Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  A few weeks later, fifteen-year-old Brenda Travis and five older high-school students held another sit-in. Travis was expelled from Burgland High School and sentenced to a year in a state school for delinquents. The older students were sentenced to eight months in jail.

  Then, on September 25, Herbert Lee, the man who had driven Moses and Steptoe around Amite County, was killed by a bullet wound to the head. Ten days later, Moses and other SNCC workers marched with more than a hundred black high-school students through the streets of McComb, protesting the brutal killing and the release of the white man accused of his murder. When the marchers stopped to pray on the steps of city hall, they were arrested. Upon their release on bond, Bob Moses and SNCC organizer Chuck McDew started what they called Nonviolent High School, offering classes for the children who had been expelled from Burgland High after the protests. Within a few weeks the SNCC workers were arrested on charges of contributing to the delinquency of minors and sentenced to four months in jail.

  C. C. Bryant, the local NAACP head who had initiated the SNCC voter registration project, had not anticipated murder, mayhem, and the arrests of children. In October, he asked the NAACP’s national headquarters in New York to “condemn the SNCC operation and have it moved out.” Medgar Evers also thought that the McComb organizers had overextended themselves. By going beyond voting rights and staging sit-ins and protest demonstrations, SNCC had started a battle it could not win, at least not in 1961.

  After their release from jail, in December, the SNCC organizers left McComb. While they had been in prison, others from SNCC had launched the Albany, Georgia, campaign. The young organization’s experiences in both communities would provide them with the skills they needed to launch a major offensive in Mississippi two years later.

  While the McComb project was developing, Medgar Evers and NAACP attorney Constance Baker Motley were trying to help James Meredith break down racial barriers at the all-white University of Mississippi—the same institution whose law school had rejected Evers seven years earlier.

  Meredith had approached Evers in January 1961. Then a sophomore at all-black Jackson State, Meredith wanted to transfer to Ole Miss. Evers suggested he write to Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Meredith did so, explaining that he was a Mississippi native with nine years of military service (he had been a staff sergeant in the U.S. Air Force) and twelve college courses to his credit. Marshall told Evers he was interested in the case, but wanted more information from Meredith. He didn’t want to invest the NAACP’s time and money if the young man’s academic record wasn’t strong enough to qualify him for admission.

  As they worked on the Meredith case, Evers and the NAACP also targeted other strongholds of segregation in Mississippi. In Leake County, they sought integration of the elementary and secondary schools. In Jackson, Evers had called the Chamber of Commerce in December 1960 to request that blacks be hired as clerks and cashiers in the downtown stores. When his request was denied, he immediately launched a consumer boycott of the city’s shopping district. The strike faltered, however, when Evers was reluctant to back it up with picketing. He lacked the bail money he would need if protesters were arrested, and there were no black bail bondsmen in the state. White bondsmen, he knew, would not help get black civil rights activists out of jail.

  Evers also won a lawsuit to desegregate Jackson’s privately owned buses, and was pursuing a suit seeking integration of the city’s parks.

  James Meredith, attempting to register at the University of Mississippi, is stopped by Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson. Though ordered by a federal court to admit Meredith, the government of the state of Mississippi refused.

  Meanwhile, white supremacists continued to strike back. A black soldier was beaten unconscious when he demanded service in a Meridian, Mississippi, restaurant. In Taylorsville, another black soldier refused to sit in the back of a bus and was dragged from the vehicle and pummeled to death by the town policeman. In court the accused officer claimed self-defense, alleging that the man had tried to strike him. The grand jury did not indict him.

  But of all the civil rights efforts then underway in Mississippi, James Meredith’s case attracted the most attention. For whites, Ole Miss was a preserve of traditional southern life—a life that excluded blacks. Located in the town of Oxford, it was a social beehive, the home of the state’s premier football team and twenty-five fraternities and sororities. In four years the institution had produced two Miss Americas, two Miss Mississippis and one Miss Dixie. Whites would no sooner allow a black youngster to attend the university than they would let a black woman enter one of those beauty pageants. The school’s mascot was “Colonel Reb,” a caricature of a Confederate Army general.

