Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  “This was the first time Ole Miss even acknowledged that there was a James Meredith,” Meredith was quoted as saying by the Daily Mississippian at the time of the 1997 donation of his papers. But he also said, “America is still a free society, people can do what they want, Ole Miss is still number one, it is the Harvard of the South.”

  The formal handing-over ceremony was held in March 1997 at the beautiful new John D. Williams Library, named for the man who’d been chancellor when the 1962 riot broke out, when Ole Miss became—for about twenty-four hours—the most famous university in the world. According to news reports, the transporting of the papers to Oxford from Meredith’s house had required three van loads and an additional moving truck. Meredith attended the ceremony with some friends and family. (Joe wasn’t there.) There is reported to have been deep collective relief on the part of the administration that the donor didn’t flip out. It was a smallish crowd. In his introduction, Chancellor Robert Khayat called him “Dr. James Meredith.” He spoke of the prominence of the state’s oldest institution of higher learning and of the importance of being able to accommodate future generations of Meredith scholars. He only touched on the events of late September 1962 and said that “although much tragedy and pain are associated with that event,” it was also true that there’d been a very positive outcome. The provost, Gerald Walton, also could only seem to dance on the skin of the riot. “A classic civil rights battle,” he noted.

  Meredith got up. “They limited me to three minutes,” he said. His huge eyes counted the room. He licked his lips. He twisted his head. “I’ve written eighteen books. I’ve sold a lot of them.” There were ten of them waiting outside the door to be purchased, he said. He began introducing old friends and family. The introductions went on and on. There was some looniness in his delivery and explosive laughter at wrong places, but mostly it was all okay, and, really, he looked smashing that day. “She bought this suit I got on,” he said, wagging his arm at his sister, Hazel. He had paid twenty bucks for a shave and a haircut—“never paid anything like that in my life.” After ten or twelve minutes had passed, the guest said, “Now I’m going to give my two-minute talk.” Individual sentences and phrases were eloquent. “Mississippi from now on will live the impossible dream in reality,” he said. He remembered what his long-deceased father, Cap Meredith, had said, sitting in the Grove on graduation day, 1963: “These people can be decent.” Beat. “I want to report to my father that today in Mississippi, these people are decent.”

  Soon the grandiosity came back. His personal goal was to make Mississippi “number one.” He ranted a little about black English. He also said, “Today, I want to launch my campaign to become mayor of the city of Jackson.” He said, “So, uh, I’m finished.” He lurched to his chair and then the chancellor got up. Uh, um, it was great to know that Dr. Meredith was running for mayor, but of course the university could take no official position on that, Khayat said.

  Afterward, there was a reception. The room where it was held wasn’t very far in linear feet from the area on the second floor where the library shelves its old bound periodicals—Time and Newsweek and Life and the Saturday Evening Post, and all the others. If a researcher or pesky out-of-town visitor had gone through the aisles looking for stories about what had happened at Ole Miss in late September and early October 1962, he would have discovered that most of the stories weren’t there. The periodicals themselves exist—but almost all of the stories have been scissored or ripped out. Whole issues are missing from the shelves, including the issue of Life containing Charles Moore’s photograph.

  Eighteen months after that ceremony, on September 21, 1998, Meredith came back to the library to give a talk, and this time Joe was in the audience. He’d just begun his graduate work. Joe’s father had on the same handsome suit, only this time he wore an Ole Miss baseball cap. “Play the tape,” he ordered his son, who was sitting in the front row, on the far left, next to a boom box. Joe was hunched over. He punched a button. Blues music came on. “Turn it louder,” commanded Joe’s father, who began to move around at the front of the room. He had some moves—crazy, inspired, sixty-five-year-old moves. “Play it louder,” he called out. The hunched son, who had on an Ole Miss ball cap, too, turned it louder. “Believe me, this is the most important part of the speech,” Meredith shouted to the audience, sashaying, finger-popping, shoulder-bobbing. A few minutes earlier, the provost had introduced him, but Gerald Walton now looked like a deer caught in headlights. “That was Elmore James,” Meredith said when he allowed the music to be turned off. He looked joyous. Joe was still looking at his feet.

