The States: Though the Heavens Fall

The constitution does not allow reasons of state to influence our judgement. God forbid it should! We must not regard political consequences, however formidable they might be; if rebellion was the certain consequence, we are bound to say, Justitia fiat, ruat coelum—Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.

—Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of England (Rex v. Wilkes, 1768)

Beneath the rich, golden-toned sky that October brings to the Deep South, a pleasant morning coolness lingered on the University of Mississippi campus at Oxford. A bell signaled the end of 9 o’clock classes, and students poured from the stately, white-columned buildings. They merged into a sea of laughing, chattering youngsters, milling about on spacious green lawns. For a moment, the view at Ole Miss looked like any between-classes scene at any big, well-landscaped, coeducational college in the U.S. on any fine autumn day.

But instead of moving on to the next classes, a crowd of students gathered in front of Conner Hall, where a campus newcomer named James H. Meredith had just completed a political science class. As Meredith appeared in the doorway, the waiting students began hissing him. He was a fellow student, a fellow Mississippian. and a fellow human being. But these likenesses were submerged by a terrible intensity of difference.

“Smile, Nigger!” Even if there had been no students jeering him and no U.S. marshals guarding him, Meredith would have been a strange figure on that campus. At 29. he was visibly older than his fellow students. His somber suit, neatly knotted tie and shined shoes contrasted with the campus’ standard male garb of white shirt, khaki trousers and scuffed loafers. And above all other differences, he was a Negro, the only one in the entire state of Mississippi who had broken through the public education system’s segregation barrier.

Escorted by half a dozen stony-faced U.S. marshals, he began walking toward the U.S. Government automobile that was waiting to take him back to his dormitory. “Hey. taxi!” a student yelled. “I wish I had a taxi to take me around campus.” The hissing intensified, and Meredith quickened his pace. As he reached the car and faced a battery of waiting news photographers, the students broke into loud jeers. “Smile, nigger, smile!” they called. The marshals hustled him into the back seat and the car drove away, followed by two U.S. Army weapons carriers loaded with steel-helmeted soldiers grasping rifles with bayonets attached.

Crying All the Way. Shameful as Meredith’s ordeal was. it had its inspiring aspects. Meredith’s very presence on that campus was an affirmation that the individual’s rights under the Constitution are to be enforced against whatever opposition, at whatever cost. The state government had tried to keep him out of the university, and a frenzied mob had fought a bloody, nightlong battle to get him out. But all in vain, for his right to be there was backed up by the might of the national Government. Only in America, perhaps, would the Government send thousands of troops to enforce the right of an otherwise obscure citizen to attend a particular university.

Meredith’s battle to get into Ole Miss was a continuation of a struggle that traces back to when he was 15 years old. As a boy on his father’s farm in the Mississippi backlands. he had never perceived the gulfs that separated whites and Negroes. But when he was 15. his father drove the family to Detroit to visit relatives. James and a brother stayed behind when the family went back to Mississippi. When the time came for the brothers to go home, they went by train. “The train wasn’t segregated when we left Detroit.” Meredith recalls. “But when we got to Memphis the conductor told my brother and me we had to go to another car. I cried all the way home from Memphis, and in a way I have cried ever since.”

In January 1961. after nine years in the U.S. Air Force, Meredith wrote a letter applying for admission to the University of Mississippi. The university fended Meredith off in the courts, but once the legal battle was lost, they were prepared to submit and let Meredith enroll. Then Mississippi’s fumbling Governor Ross Barnett interfered (TIME. Oct. 5). Barnett’s overt defiance of the law provided a cause to rally around, not only for Ole Miss students, but for racists all over Mississippi and in other Southern states.

In Texas, a weird call to arms was sounded by Edwin A. Walker, sometime U.S. Army major general, who resigned his commission after being officially admonished for wild right-wing talk. Walker appealed to Americans “from every state” to march to Barnett’s aid. His cry rang out all over the Deep South with a special meaning—for Walker was the man who commanded the U.S. troops that President Eisenhower sent to Little Rock in 1957.

