The South: The Intruder

Hotty toddy,

Gosh almighty!

Who in the hell are we?

Hey!

Film! Flam! Bim! Bam!

Ole Miss, by damn!

The Ole Miss yell spiraled through the crisp sunlit air like a football passed by Chuckin’ Charley Conerly of legendary lore. Boys, lean and brimming with youthful vigor, horseplayed around—almost as if they were unconscious of the pretty coeds who watched them. Right down to the blue and maroon freshman beanies, the scene was of the sort to make alumni hearts swell with bittersweet memories of days long gone. But beneath all the laughter, beneath all the seeming exuberance, was an ugly, constantly recurring question. “When,” the kids asked one another, “will the nigger come?”

That question passed from youth to youth as they gathered—2,000 of them—on the colonnaded campus at Oxford, Miss. Grey-uniformed state patrolmen were there; so were newsmen and television crews. Governor Ross Barnett, fresh from a long meeting with the state college board, from which he had extracted the authority to deal personally with “the nigger,” flew into Oxford, drove to the campus, and there took over as special registrar of the university. Barnett had promised the people of Mississippi—despite telephone calls from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who had warned him of the legal consequences —that he would go to jail before he would permit Negro James H. Meredith to register for classes.

The Mission. But Meredith was just as determined as his Governor. Like Barnett. he is one of ten children. Like Barnett, he is the son of a farmer. His grandfather was a slave (Barnett’s father and grandfather were both Confederate soldiers), but James Meredith served in the U.S. Air Force and came out in 1960 a staff sergeant. A slight, shy man of 29, he became, in the words of Federal Appeals Judge John Minor Wisdom, before whom he appeared in his attempts to enter the university, a “man with a mission and a nervous stomach.”

Meredith took correspondence courses as a G.I., later attended the Negro Jackson State College in Mississippi, but decided that it was “substandard.” Reared as a Methodist, he gradually evolved beliefs bordering on mysticism. “Everybody’s worrying about life,” he said. “But if I can’t live this life then I don’t have it. In my feeling, I’m already dead. I want to go to the university. This is the life I want. If I can get it then I have my life; if I don’t then I might as well not have existed. Just to live and breathe —that isn’t life to me. There’s got to be something more.”

Having been granted the right to “something more” by a series of federal court decisions, Meredith arrived on the Ole Miss campus last week in the company of police officers and federal marshals and attorneys.

“Breaking the Law.” By the time Meredith got there, the waiting students had worked themselves from gaiety into anger. A few tried to lower the U.S. flag and raise instead the banner of the old Confederacy; student leaders stopped them. As Meredith got out of his car, students booed and chanted: “Two, four, six, eight —we don’t want to integrate!” A few yelled: “Go home, nigger!” Meredith looked around, smiled thinly, furrowed his brow and followed his escorts into the Center for Continuation Studies. There, in a private session with Ross Barnett and his aides and the marshals, Meredith presented the federal court orders and his credentials.

The Governor turned him down. Asked a Justice Department aide: “Do you realize you are breaking the law?” Replied Barnett: “Are you telling me I’m in contempt, or shouldn’t the federal judge do that?” This was enough to perplex the marshals, who walked out with Meredith and drove away while students’ jeers rang in their ears.

Within hours, the Justice Department was in court again. It did not accept Governor Barnett’s dare and ask for a contempt citation against him. It asked, instead, for proceedings against the three top university officials, who had been superseded in authority by the Governor. But Federal Judge Sidney Mize, who had refused Meredith’s pleas before, once again decided for Mississippi, holding that since the university officials had been preempted of their duties, they were not in contempt.

This week the Justice Department planned to try in the appeals court to break down the barriers that Mississippi had erected against Meredith. Ross Barnett could reflect on the fact that so far he had got away with defying the law of the land.