  The speaker got onto the royal Choctaw thing and wouldn’t leave it alone. “I was a selected one,” he said. He made some impolitic and sexist claims. He took questions. Two black women in the audience were visibly angry. One got up and said, “I’ve heard several people [before today] call him crazy, and quite frankly, listening to him, I can understand that.” She and Meredith began to interrupt each other loudly. Suddenly, he seemed very afraid, very old, bewildered. Listen, he said, I know I’ve made some folks mad here today, okay, enough of this, “we’re gonna talk about football.”

  That was in the fall of 1998, and in the following spring, on the veranda of Square Books, our first meeting, Joe sighed heavily and said: “That’s a hard question, because it integrates what he did with what he’s done in the family. Am I proud of my father? This is what you’re asking. Okay, I guess very proud of the event of history you’re talking about. But then you’ve got to look at everything else. For instance, you could say because of my father, I went to Harvard. Okay, there’s that. And the other way to look at it is that he pushed me too hard.”

  The subject of Jesse Helms came up. “You take that,” Joe said. “You start thinking, okay, what effect did that have in your family. For the next five years, you have to answer that question. ‘Hey, why did your father go to work for Jesse Helms?’ I can tell you what he says about it. He says he wanted to do research at the Library of Congress.”

  Come again?

  “That’s what he said. He said he wrote all these letters, and Helms and maybe one other senator were the only ones who answered. I don’t know if it’s true. I can tell you it was a financial disaster. You don’t make much money working for a congressman. We were living in California—my stepmom had gone there to take a job—and so we were paying two rents.”

  “Did what happened to your father at Ole Miss wreck his life, and in a way the family’s?”

  “It’s a contributing factor. It’s not causal. When he does something, it’s because he thinks it’s right, even if he can’t explain it to anybody. He goes to work for Jesse Helms, and it makes sense to him. I’ve heard people say, ‘Oh, if he hadn’t integrated Ole Miss, he wouldn’t have done all these crazy things.’ I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s something else. I’ll call it his eccentric philosophy. This is my theory. He does these things—almost as a kind of offensive strike to throw you off—so that he can find the energy to do whatever else he wants to do. For instance, supporting David Duke. Why in hell would you ever support a racist like David Duke if you’re James Meredith? Well, maybe he knows he’s going to get all these articles and letters about that, condemning him. And that somehow gives him the energy to do what he wants to do next.”

  Joe talked about the wrestling team at Harvard. He had participated in the sport for three years and had earned his letter. The next year, the lupus came, and in a way it might have been a relief. He was never a star on the team—the step-up in class from prep school to the collegiate level was too great. Harvard had turned into a national wrestling power in those years. Of his teammates, Joe said, flashing the bitterness: “I was outcasted. Whenever there was a breakout in groups of two, I was the only one without a partner. You swallow your pride and go up to somebody after practice and say, ‘Hey, you want to wrestle?’ ‘No, I’m tired.’ After a while, it makes you very bitter. Same thing with the wrestle-offs, to see who
’s going to be starting for the team that week. You could feel them rooting against you.”

  Joe sat silent. “So you think of my father forty years ago at this school. First day of class, every student in his class wants to leave the classroom. Every day, you go into the cafeteria at lunch, and you hear the taunting. They start banging their trays on the table. What I mean is, sometimes I think I know what my father felt.”

  For something like the last fifteen years, a lawyer and public servant in Cincinnati named Tyrone Yates has been trying to write the authorized Meredith biography. A young adult biography exists, less than 10,000 words, but there has never been a full biography of Meredith. Yates is African-American. He was once vice mayor of Cincinnati. He has served on the city council. He has law-clerked in the White House. Currently, he does trial work for the public defender’s office in his hometown. He says that many of his fellow blacks, some of whom are nationally prominent, have tried to dissuade him from writing Meredith’s story. “They feel he is not worthy. They’re embarrassed by him. They’d rather just have people forget about Jay Meredith. Well, to me he’s a hero. I think of James H. Meredith as my hero.” Yates, who nearly always speaks of Meredith as “Jay,” as family members do, is certainly not blind to the difficulties of Meredith’s personality. He has suffered at the hands of it. That doesn’t matter to him. He sees Meredith as “a genius who was trapped in the constraints of poverty and racism.” Yates: “You see, in a flash, he was one of the most famous people on earth, as Jay himself would say. I think it’s a natural situation that one does strive for that kind of thing again. I think he expected that level of fame would keep up.”

