Meredith fought in the courts, eventually winning the right to matriculate. For most of September, federal agents were trying to enroll him but were turned back by politicians. Meredith and the feds thought a deal had been arranged, that the waiting was finally over, but Barnett’s call fixed that.
That’s OK. Meredith knows how to wait. In his hometown of Kosciusko, Mississippi, a field of pine trees grows slowly. His father gave them to him when Meredith got out of the military; one day, his dad told him, these trees would be worth something. They grow, inch by inch. As long as something lives, it can reach the sky. Meredith, just a small man—5-foot-6, 135 pounds—with the biggest dreams, finds comfort in that. Sitting at a Naval Air Station outside Memphis, Meredith watches a pro football game on television as the politicians work on yet another deal. Finally, fed up, Robert Kennedy threatens Barnett. The president is going on live television to tell the nation, and Mississippians in particular, that the governor has been promising them one thing while dealing with the hated Kennedys behind their backs.
“You mean the president is going to say that tonight?”
“Of course he is; you broke your word. Now you suggest we send in troops, fighting their way through a barricade.”
“Why don’t you fly in this afternoon? Please let us treat what we say as confidential.”
That’s what it takes. Segregation is about to end at Ole Miss. Meredith and head marshal Jim McShane climb into a green, twin-engine Border Patrol Cessna and take off. Destination: Oxford, Mississippi.
As Meredith and McShane make their way south, Vaught settles into the film room and begins to work. Two wins down, seven to go. In six days, the Rebels will face undefeated Houston.
6. THE FEDS ARRIVE
The players return from the game on their own, many going home for a night. On Sunday, they begin the trek back to campus. Buck Randall heads to Oxford from the Delta, through the flatlands, white cotton all around, waiting to be picked. He listens to music, not the news, and has no idea what waits on the other side. He has deep blue eyes, a boxer’s nose, and a hard chin. Anger bubbles just beneath the surface with Randall, always, though he has trouble explaining it. When Buck was a kid, his father was in the pen, and Buck had to live with a high school teammate instead of his own family. He never walks away from an insult, large or small. Stories, some of them true, about him taking on two and three guys at a time, stacking ’em like firewood, make the rounds of Miller Hall, where the football team lives.
A bunch of the guys ride a bus back to campus from the airport, down University Avenue toward the statue of the Confederate soldier, honoring the students killed at Gettysburg. As they rumble toward the center of campus, quarterback Glynn Griffing stares out a window. Federal marshals have surrounded the Lyceum Building, the oldest structure on campus, where Meredith will register in the morning.
What are they doing here? Griffing wonders.
Players wander off to see what the commotion is all about. Sam Owen, a wise guy lineman nicknamed Soup Bone, hangs around at the back of the crowd, taking in the scene. So does Louis Guy, one of the most popular players on campus. Jimmy Weatherly, a sophomore quarterback who is struggling with wanting to be a musician while everyone else wants him to replace Griffing, watches too.
Hundreds of students fill the circle of grass in front of the marshals who have gathered near the Lyceum Building. It feels almost like a pep rally, topped by a large dollop of defiance. Coeds ride on the backs of convertibles around the street in front of the building, Rebel flags flying from the cars. The familiar chants from the stadium ring out, albeit slightly altered:
Hotty Toddy
Gosh Almighty
Who the hell are we?
Flim-flam
Bim-bam
White folks, by damn!
And . . .
Two, four, six, eight . . . hell, no, we won’t integrate.
And . . .
Two, one, four, three, we hate Kennedy!
As the sun sinks down, casting shadows from the tall oaks and magnolias, things begin to get really ugly. For some, nothing—not the campus, not the South, none of it—will ever be beautiful again. The marshals grit their teeth. Darkness settles over Oxford.
It will be a long time before sunrise.
7. A MOB SCENE
The players watch the madness unfold. Some join the mob. One player, a burly ex-boxer-turned-lineman named Don Dickson, disrupts an interview while a friend smashes the reporter’s camera. Mostly, though, they stand to the side, some amazed, others frightened.