A Haunting Gibe. After several abortive attempts to get Meredith registered, it became dismayingly obvious that it was going to take a very large force to carry out the court’s orders. Attorney General Robert Kennedy summoned 500-odd federal marshals and deputy marshals from all over the nation to the U.S. Naval Air Station near Memphis. Tenn.. 80 miles from Oxford. President Kennedy put aides to work drafting two speeches to the nation—one to be delivered if Barnett stepped aside, the other if he persisted in his defiance. The President still hoped to avoid sending military forces into Oxford. At one point during the 1960 campaign, he had said in reference to Little Rock: “There is more power in the presidency than to let things drift and then suddenly call out the troops.” All during the Ole Miss crisis, that gibe at Eisenhower must have haunted John Kennedy. He desperately wanted to be able to avoid any accusations that he had let things drift and then suddenly called out the troops.

The day before his TV speech, the President sent Barnett a telegram demanding to know “this evening” whether the Governor and his officials would “cooperate in maintaining law and order.” Barnett telephoned the President at 7:30 p.m. and evasively asked for more time to frame his reply. At 10 p.m., he called Attorney General Kennedy and said that he could not agree to the President’s demands.

Somberly, the President issued an executive order directing the Secretary of Defense to “take all appropriate steps” to enforce the court orders and calling the Mississippi units of the National Guard into “active military service.”

But the following morning, Barnett called the White House again. He now seemed to be willing to cooperate. He urged the President to bring Meredith in that day, Sunday; there were, he said, indications that segregationist gangs were planning to converge on Oxford on Monday. As White House officials tell it, Barnett promised that if U.S. marshals escorted Meredith onto the campus on Sunday, the state police would help maintain order. Accepting these assurances, the White House decided to put Meredith onto the campus that afternoon, even before the President delivered his speech.

Through the West Gate. Late that afternoon, the first wave of C-47 transports airlifting marshals from Memphis set down at the Oxford airport. Wearing white helmets and orange riot vests stuffed with tear-gas canisters, 167 marshals loaded into waiting Army trucks and chugged off to the campus half a mile away. At 5 p.m.—it was then 7 p.m. in Washington —marshals surrounded the Lyceum, the old, red brick administration building where Meredith was to register.

Shortly afterward, Meredith arrived from Memphis aboard a twin-engined U.S. border patrol plane, climbed into a border patrol automobile, and rode to the campus, escorted by a caravan of marshals with black, stubby tear-gas guns in their hands. The cavalcade swept onto the campus through the little-used West Gate and deposited Meredith at Baxter Hall with a guard of 24 marshals.

The time neared for the President to go on TV—7:30 p.m. E.D.T.—but he sent word to the networks that he was going to postpone the speech until 10 p.m. He wanted to wait and see whether

Barnett was going to keep his promises. When the President finally did goon camera, he was unsure about what was happening in Mississippi, and his uncertainty showed in his speech. But even if Kennedy had been at his most eloquent, it was too late to do any good. In a note of self-congratulation, he told his audience that “thus far” the Government had not used military force. But down in Mississippi, a long night’s violence had already erupted.

A Length of Pipe. The crowd in front of the Lyceum had grown bigger and uglier. First it turned on newsmen in a face-punching, camera-smashing frenzy. Then up rolled the 60-man local National Guard unit. It was Troop E of the Second Reconnaissance Squadron of the 108th Armored Cavalry Division, under the command of Captain Murry C. Falkner, nephew of Oxford’s late Novelist William Faulkner.

Enraged by the sight of Mississippi men arriving to aid the federal marshals, a man tried to set fire to a truck with a gasoline-soaked rag. Eggs came flying toward the marshals, then rocks. Out of the gathering darkness hurtled a length of metal pipe. It struck a marshal on the side of the helmet, stunning him. That was enough. “Let ’em have it!” yelled Chief Marshal James McShane. “Gas!” Tear-gas guns went off with metallic whoomps, filling the air with blinding mist. The crowd screamed and retreated. But the battle had only begun.

