Battle of Ole Miss 75Barnett that he would leak their incriminating taped telephone conversa-
tions. The governor, who publicly urged resistance to the federal govern-
ment, was privately negotiating the state’s surrender to it. Realizing the jig
was up, Barnett would let Meredith register on Sunday, 30 September, when
the campus would be largely deserted. Barnett would not oppose Meredith’s
registration if he could ‘just raise cain’ about it to protect his reputation. He
could then claim that the Kennedys hoodwinked him and that he had not
retreated a single inch on segregation.
Once Meredith was escorted safely to a heavily guarded dorm room, the
oak-lined campus became a battleground. For fourteen hours, a frenzied
mob of 3,000 roughnecks and Ole Miss students charged federal marshals
defending the Lyceum administration building with rocks, Coke bottles, lead
pipes, eggs, and smoke bombs. ‘Give us the nigger!’ the mob screamed. One
marshal confessed to being ‘more scared in Mississippi’ than he was at Pearl
Harbor. Having donned protective masks, the marshals fired back tear gas,
but the wind blew much of it into the faces of the klan-dominated state high-
way patrolmen, who were manning campus roadblocks. As the choking
fog spread, the patrolmen withdrew to their cars, allowing the mob to toss
Molotov cocktails, chunks of concrete, and acid from the chemistry lab at the
marshals. The marshals dug themselves a huge hole because they had no
campus maps, bullhorns for crowd control, flak jackets, or first-aid equip-
ment. Before long, the mob fired shotguns, burned vehicles, and drove a
bulldozer at the marshals. Many students fled, but some fraternity boys
joined the riot, enraged by rumors that a sorority girl was killed. Episcopal
priest Duncan Gray, Jr., and Ole Miss chaplain Wofford Smith entered the
battlefield to persuade some rioters to surrender their weapons, but the
indiscriminate violence lasted through the night, reminding a federal official
of the slaughter at the Alamo.
The Battle of Ole Miss was the most serious federal–state confrontation
since the Civil War. To stop the mayhem, the president federalized the
National Guard – one of whom was Ross Barnett’s son – and sent troops from
Memphis to Oxford. Several foul-ups ensued, delaying the troops until
2 a.m. All told, 31,000 army troops, US marshals, and National Guardsmen
arrived to protect one black student at a cost of $2.7 million. There were
three times more US troops in Oxford than in West Berlin. To avoid offend-
ing white Mississippi sensibilities, Robert Kennedy agreed to segregate hun-
dreds of black soldiers, sending them to the back of the occupation force,
where they washed dishes. By the time all the troops arrived, two were dead
and 375 injured, including half of the marshals. French journalist Paul
Guilhard had been forced at gunpoint to an abandoned area, where he was
executed. His telling last dispatch read: ‘The Civil War has never ended.’ The
murders were never solved, and no rioter was expelled or convicted of the