The violence increases, as if the dark offers absolution. First, it’s a smashed camera. Then a tossed cigarette. The mob surrounds a Dallas television reporter, George Yoder, sitting in his station wagon with his wife in the passenger seat. Someone reaches in and grabs his camera, which is thrown at the marshals. Then the mob turns on Yoder’s wife, reaching for her like a scene from a zombie movie, screaming, “N— loving Yankee bitch!” She is from Jackson, Mississippi.
Finally, after watching the scene with amusement, some state troopers lead the Yoders to safety. Later, their car will be flipped and burned. The mob closes in on the marshals. Missiles come from every direction, starting adolescent, slowly becoming more adult, from rotten eggs to firebombs. A construction site not far away is discovered, and bricks rain down on the white-painted helmets of the marshals too.
A group takes down the Stars and Stripes and runs up the Confederate flag. The chain snarls at half-staff, where the flag will remain throughout the night, the Stars and Bars a beacon heralding a long-gone moment when a bunch of college boys rose and charged from Seminary Ridge.
8. MASS INSANITY
Back at the Lyceum, it’s a little after 7, and something has to give. A campus security official finds Vaught in the film room: Would the coach be willing to try to calm the crowd? Vaught wanders through the mob for a while, then rushes to Miller Hall.
At 7:30, Barnett goes on the radio to announce Meredith has been brought to Mississippi by force. Before signing off, he issues a warning to the marshals: “Gentlemen, you are trampling on the sovereignty of this great state and depriving it of every vestige of honor and respect as a member of the United States. You are destroying the Constitution of the United States. May God have mercy on your souls.”
Twenty minutes later, Marshal McShane orders his men to put on their gas masks. More bricks. A bottle hits a marshal on his arm, and liquid splatters on him. It burns: acid from the chemistry building next door. A few minutes after that, as President Kennedy prepares to address the nation, a heavy length of lead pipe bounces off the head of a marshal, denting his helmet. The marshals grip their billy clubs tighter; the students at the front can see their knuckles turning white.
Jojo Wilkins, a senior wide receiver, standing close to the marshals, by a small magnolia tree near the sidewalk, hears someone shout, “Let ’em have it!” All hell breaks loose, the marshals spraying tear gas into the crowd, the rounds sounding like helicopter rotors turning. A haze covers the campus, and tears stream down everyone’s face.
Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general, picks up the open line to the White House inside the Lyceum. Robert Kennedy answers. “Bob,” Katzenbach says, “I’m very unhappy to report that we’ve had to fire tear gas.”
“I think I should really go tell the president about it,” Robert Kennedy says. “He’s just going on the air.”
The attorney general runs toward the Oval Office, where his brother is about to go live. He arrives moments too late, just in time to hear the president begin. JFK’s words carry over radios of cars parked near the Lyceum in Oxford, adding an eerie new soundtrack: the whoop of the tear gas guns, the screaming of the mob, the cloud covering the campus, with the voice of the president of the United States in the background, urging them to remain calm: “You have a great tradition to uphold
, a tradition of honor and courage, won on the field of battle and on the gridiron.”
No one listens.
9. “DON’T GO OUT”
With tear gas seeping into the team dorm, through the towels beneath the doors and windows, Vaught gathers his players. The sounds of explosions frighten them, as does a new sound: gunshots. Most are hunters, and they listen as the caliber of the rounds slowly rises. While assistant coaches patrol the halls, Vaught says, “We have to band together. We have a purpose. We must keep our poise.”
The players get the message. Pull tight. Stay together, no matter what happens. The guys worry a lot that night, about the violence and about their season. Some try to sleep, but the explosions and gunshots make that hard. A few players help wash out the eyes of students who stumble into the dorm. Assistant coach Wobble Davidson, on patrol, keeps reminding the players, “Don’t go out.” For most people, the fear of Davidson, a former Marine who crawled into caves in World War II, is enough. They don’t want to have to run up and down the 65 steps of the stadium, 10 laps in 10 minutes, or do it again.