The planners of the federal operation had deliberately concentrated the main force of marshals at the Lyceum to divert any violence from. Meredith, who was actually dozing fitfully on a cot in Baxter Hall. The stratagem worked. Although the mob, screaming, smashing and burning, surged all over the campus during the long night, the central and decisive contest was the siege of the Lyceum. The attackers used a deadly arsenal—stones, clubs, iron bars, bricks from construction sites, jagged hunks of concrete from smashed-up campus benches, gasoline bombs made of Coca-Cola bottles and paper wicks shotguns, pistols; and rifles. :

“The defending marshals used only tear gas. Many of them had concealed pistols or riot guns, but Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, No. 2 man in the Justice Department and the man in command inside the Lyceum, ordered the marshals not to shoot so long as tear gas held the attackers, off Only once, did the marshals” fire bullets. When a group of ‘students drove the campus fire truck up close and loosed a stream of water at the Lyceum, a band of marshals charged the truck and fired pistol bullets into the hose.

Around 11 p.m., the attackers brought up a bulldozer, attempted to batter their way into the Lyceum. On the first try it struck a tree and stalled. When it charged again, Marshal Albert Taylor of Chula Vista, Calif., led a counterattack, and a well-placed canister of tear gas forced the bulldozer’s crew to abandon the machine.

Fighting valiantly beside the marshals all the while was Captain Falkner’s Troop

E. As Mississippi men, the guardsmen could hardly have felt much sympathy with the federal cause. But they did their duty unflinchingly, and before the night was out, 16 of them were wounded or injured, including Captain Falkner, who suffered two broken bones when a flying brick struck his arm.

Tense Vigil. Throughout the night, the defenders in the Lyceum remained in continuous telephone contact with Washington, where the President, his brother and a cluster of aides kept a tense vigil. Toward midnight, Katzenbach warned Washington that the defenders could not hold out much longer. But effective military help at last was on the way. At the Memphis Naval Air Station, Able Company of the 503rd Military Police Battalion boarded Oxford-bound helicopters, and other MP detachments left the base by truck. At 2 a.m., Able Company rolled onto the campus in airlifted Jeeps. On the way to the Lyceum, attackers bombarded them with rocks and gasoline bombs, and they arrived with scorched vehicles and smashed windshields. The MPs lined up in front of the Lyceum, bayonets pointed skyward. The besiegers pushed toward them, hurling gasoline bombs, then fell back. Up ahead, in the eerie light of a burning automobile, a band of attackers went into a sort of war dance, emitting hysterical rebel yells. Slowly, silently, the MPs started pushing forward.

During the next few hours, additional military units poured into Oxford in a swelling tide that by early morning had engulfed the campus and the town. Shortly before 8 a.m., Marshal McShane and two other men accompanied Meredith in a car to the battered Lyceum to register. They met with no resistance. Meredith listed his academic goal as a degree in political science, claimed credits (from extension courses) that would enable him to get a degree in a year and a half.

The campus was a nightmarish shambles, strewn with wrecked vehicles, hunks of concrete, countless tear-gas canisters, and the green chips of thousands of smashed Coke bottles. Oxford and its environs swarmed with soldiers—some 16,000 of them, more than the combined civilian population of town and university. As if making up for calling out troops belatedly, the Administration had finally called out far more than could possibly have been needed.

Death in the Dark. Two men had been killed, both of them noncombatants gunned down in the darkness of the campus. Paul Guihard, a French newspaperman representing Agence France-Presse, was shot in the back while covering the battle. An Oxford workman named Ray Gunter was shot in the forehead while merely watching it. A total of 166 marshals, 30% of all those sent to Oxford, suffered injuries or wounds, along with some 40 soldiers and National Guardsmen.

Most of the attackers, operating in darkness as members of a mob, escaped not only injury but arrest. Marshals and MPs took about 200 prisoners, but most of them were soon released for lack of solid evidence. Of those prisoners, only 24 were Ole Miss students; another score or so were students from other Mississippi colleges and from Southwestern at Memphis College. The rest, pretty seedy specimens, were intruders who had nothing to do with any university.” A dozen of them, including men from Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas as well as Mississippi, were arraigned on charges of insurrection, seditious conspiracy and other serious offenses.

The only prisoner with a claim to fame was Edwin A. Walker. He had arrived in Mississippi the day before the battle, proclaiming that the court orders on Meredith were part of “the conspiracy of the crucifixion by Antichrist conspirators of the Supreme Court.” On the night of the battle, he was observed by newsmen and a campus minister to be holding forth at a sort of informal command post. Every now and then somebody would run up to him and ask for military counsel. One man who got close to him reported that “there was a wild, dazed look in his eyes.” Late that morning, soldiers at a roadblock arrested Walker as he was attempting to leave town in a car. He was arraigned on charges of insurrection and seditious conspiracy and sent to the U.S. prison and medical center in Springfield, Mo., for observation. At week’s end he was released on $50,000 bond.

The Other Lesson. Even before the battle was over, recriminations began ringing out. Governor Barnett put the blame for the violence on “inexperienced, nervous, trigger-happy” U.S. marshals, who, he said, started firing tear gas unnecessarily. But the mob had inflicted injuries on eight marshals before the first tear-gas gun was fired. The Kennedy Administration blamed Barnett. claiming that he failed to keep his promise to help maintain order. The state cops made no effort to disperse the gathering mob. and soon after the serious violence started they withdrew from the campus. Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson later explained lamely that the police had to withdraw when the marshals started shooting tear-gas guns because the World War I-type police gas masks could not filter out tear gas.

Barnett was undoubtedly to blame. both for failing to help preserve order, and for bringing on the crisis in the first place. So was the Ole Miss faculty, whose members timidly failed to make any serious effort to quiet down the students. And so was the Kennedy Administration. President Kennedy could have learned one lesson from Eisenhower’s performance in the Little Rock crisis: if forced to intervene, then intervene with sufficient force. That is what Ike did, and there was no death toll in Little Rock, nor any serious casualties. From the time of Meredith’s first attempt to register under federal court orders, he was a sort of U.S. Government ward, accompanied by federal officials and transported in federal planes and cars. But not until hours after the attackers besieged the marshals in the Lyceum did Kennedy commit enough force to do the job. Even after Barnett personally blocked Meredith twice, the Administration tried a third time with the same demonstratedly inadequate two-man escort. Each successive failure made Barnett more of a hero to segregationists. And when the President finally committed a force of 500-odd marshals, which in turn proved to be inadequate, his timing was terrible: by following Barnett’s advice to put Meredith on the campus on Sunday, before the TV speech, he enraged Mississippians, who looked upon the move as a kind of federal treachery.

Signs of Thaw. But despite all the mistakes, all the knavery, the hate and violence. Meredith was enrolled at Ole Miss. Justice was done. And soon afterward a sort of semi-normalcy began gradually returning to the campus and the town. At midweek the Pentagon began withdrawing troop units. Army Secretary Cyrus R. Vance issued an order sending home 8,000 of the 11,000 Mississippi National Guardsmen who had so recently been called into federal service. Voices of common sense and moderation began speaking up in Mississippi. The Ole Miss student body had been sobered to the extent that it put up surprisingly little protest when the Defense Department, to forestall further violence, ordered the weekend homecoming game (Ole Miss v. Houston) shifted from Oxford to the stadium in Jackson, 170 miles away.

As the climate of violence receded. Meredith’s campus guard shrank to three or even two marshals, without helmets or visible weapons, hovering discreetly in the background. Meredith even saw direct signs of thaw. As he climbed the steps of a classroom building on his third day of classes, a student seated on the steps said hello to him (the student later got punched in the face for his courtesy). In the cafeteria next day, a student from his home town of Kosciusko came over to his table and chatted with him briefly. And in a political science class, a student asked the instructor to tell Meredith that he was welcome to use the student’s notes to catch up with the work he had missed because of his late registration.

But such signs may have been perilously deceptive. And it will be a long time before Meredith can safely walk around the campus with no escort at all.