crime he was charged with – insurrection. President Kennedy called the riot
‘the worst thing I’ve seen in forty-five years’ and blamed himself for not send-
ing the troops earlier.
Hours after the gunshots ended, an unscathed and stoic Meredith crossed
the rubble-strewn campus to register at 8.30 a.m. on 1 October. It was his
fifth attempt at registration. ‘Was it worth two lives, nigger?’ a student yelled
at him. Meredith’s refusal to drop out led a group called the Rebel Resistance
to drive ‘the coon from the curriculum.’ The Underground slashed tires,
threw cherry bombs, smeared excrement in dorm rooms, and made hate calls
to Meredith and his ‘communist’ supporters. In the mail, Meredith received
a rope and a poem: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue; I’ve killed one nigger and
might as well make it two.’ His teenaged sister was nearly killed when buck-
shot sprayed their father’s house. To shield Meredith, five hundred soldiers
and marshals – referred to as ‘Kennedy’s Koon Keepers’ – stayed with him
until he graduated with a political science degree a year later 1963. On the
last day of classes, Meredith triumphantly wore a ‘Ross is Right!’ badge
upside-down. Having survived death threats to graduate from Ole Miss,
Meredith escaped to Nigeria.
The Battle of Ole Miss cost the state dearly, and most whites hated
Kennedy for helping Meredith. Car bumper stickers appeared, reading,
‘FEDERALLY OCCUPIED MISSISSIPPI’ and ‘KENNEDY’S HUNGARY.’
Congressman John Bell Williams compared the Kennedys to Hitler and his
‘infamous Gestapo,’ and the state senate expressed its ‘complete, entire and
utter contempt for the Kennedy administration and its puppet courts.’ With
Kennedy beyond reach, a grand jury indicted federal marshal McShane for
inciting the riot. At Ole Miss, student enrollment dropped, and thirty-seven
professors resigned, including most of the chemists and all of the philo-
sophers. James Silver, a transplanted New Yorker who was president of the
Southern Historical Association, became ‘the most hated white man in
Mississippi’ for giving a speech that exposed the state for what it was – ‘a
closed society’ in which Jim Crow was king. For his impudence, Silver was
run out of the state.
Such sentiment notwithstanding, the bloodshed at Ole Miss helped turn
the tide against massive resistance, because violence repelled many white
southern clergy, educators, businessmen, labor leaders, and editors. South
Carolina governor Ernest Hollings told state legislators to accept school
desegregation: ‘We have all argued that [Brown] is not the law of the land. But
everyone must agree that it is the fact of the land. Interposition, sovereignty,
legal motions, personal defiance have all been applied – and all attempts
have failed.’ Mississippi governor-elect Paul Johnson did an ideological
about-face, vowing that ‘hate or prejudice or ignorance will not lead’ the
state while he was in charge. He backed up his promise by cutting off state76 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT