remember.

  “Sir, there’s been a great deal of turmoil and conflict. Two people have died. Do you have any feelings of guilt, have you given it any second thoughts?”

  Smiling, moving, not answering immediately: “I’m very sorry that anyone had to get hurt or killed. But of course I think that’s an unfair question of me. I don’t believe any of you believe of me that I had anything to do with that.”

  “How are you getting along in school, sir?”

  “Just fine, just fine.”

  “How are the students—uh, talking to you? Is there any reaction?”

  “No, just acting like students, I suppose.”

  “Is this kind of a lonely life for you, despite all these people around you?”

  Getting into a sedan, the sedan starting to move away, Meredith answers, “I’ve been living the lonely life a long time.”

  Newsweek is on campus to file a first-person report. It’s a month afterward. The piece is sensitively done by esteemed civil rights correspondent Karl Fleming: “One can’t help but be impressed by the vast personal dignity of this man. He is neither cocky nor egotistical, yet he seems to possess some fantastic inner strength and discipline—never flinching, for instance, when firecrackers go off near him.… His quarters in Baxter Hall are depressingly plain. He has a steel bed and works at a metal table. A red lampshade provides the only color in the room. There are two other beds in the room, used by Justice Department attorneys.… Some students call him ‘Jungle Jim’ or ‘Blackberry.’…‘I don’t even hear them,’ he says. ‘I can’t remember one of them.’ Does he worry about the possibility of being killed? ‘I don’t even let myself think about that.’ ” An Ole Miss professor is quoted in the piece: “They’ll never break him. That’s for sure.”

  The following are from declassified documents of the U.S. Marshals Service. This first document, with its rushed typing and imperfect grammar and spelling, is part of a many-paged “Shift Report” dated “10-31-62”:

  Mr. Meredith left for the noon meal at 11:20 AM.… He left mess hall at 12 noon and proceeded back to Baxter hall on foot. While Mr. Meredith was having his lunch a suspicious man 5FT. 11 In. tall approx. 205 lbs. Light brown coat, dark brown pants, white shirt, no tie, brown shoes, and dark brown hat. This man took a seat next to Mr. Meredith with another student, which he did not seem to know. He kept looking at Mr. Meredith and eating his lunch very slow.… Mr. Meredith left class at 2:50 Pm and proceeded to the Student Union building to Pick up his mail. As he entered the building a few cat calls came from a group of students.… At 3:55 Pm received information of two students one of which lives in Baxter Hall That a student in Baxter who lives on the third floor has 17 sticks of dynamite in his room.… Chief Tatum took it [a suitcase] to Robertsons room where Chief Tatum ask Robertson opened it, found inside was an ID card, firecrackers … also found gas can (2 gal)…. About 6:40 P.M. the F.B.I. came … in trash can in hall way, in hallway was a gas grenade.… in Baxter hall in room 41 … there was found 20 shotgun shells … then searched Lester Hall, in room 33 a night stick was found … a 22 rifle in 3 parts, a BB six gun (Daisy Bullseye)…. Capt Shiver and Chief Tatum found a machete knife, in room 21 a gas can was found … on the west end last room was found a old grenade.… 12:25 A.m. 11-1-62 received information from Andy Crosby that there was a bomb in the building and you better get out.… Deputys made a check of building at 12:55 A.M. nothing unusual a few firecrackers still being set off.

  Another document (Meredith has been on campus for five and a half months):

  As Meredith passed Howry Hall #2, two plastic bags of water were dropped from the second floor hall window. They landed near Meredith splashing water on his shoes and lower portion of his pants. Meredith turned and ran into Howry hall with the Marshal. He banged on several doors and asked one boy if he knew anything about the water.… Deputy Vandegrift telephoned and said that at 1:00 p.m. today two plastic bags full of water were dropped from the second floor.… One struck behind and one beside Meredith and the water splashed on his pants and shoes. He became provoked and ran into Howry Hall and up to the second floor.… Meredith banged on a few doors and when a student came into the hall, Meredith said, “Who threw that on me?” … Meredith came out and went on to class.