But Buck Randall wants to go out. Telling him to stay put is like telling him not to eat ice cream. He slips into the night.
10. FACE-TO-FACE WITH THE CARNAGE
The battle is growing desperate. The marshals are running out of tear gas. Bricks and bottles and iron spikes rain down. Gunshots ring out. Thugs drive into town from Alabama and Arkansas and Tennessee and Louisiana, one carload sending two barrels of buckshot into the home of LeRoy Wadlington, the African American kid who lives off the highway leading into town. His father grabs his own gun and orders his family to lie down in the back of the house.
The Civil War has begun anew, and the North is losing. Later, the events of the night will seem impossible: an Associated Press reporter shot in the back with birdshot. A bulldozer and fire truck stolen and driven at the marshals. A French reporter is shot dead. So is a local resident. Dozens of marshals are shot or injured. A sniper sets up on the Confederate statue, first shooting out the lights, then turning his weapon on the Lyceum, pushing the marshals inside, high-powered deer rounds shattering the door and window frames.
During the night, Chief Burns Tatum, the head of security for the university, spots Randall in the crowd and pulls him into the besieged Lyceum, where Randall comes face-to-face with the carnage. In a corridor, shot through the neck, Marshal Gene Same from Indianapolis is bleeding out on the floor as his fellow officers kneel over him, helpless and frustrated.
“Where the hell’s the doctor?”
“We’re trying to get one!”
“Try, hell. This man’s dying!”
Tatum tells the marshals that Randall plays football for the Rebels. That sends some of them over the edge. “Come on, son,” a marshal snarls. “We’ve got something to show you.” They push him real close to Same. “You see him? You see him? He’s bleeding to death. You get out there and tell those bastards they’ve killed a man.”
McShane decides to send the big football hero out into the mob. “Tell those people to disperse now,” McShane says, “or we’re gonna start shooting—students and all.”
Randall heads to the Grove, calling for people’s attention. Gorton, standing near the Lyceum, will remember, years later, what he saw: “Buck didn’t give a ‘speech.’ He sought people out. He implored. There was a strange quality about that from a tough guy who looked haunted that night. Bear in mind that this was the toughest guy in the Delta. It was the end of an era. He must have lost his mind because Buck Randall was always in favor of mayhem and misery and murder. That’s what he loved. There was some badass motherfuckers around. Of all the badass motherfuckers, I’d like to nominate him for as mean as they got. Nothing on the face of the earth would scare that guy. But that night did.”
Scared or not, Randall tries to explain what they’ve done. “There’s a man in there dying,” he says.
A crowd begins to gather, and people don’t like what they’re hearing. Someone yells, “Pull him down!” Another yells, “Murder him!” Every time someone challenges him, Randall snarls, “Come on, boy. Come on. Try it. I’ll kill you.”
The people who know him, the students, don’t get within a dozen feet. The folks who came just to fight sense some major alpha mojo because they don’t mess with him either. But that doesn’t mean they intend to listen. They mock him. This goes on for 10 minutes. Finally, Randall gives up. The crowd separates to let him through, and he walks back toward Miller Hall, alone, disappearing into the haze.
11. OCTOBER 1, 1962
Through the long night, the marshals wait for the U.S. Army regulars. The cavalry, in the form of the 101st and 82nd Airborne and an elite military police unit, is on the way. Troops land in Memphis, Tennessee, and head the 85 miles south to the Ole Miss campus. For the first time in a century, the U.S. Army is invading the state of Mississippi. Black families leave their homes and stand on the side of the highway, silent, as if at attention, watching the Union army speed toward Oxford.
