Word: merediths
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...