  On September 3, 1962, a federal district court ordered the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith. Governor Ross Barnett, an ardent segregationist, went on statewide television to make his stand against the ruling. At the time, the governor’s popularity was sagging; the crowd had jeered him at an Ole Miss football game the year before, after a scandal involving gold-plated faucets in the bathrooms of the governor’s mansion. Now Barnett intended to seize on a political issue that could galvanize every segregationist in the state.

  The governor began his television speech by terming the time at hand “a solemn hour … the moment of our greatest crisis since the War Between the States.” The crisis, he said, resulted from “an ambitious federal government employing naked and arbitrary power.” He appealed to white racial pride and fear, arguing, “There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration … We must either submit to the unlawful dictate of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them, ‘Never.’”

  The next day, a headline in the Jackson Daily News declared, “Ross Risks Jail to Halt Mixing.” Mississippi’s United States Senator James O. Eastland vowed, “I certainly support him to the limit.” But James Meredith told Evers and others not to worry. He believed he had widespread support among white Mississippians who felt the state had gone too far.

  While state politicians generally cheered Barnett, Congressman Frank Smith accused the governor of leading the state “down another blind alley … Whether we like it or not the question of state vs. federal law was settled one hundred years ago.” In the university town of Oxford, eight ministers issued a statement urging that “the entire population act in a manner consistent with Christian teaching concerning the value and dignity of man.” The university’s Episcopal rector, Duncan M. Gray, Jr., asked that politicians and students exercise “the leadership necessary to assure the peaceful admission of James Meredith to the university.”

  On Saturday, September 29, 1962, at an Ole Miss football game in Jackson, Governor Barnett addressed the crowd at halftime. The “Rebels” were leading Kentucky by a score of 7–0. The audience waved thousands of Confederate flags. “I love Mississippi,” said the governor. “I love her people, her customs! And I love and respect her heritage.” At each pause in his speech, the crowd chanted. “Never, Never, Never, Never, N-o-o-o Never.” “Ross’s standing like Gibraltar. He shall never falter.” “Ask us what we say, it’s to hell with Bobby K.” “Never shall our emblem go, from Colonel Reb to Old Black Joe.”

  Despite his hardcore public stance, Barnett was privately negotiating with the Kennedys. The federal government was determined to see James Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss. On Sunday, September 30, the governor called the White House and suggested that the Army troops slated to escort Meredith to the university draw their guns and “force” the state to allow the young man to register. Barnett could thus save face with the segregationists and shift the political blame onto the Kennedys. The president refused. He threatened to reveal that Barnett had been negotiating with his administration. The governor begged the president not to do that, and Kennedy then proposed bringing Meredith to the campus that very night. Kennedy would announce on television that Meredith was already at Ole Miss, in hopes of defus
ing the situation. Kennedy had already authorized the use of federal troops if necessary, and the Mississippi National Guard was at the ready. By 4 P.M., 123 deputy marshals, 316 border patrolmen, and 97 federal prison guards had moved into place at the Lyceum, the campus administration building.

  Around 6 P.M., the plane carrying James Meredith landed at Oxford’s airport. He was secretly escorted to a room in Baxter Hall on the campus, where he closed the door and picked up a newspaper to read. Twenty-four federal agents guarded the hallway outside. Meanwhile, a rowdy crowd, unaware of Meredith’s presence, aimed their fury at the marshals blocking the front door of the Lyceum. They shouted racial slurs and chanted, “Two-four-six-eight, we ain’t gonna integrate. We hate Kennedy!”

  By 7 P.M., mayhem reigned. A white youth attacked a black military truck driver, spraying him in the face with a fire extinguisher. The rabble threw rocks and bottles and began to overturn cars and smash windows. As the violence escalated, the Mississippi state highway patrolmen drove away. Federal officials anxiously called Governor Barnett, asking him to get the troopers back on the scene. Barnett said he would, but the troopers did not return.

  The governor had promised the Kennedys that he would make a televised announcement of the state’s compliance with Meredith’s enrollment. As the campus violence raged, Barnett faced the cameras. “As governor of the State of Mississippi, I have just been informed by the attorney general of the United States that Meredith has today been placed on the campus of the University of Mississippi …,” he said. “I urge all Mississippians and instruct every state official under my command to do everything in their power to preserve peace and to avoid violence in any form.”

  The governor then added, “Surrounded on all sides by the armed forces and oppressive power of the U.S.A., my courage and commitment do not waver … To the officials of the federal government I say, ‘Gentlemen, you are trampling on the sovereignty of this great state … You are destroying the Constitution of this great nation … May God have mercy on your souls …’”

  Unaware of the governor’s words, President Kennedy prepared to make his own television speech to the nation. As he did so, the federal marshals on campus began firing tear gas. “Americans are free … to disagree with the law, but not to disobey it,” the president said. “For in any government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent and powerful, and no matter however unruly and boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law … You have a new opportunity to show that you are men of patriotism and integrity. For the most effective means of upholding the law is not the state policemen or the marshals or the National Guard. It is you.”

  On campus, the rioting was out of control. Shortly after the president finished his speech, the body of French reporter Paul Guihard was discovered. Guihard had been shot in the back at close range. Ray Gunter, an Oxford resident who was watching the mayhem, was shot dead at about 11 P.M. John McLaurin, Barnett’s representative at Ole Miss, recalled that night. “If Governor Barnett had gotten on the radio and asked for people to come to Oxford to defend the state of Mississippi,” he said, “I felt like the road wouldn’t have carried all the people that would’ve come in through Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana.”

  Around 10 P.M., Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach called the White House from Oxford to say that federal troops would be needed to squelch the rioting. Army Secretary Cyrus Vance ordered troops at an air station in Tennessee to move in. At 11:45, the president called Barnett again to demand that the highway patrolmen return to the scene. Barnett agreed, but by midnight the order had not been issued. The governor went on the radio and declared, “I call on Mississippi to keep the faith and courage. We will never surrender.”

  Governor Ross Barnett on the campus of Ole Miss.

  Hours had passed by the time the army troops finally landed at Oxford from Memphis. At 3:55 A.M. the president ordered them to move immediately to Ole Miss. In his message to the Army commander, Kennedy termed the incident “the worst thing” he had seen in his nearly 45 years. It was 4:30 A.M. before the president, assured that the savagery was over, went to bed. A force of several hundred federal personnel was in Oxford. One-hundred-sixty marshals had been injured and twenty-eight had been shot. Two men were dead. Two hundred people had been arrested, less than a quarter of them University of Mississippi students.

  At 7:55 A.M., just hours after the violence had been quelled, James Meredith walked across the now-quiet campus to the Lyceum and registered as a student. He met with no resistance. At 9 A.M. he began his first class, Colonial American History.

  Meredith’s ordeal did not end that morning. Federal marshals stayed on campus to guard him. Often he met with harassment, as when a group of angry whites surrounded him in the dining hall. But he also met with support. On one occasion, seven white students defiantly sat down at his table to share a meal with him. Medgar Evers visited Meredith on weekends to assess the situation for the NAACP. In the summer of 1963, James Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi with a bachelor’s degree in political science. Pinned to his gown he wore a “Never” button—turned upside down.

  The NAACP, particularly Medgar Evers and Constance Baker Motley, had won the esteem of many black Mississippians. John Salter, a civil rights leader with the NAACP’s Youth Council in Jackson, wrote later that “almost every black in Mississippi knew that James Meredith was in the University of Mississippi, that Ross Barnett and the Citizens’ Council had lost a major round, that the federal government would, in some instances at least, constructively involve itself all the way, even down in Mississippi. For the first time in their lives, Mississippi blacks had seen a very tangible civil rights victory for one of their own, and if there was fear within themselves, there was no longer quite as much apathy. There was a new interest in the battle against segregation and discrimination, especially among youth.”