  The two came to know each other not long after Meredith and some of his family had relocated to Ohio in the mid-eighties. Yates asked Meredith if he would present a talk to a local group. Meredith replied that he didn’t talk to anyone for free. Yates presented him with a $20 bill. Meredith laughed and said, “Okay, I am indebted to you now.” They became close friends, and when Meredith lost control of the students in his constitutional law course at the university (Yates had originally been slated to teach the course), the attorney stepped in. Yates has many convictions about Meredith, and a central one is how “extraordinary a father he is, despite what anybody thinks from the outside. He is absolutely committed to the welfare of his children. Can you imagine how hard that is for him, given his tortured mind? I’ve actually seen very few fathers, or mothers for that matter, keep such a focused eye on the welfare of his children. I know he would do anything for his kids.” Yates hesitated and said that the pity is that it all gets screwed up. The law of unintended consequences, perhaps.

  In late summer 1987, Meredith called Yates. James Jr. had just been involved in that car accident in Maine and two people were dead. James Jr. was eighteen and had been driving. Yates: “He called and told me. He was absolutely terrified. Stricken. He said, ‘Tyrone, I need you to do something for me. I need you to do it right now.’ ” He asked Yates to call former presidential assistant Richard Goodwin, still very close to the Kennedy family. Goodwin would be able to help secure the best defense attorney in New England, Meredith said. Yates called Goodwin and was then directed to other influential people in Washington, D.C. Yates: “Jay raised twenty thousand dollars on the spot for the defense. That was the least of his bolting into action to save one of his children.” Two years after the accident, on August 22, 1989, the son was sentenced to a year of house arrest, which essentially allowed him to continue his undergraduate studies at Penn without interruption. He was given a $350 fine. He lost his driver’s license for five years.

  Yates says he will see his Meredith biography through to completion and publication, even if he has to sell it himself. “Anybody who did what he did deserves the thanks of this country. But we don’t want to give it to him.”

  Jim Peckham was Joe’s old wrestling coach at Harvard. He is retired but is still nationally known in collegiate wrestling circles. He was told about Joe’s feeling of ostracism by his teammates. Peckham said he had no idea. “That’s terrible. That’s terrible. I must have let him down. We all must have let him down. In the sport of wrestling, it’s almost impossible not to bind with someone. It’s so intimate and involved.” Joe’s former teammates seemed less stressed in trying to recall Joe. They said they could remember an athlete with solid if unexceptional skills, but who didn’t seem willing to work hard enough to secure his place. The fire in his belly wasn’t there. Not one team member (of the six who were asked) could remember taking a class with him, or seeing him around Harvard Square, or ever sitting across from him in a dining hall. They said they could recall him only at the gym, working out. Almost always, he kept to himself, whether getting into or out of wrestling togs or walking to the shower or back to the college houses. Scott Merriner, a classmate and average-skilled wrestler, now a minister at a church in Alaska, remembers reading the newspaper stories about Joe’s father going to work for Helms. This was in the fall of senior year, 1989. Merriner: “I remember trying to kind of dig at that, the Helms story. I was really curious why Joe’s father would have done that. But I couldn’t connect with him on it.… I was pretty conservative myself, especially in a place like Cambridge. I certainly wasn’t a liberal. I just wanted to talk to him about it. He wouldn’t do it. You always got the feeling that Joe perceived his father as someone he could not be unreservedly proud of.” Merriner added, “I don’t ever remember him speaking against his father, though.” Tim Kierstead, another classmate on the team: “Nice guy.… Couldn’t know him.… I vaguely remember something about his twin brother getting in that automobile accident. I vaguely remember somebody telling me that his father went to work for Jesse Helms. It wasn’t something you would have ever asked him about. He was closed off to conversation in general but that kind of conversation for sure. I think these kinds of things might have piled up on him.”