  Another document: “Weekly Report—May 15 thru 18, 1963”:

  Subject observed following Meredith—questioned and identified by Chief Tatum.… Stated if he had the money he would have Meredith killed. Someone had to do it so it might as well be him regardless of what the penalty was. Checked and released by Chief Tatum. No other unusual activities.

  Another document (May 19, 1963):

  Meredith drove to Oxford from Jackson, Miss., in his new 1963 Thunderbird. A crowd of about 50 students gathered around the car in front of the Student Union directing derogatory remarks to Meredith about he and his car. About 20 students gathered at Baxter Hall and the same things transpired. During the night eggs and soap were thrown on the car. No further incidents.

  Native son Willie Morris wasn’t in Mississippi when James Meredith forcibly penetrated Ole Miss. Three months afterward, Morris wrote a piece in Dissent magazine called “Despair in Mississippi: Hope in Texas.” “I bought a newspaper one afternoon in San Francisco and read the wire service account of how a hundred or more students had surrounded Meredith’s table in the school cafeteria. Shaking their fists, quivering like young mammals in heat, they had chanted: ‘Go home nigger. We don’t want you here.’… There sat Meredith, and there he no doubt still sits; one can only imagine how he, as a human being, must have been torn inside.… With a handful of exceptions, Mississippi is a monolith; its soul-force is its burning and ravaging and gnawing hatred.… There is only this overriding consideration: to keep the black man down; so determined are they, so great is their fear and hatred, that even with the more sophisticated among them life is a thing of empty social ritual, intellection is shabby and false, and even in their hate there is an almost lifeless formalism. Growing up in Mississippi, you have the hatred nurtured in your bones. If it is not your parents who do the nurturing, then it is someone else; it is almost everything else.”

  In December, roughly three months after he’d been on campus, a journalist for The Reporter magazine asked if he was lonely. Meredith answered, “It wouldn’t be right for me to be lonely.… I get low sometimes but then I tell myself, ‘You got to stay operational.’ ”

  At a Baxter Hall press conference on January 7, 1963, the student-soldier handed out a statement to the press: “I have decided not to register for classes during the second semester.… We are engaged in a war, a bitter war.… The enemy is determined, resourceful, and unprincipled. There are no rules of war for which he has respect.” Afterward, a marshal wrote a memo to his superior: “… one minute he talks like he will leave and the next minute like he will stay.” At a press conference in Jackson, on January 30, Meredith announced that “the Negro” was not returning to Ole Miss. He paused, smiled. However, “I, J. H. Meredith, will register for the second semester.” In June, right before the summer session started, Saturday Review magazine wrote: “How does a man manage to keep himself so rigidly on guard.… Only a terrifying dedication can sustain that man.” On August 18, 1963, the most famous student in the history of the University of Mississippi walked in a cap and gown with his classmates through the Grove. Seventy-two-year-old Cap Meredith was in the audience, holding on his lap his three-year-old grandson. When Meredith’s name was called, he went across the stage and accepted his degree with a handshake from the university chancellor. “One of Ross Barnett’s NEVER! buttons was on my lapel,” he said many years later. “I wore it upside down.” The graduating moment in the Grove was but Meredith prologue to all t
he bewildering after-years.

  For a time, he lived in Washington, D.C. He gave speeches. Tired of this, he accepted an offer in 1964 to go to Nigeria to study at Ibadan University. He came back to America to take up the law at Columbia University. He led a March Against Fear through Mississippi. This was in the early summer of 1966, and the stated plan was to walk 225 miles in the June heat. He wore a pith helmet and black sunglasses and carried an ivory-headed cane. A man hiding in bushes by the side of the road rose up and hit him with at least twenty pellets of bird shot from a shotgun. “Is anyone getting help for me?” the victim cried, falling against a car. The AP reported him as dead, but the wounds turned out not to be mortal.

  At Columbia, still in law school, he announced he’d run as a Republican against Adam Clayton Powell, congressman from Harlem. He got himself nominated, but baseball immortal Jackie Robinson, first man to smash the color line in the majors, convinced him to withdraw about six days later. In July 1967 (still in New York), he took out a newspaper ad in Mississippi urging voters to support Ross Barnett, who was trying to make a political comeback in the governor’s race. After Oxford, Barnett had been all but politically finished. He’d embarrassed Mississippi, but worse than that, he’d lost. He finished a weak fourth in that summer primary in 1967, despite or maybe even partly because of the stunning endorsement.