  By the end of 1962, the civil rights climate in Mississippi had changed dramatically. The NAACP’s success at the University of Mississippi added to an emerging sense of hope and possibility among blacks.

  Each October, the Mississippi State Fair was held in Jackson. Traditionally, the first week of the fair was for whites only, after which blacks were allowed in for only three days. Before the 1962 fair, though, Evers and Salter’s NAACP Youth Council organized a boycott, hoping that Meredith’s success at Ole Miss would embolden blacks to participate. The story of the impending strike became front-page news. Police surrounded the fairgrounds, anticipating violence, but none came. As usual, marching bands of black high-school students heralded the opening day of the blacks-only part of the event. But instead of marching onto the grounds, they remained outside, bolstering the boycott participants. Evers later estimated that the boycott was sixty percent effective, an impressive measure for rural Mississippi.

  At Christmas dinner, 1962, Medgar Evers told a group of friends that he believed Mississippi was ready for a large-scale civil rights movement of its own, much like the one in Albany, Georgia. But his optimism was tempered by the certainty that a hard fight lay ahead. “The white man won’t change easily,” he said. “Some of these people are going to fight hard. And more of our people could get killed.”

  In the spring of 1963, Evers revived his campaign against segregation in the city of Jackson. In letters to the governor, to Jackson’s mayor, Allen C. Thompson, and to the city’s Chamber of Commerce, he wrote that “the NAACP is determined to put an end to all forms of racial discrimination in Jackson … We shall use all legal means of protest—picketing, marches, mass meetings, litigation … We call upon President John F. Kennedy and on other national leaders who share our love of freedom to use their good offices in helping to get these discussions started.”

  In reaction to the letter, Mayor Thompson told store owners, “Nobody is going to come here and tell our businessmen what to do.” He said he would not talk, much less negotiate, with “any member of the NAACP, CORE, or any other racial agita
tors.” On May 12, the mayor made a televised appeal to Jackson’s black citizens not to cooperate with Evers. “You live in a beautiful city …,” he said. “You have twenty-four-hour protection by the police department … or suppose you need the fire department? … You live in a city where you can work, where you can make a comfortable living … Now with these privileges that you have come certain responsibilities … Do not listen to false rumors which will stir you, worry you and upset you. Refuse to pay attention to these outside agitators who are only interested in getting money out of you, using you for their own purposes and who will advocate destroying everything that you and the white people working side by side [with you] have built up over the last hundred years … There will be no meetings with the NAACP or any other such group.”

  A week later, with the help of the Federal Communications Commission, Evers made a televised response to the mayor. “I speak as a native Mississippian,” he said. “I was educated in Mississippi schools and served overseas in our nation’s armed forces in the war against Hitlerism and fascism … Most southern people … usually think of the NAACP as a ‘northern outside group’ … Now the mayor says that if the so-called outside agitators would leave us alone everything would be all right. This has always been the position of those who would deny Negro citizens their constitutional rights … never in its history has the South as a region, without outside pressure, granted the Negro his citizenship rights … Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television … about the new free nation in Africa and knows that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson he cannot even drive a garbage truck. Then he looks about his home community and what does he see, to quote our mayor, in this ‘progressive, beautiful, friendly, prosperous city with an exciting future?’ He sees a city where Negro citizens are refused admittance to the city auditorium and the coliseum; his children refused a ticket to a good movie in a downtown theater; his wife and children refused service at a lunch counter in a downtown store where they trade … He sees a city of over 150,000, of which forty percent is Negro, in which there is not a single Negro policeman or policewoman, school crossing guard, fireman, clerk, stenographer … He sees local hospitals which segregate Negro patients … The mayor spoke of the twenty-four-hour police protection we have … There are questions in the minds of many Negroes whether we have twenty-four hours of protection or twenty-four hours of harassment …”