  Newsweek, October 22, 1962, beneath the headline “What Manner of Man Is This?”: “He is small (about 5 feet 6 inches), with delicate bones and features. His eyes are brown, large, and luminous. He has a pencil-line mustache. He dresses neatly and, almost invariably, in a dark suit, white shirt, with a handkerchief folded square in his breast pocket. When he is self-conscious, he issues a tiny, tentative laugh. But he gestures passionately with his left hand when he becomes indignant about what he regards as an insult or ill treatment of Negroes.”

  James Meredith has three sons and one daughter. His oldest son, John, is in his early forties. He is eight years older than the twins and works as a congressional lobbyist in Washington, D.C. He is single and a self-described loner. In August 1963, he was the child sitting on Cap Meredith’s lap during graduation ceremonies in the Grove at Ole Miss. John Meredith carries himself very well and is polished in conversation and looks almost eerily like the man being described in that old article from Newsweek. John says he rarely goes home to Mississippi to see the members of his family. “Not a particularly sit-around-the-fire-talking family,” he says.

  He’s in a hotel restaurant on K Street in Washington. It’s the first of two meetings, and this one will last for more than two hours. In both, little emotion will slip through cracks, and very little evidence of sibling love will manifest itself. The eldest son has on a yellow tie and a white shirt and a dark suit. His eyes are brown, large, and luminous. He’s just come from a round of meetings on Capitol Hill. He is dining on bay scallops and his table manners are exquisite. He places his left hand on Moore’s photograph (he has not seen it before), holds aloft the fork in his right hand. “First thought that hits me looking at this is: This is why black people don’t trust cops,” he says.

  Once, he approaches anger. “Oxford, Mississippi,” he says. “They have a Martin Luther King, Jr. Street there. Why? King was never there. Why isn’t there a James Meredith street in Oxford?” At another point, he recounts a racist incident during a job interview at an employment agency in Jackson a few years ago. “The white guy in the next cubicle
was being offered fifteen dollars an hour for something I was more qualified for. I could hear it. In my cubicle, the guy looks over my résumé and says, ‘Well, we’ve got one here for seven an hour. But you’re probably overqualified.’ ” Pause. “I don’t care about the beauty of the land in Mississippi. You can have it.”

  He tells of a recent altercation he got into in New Jersey recently with a white woman who wouldn’t let him have a parking space. He blocked her car in. She called the cops on her cell phone. They surrounded his car and told him to get out. “And of course they believed her story, not mine.”

  He is asked about the fact that there has never been a biography of his father. “It’s simple. Black publishing doesn’t want it. Because they don’t want a divided electorate. A bio would create problems. It could move some blacks off the Democratic rolls.” He listens when encounters with his younger brother in Oxford are described. “I guess I haven’t spoken with Joe in a while,” he says. “Sorry to hear he struck you like that.”

  On the traumas in the family caused by James Jr.’s auto accident. “Yes, a rough time, a rough time.”

  Do people he meets in the course of his lobbying work on Capitol Hill connect his name with that of his father? “Very little name recognition now,” he replies. “Especially since what my father did at Ole Miss is not something taught very much in schools. I would never want to use the name for advantage anyway.”

  Has his father been an influence on his own conservative political views?

  “Indirectly,” he says.

  “Telepathically?” he is asked.

  “Maybe you could say that.”

  The eldest son has contributed opinion pieces to the newsletter of the Leadership Institute, an archconservative, nonprofit educational organization headquartered in suburban Washington. According to its Web site, the prime mission of the Leadership Institute is to identify, recruit, train, and place political conservatives in public policy jobs. From one of John’s published pieces: “The liberal media of today don’t want you to hear James Meredith: He doesn’t fit their mold of a proper black American. The civil rights ‘leaders’ of today hope you won’t listen to James Meredith: he won’t submit to their entitlement mentality. These plantation owners of elite opinion can’t stand the sight of an uppity James Meredith, not content with the place they’ve assigned him.” From another piece: “While James followed the road less traveled, the anointed black leaders veered increasingly left, roaring down the dead-end, weed-infested lanes of Marxism, radical separatism, preferential treatment and violent struggle. James’s ostracism reached its nadir in 1989, when he accepted a position in the office of conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. For exposing the long-cultivated myth that black leaders must be liberal, James was excoriated by the media and his former colleagues. Despite the unceasing vilification, my father remains uncowed. His vision is keen. And he still stands tall.”