  The Columbia law student owned a six-story apartment building in the Bronx, among other New York holdings, and eventually he was denounced as a slumlord. (In 1969, he would spend two days in jail for harassing his tenants, accused of trying to force white residents out of the building and of failing to provide hot water and elevator service.) In 1968, he won his law degree (he would claim later that he got it without ever cracking a book), but this accomplishment seemed only to presage a series of further run-ins with the law. Back in Mississippi, Meredith began trying for public office—he put his name in for at least five races between 1972 and 1979. In 1974, he declared bankruptcy. In 1979, his wife suddenly died, and that same year he got arrested at a Pizza Hut for causing a scene when the manager wouldn’t honor his two-forone coupon. By 1982, on the twentieth anniversary of the entry into Oxford, he was running a Jackson bar, the Broad Street Club. He was also putting out a publication called Outlook and he’d started a talent agency. “I’m going to try to be like Colonel Parker,” he told a reporter for the Gannett chain of papers, who’d come to do a feature. “Soldiers don’t have regrets,” he said. “They only win or lose.” He was asked about the significance of Oxford. “I’m twenty years older, that’s the significance,” he said. Of his ex-antagonist Ross Barnett, he said, “A very brilliant man who safeguarded the whole state of Mississippi.” Barnett was eighty-four by then, still a handsome six-footer, practicing law out of the Barnett Building in Jackson. He, too, had acquiesced to some interviews on the twentieth anniversary. He said he had no regrets. He told one interviewer he’d just read a book about the skull of blacks being not quite able to hold what the skull of a white man’s can hold on account of a black skull has a known genetic cave in it.

  Meredith in these years tried investment banking, restaurant life, radio and TV repair, the cosmetics business, farming, catfish sales. He became a product distributor for Amway. He went into religion, starting his own church, the Reunification Church Under God. It had no buildings and held no religious services. “My thing is, I’m on a crusade,” he told a reporter. “I don’t any longer have to decide if I want to be an ordained minister to carry out my calling, and that’s what it is to me, a calling.” He tended toward jumpsuits and berets. He sought to secure a job on the faculty of Ole Miss, but it didn’t pan out.

  In 1984, the University of Cincinnati offered him a year-long contract as a lecturer in Afro-American studies. (He’d sent out letters to something like eleven schools, offering his services.) He moved to the Midwest with his family and named the wood-frame house in which he established his office the James H. Meredith Office Building. Problems arose. His car was vandalized. He called a press conference to denounce racism in the city. He charged the university with failing to graduate a single black athlete since 1964, although at least twenty had graduated in the previous decade. (It was still a pathetically small number, a fact that seemed to be overlooked in the bad press against him that arose.) At the university, his course was called “The Law and Black People.” He couldn’t seem to master the material past the first ten or fifteen minutes of each class. His students began reading newspapers while he rambled. By late fall, another instructor had been brought in to take over the course. Police officers had to remove him from a health club when he wouldn’t produce a membership card. Actually, he was a paying member of the club, but he said he was trying to make a point. In June 1985, the university chose not to renew his contract, and Meredith charged a conspiracy. “What it boils down to is that certain blacks decided they didn’t want me here,” he said to the press. “So they got together with certain whites and decided to eliminate me.” This was denied by the university administration. The local paper ran a front-page feature entitled “Life of James Meredith Defies Easy Categories.” He told the reporter, “I have always felt like a prophet or a messenger.” He claimed in that piece that his personal worth was $900,000. He ran for the Cincinnati school board, but it didn’t work out. He went on a call-in radio show and traded astonishing insults with local bigots. He told his listeners that he wouldn’t have signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if he’d been in Congress, and he also said that he’d prefer to see George Wallace or Lester Maddox on the Cincinnati City Council than the nine men who were serving there. He continued giving speeches around the country, with Cincinnati still the base of operations, although the lecture fees had dropped radically and the audiences were turning paltry. In 1988, he was at Webster University in St. Louis. A female African-American interviewer asked him about “the movement.” He was in a lawyerly three-piece blue pinstripe, with a wreath of handsome gray beard. “I have never participated in any of that,” he said. “In fact, I always considered that below my dignity—you understand that? I have never protested anyone. You understand? No one is big enough for me to protest.” He lolled his tongue at this comely interviewer, winked at her. Later on the tape, he seems suddenly scared, confused. “It was too overwhelming,” he says to her, looking down. He means Oxford.