On campus, the troops dismount and rush to rescue the marshals and local National Guardsmen, who are almost out of tear gas again and scared of being overrun, 160 wounded, 28 of them by gunfire. The troops form a wedge and march past the sorority houses, where girls curse and throw books. They march through a storm of bricks and Molotov cocktails, never breaking stride. The precision scares the rioters, as do the shining fixed bayonets. The sound of hundreds of rounds of live ammunition being jacked into hundreds of chambers echoes off the old white buildings, chilling the crowd.
The soldiers march toward University Avenue and, at last, the formation is within sight of the marshals, whose relief comes out as a long, loud cheer. By a little after 5 a.m., the troops have pushed the rioters off the campus. Students, the football team at Miller Hall, and Meredith over at Baxter, begin dressing for class, the smell of tear gas still heavy in the air. Marshals slump over in the Lyceum, surrounded by cigarette butts and bloody gauze. Others eat C rations under trees in front of the building. Two men, the French reporter and a local jukebox repairman, lie dead. The campus priest takes down the Confederate flag. The battle is over, and now a state, a school, and a football team have to pick up the pieces.
A light rain begins to fall.
II. RECONSTRUCTION
1. OCTOBER 1, 1962
Sam Owen wakes up early, slipping out of Miller Hall. The sun is up, shedding light on the destruction. The walk to the Lyceum takes only a few minutes. Around campus, little puffs of tear gas rise from the grass. It’s hard to breathe. He feels as if he has walked into a swamp.
He sees the burned-out skeletons of cars, some of them flipped over, still smoldering, sending black smoke into the air. A bulldozer and fire truck rest at strange angles, as if tossed by a giant toddler. At the Lyceum, chunks of wood have been blown out by rifle fire.
He has never thought about segregation before. Not really. Never broken it down to its essentials: his people keeping another group of people from being free, by laws, by social order, and by violence. He has never questioned what he has been taught, that it is good for everyone. This is just the way things are done. He isn’t for segregation—his high school had been integrated, which made his father livid—but he isn’t really against it either.
But this? He didn’t know segregation looked like this. For a moment, he just stares, his life divided into two parts now. On one side, this mystical thing: segregation, the Old Mississippi. On the other: the New Mississippi, an honest-to-god war zone, the physical manifestation of hate and fear. He looks back at his life and realizes a Rubicon stands here, and he has crossed it. The cars and the gunshots and the bleeding marshals, all of it works its way through his brain and into his heart.
After checking on his girlfriend, Judy, he finds a pay phone and calls his folks back in Tennessee. He tells them what has happened and that he is safe.
“Do you want to co
me home?” they ask.
Not a chance.
“We gotta play Houston,” Owen says.
2. WILL THE SHOWDOWN GO ON?
The game is only five days away, and thousands of federal troops are camped out on Vaught’s practice fields. More are camped outside town, one radio call away from marching on Oxford. Helicopters move men and equipment. Troops screen every car coming onto campus, and they will for months, looking in trunks and under seats for weapons. Meredith goes to class, escorted by armed guards, harassed the entire way. The first walk of the first morning brings frothing crowds. Someone gets right in his face and screams, “Was it worth two lives, n—–!?” Meredith puts on his pope face.
Some politicians are demanding a total shutdown of the school. Straw polls estimate half of Mississippians want the university closed. There is really only one overwhelming reason not to shutter the place: the highly ranked Rebels. No school, no football. Few have more influence in Mississippi than Vaught. Robert Kennedy calls him after the riot: “Coach Vaught, I want you to do what you can to keep the situation calm.”
Vaught certainly appreciates the call, the ego boost of the attorney general of the United States needing him. Vaught has a lot of good traits, but he is also vain. He is bald, and hates it, and always wears hats. The team calls him Slick, but only behind his back. He needs glasses but won’t wear them. If it’s sunny and he can wear prescription shades, he is a great game coach. If not, he can’t see the action and sometimes doesn’t know who is in the game or what plays are being run. “Vaught was a good organizer,” Frank Kinard, a member of the ’62 team and the son of assistant coach Bruiser Kinard, would say years later. “On the day of a game, he didn’t know where he was.”
The Cost of These Dreams Page 7