  The year before that interview, on November 6, 1987, Ross Barnett had died at Doctors’ Hospital in Jackson. “He just quit breathing,” Ross Barnett, Jr., said of his eighty-nine-year-old dad. “He’d gone as far as he could go, I guess.” If he could have gone another few years, the old seg would have seen his maverick, middle-aged daughter, Ouida Barnett Atkins, become a teacher of world history at almost entirely black Lanier High School in inner-city Jackson. (“People ask me if what I’m doing is an apology for my father,” Atkins said, when I asked her about it. “The answer’s no. What those people did back then, uh, that was their deal.” She didn’t sound defensive.) After Ross Barnett died, a black couple bought his home in north Jackson.

  By 1989, many things had gone wrong and scary in the Meredith family. James’s oldest son, John, twenty-eight, was struggling to find himself. His twin sons, Joe and James Jr., almost twenty-one, faced huge legal and medical problems. Joe, an upperclassman at Harvard, had come down with lupus and had been forced, at least temporarily, to suspend his studies. James Jr., in his third year at the University of Pennsylvania, was facing sentencing for a crime in Alfred, Maine. Two summers before, in late August 1987, James Jr. had been driving a Datsun 280-Z in which two passengers were killed. They were his roommates. The son, driving under the influence of alcohol, missed a turn. The car left the road and smashed into a large boulder. The accident happened at night, as the three were coming home from a restaurant called Mrs. B’s, where they had been employed. They were celebrating the end of the summer season, before James’s return to school for his sophomore year. He survived the crash with minor injuries. A year and a half later, on the se
cond day of his manslaughter and drunk-driving trial (it opened in January 1989), the defendant pleaded no contest to two counts of manslaughter and one count of driving under the influence. His father, in attendance, suggested to the local press that there had been racial bias in the handling of the case. Seven months later, after much negotiation between lawyers, the son received a greatly reduced sentence, with no jail time.

  This was the same month, August 1989, that James Meredith, in Ohio, announced that he was pulling up stakes from Cincinnati and going to work in Washington for a senator. Deeply worried about the medical and legal bills, Meredith had sent a letter to each member of Congress and to every governor in the country. “If God sees fit to allow me longevity and good health,” he said, “I will be in the future the most important Black Leader in America and the World. We need to know each other.”

  Soon there were headlines: “Man Who Integrated Ole Miss Now at Work for Jesse Helms.” The race relations adviser to the Senate’s most prominent racial obstructionist was on the payroll for a reported salary of $30,000. It wasn’t a lot of money, and to complicate matters, Meredith’s wife, a TV reporter, had a new job in San Diego, and so the family had to maintain separate residences. To defray some of this, the new Hill aide to a North Carolina racist went around lecturing about race. At Florida State University, he told the law school student body, “For the last ten years my enemy has been the white liberal. And I plan to crush them, and wash them out, because they are destroying my people.” At Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, he said, “My enemy then was the white supremacist, my enemy now is the white liberal. The white liberals are about 1,000 times worse than the white supremacist.” In Boston, he said, “The making of slavery as an institution does not have near the significance as is placed on it.” At a State Department briefing on U.S. policy toward Africa, he told the audience he was a genius with a 141 IQ. He wished to be referred to as “Dr. Meredith.” On U.S. Senate letterhead, he wrote to an energy specialist in Senegal: “Without a doubt I am now in the most powerful position that any black person has possessed in the history of Western Christian civilization. Time will tell whether I am a match for my responsibility and opportunity.” Time did seem to tell—the relationship with Helms was dead by the fall of 1991. Meredith said he was quitting the staff because the senator was “too liberal.” A month later, he drove to Louisiana to throw his support behind candidate David Duke, onetime neo-Nazi and imperial wizard of the KKK, who now wished to be governor of his state, and beyond that, president.