James Meredith

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As the first black to attend the University of Mississippi, James H. Meredith (born 1933) scored one of the earliest important victories against segregation in Mississippi.

Fiercely independent and keenly intelligent, James Meredith was the great iconoclast of the civil rights movement. As the first black to attend the University of Mississippi, Meredith scored one of the earliest important victories against segregation in Mississippi. At the same time, he remained largely aloof from the established civil rights organizations. Medgar Evers and the NAACP helped Meredith win his legal battle to integrate Ole Miss, but as Meredith proudly noted, "Nobody hand picked me. I made the decision myself. I paid my own tuition."

Born on a small farm near Kosciusko, Mississippi, on June 25, 1933, Meredith was the seventh of Cap Meredith's 13 children, and the first of seven by Cap's second wife, Roxie. Meredith, baptized simply as "J.H.," inherited his independent streak from his father. The family was poor and their home lacked running water, but they were self-sufficient. "I was taught," Meredith said later, "to believe the most dishonorable thing a Meredith could do was to work in a white woman's kitchen and take care of a white man's child." Seeking a better education than he could attain in Mississippi, Meredith moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he lived with an aunt, and graduated from high school in 1951. Lacking money for college, he joined the U.S. Air Force, under the name "James Howard Meredith." To the young Mississippian, attacking Jim Crow meant self-improvement, and that required money and education. In the service, Meredith saved much of his modest pay and routinely took classes at nearby schools, including the University of Kansas, Washburn University in Topeka, New Mexico Western College, and even the University of Maryland's Japan campus. After a nine-year hitch in the Air Force, Meredith returned to Mississippi and entered the all-black Jackson State University. His decision to seek admission at the all-white University of Mississippi reflected his strategy to attack a system of segregation that limited the economic opportunities open to blacks. "Before I could engage in business at the level I desired," he believed, "the system would have to be broken." Convinced that the new president, John F. Kennedy, would support his efforts, Meredith, on January 21, 1961, the day after Kennedy's inauguration, wrote Ole Miss for an application form.

Meredith's letter touched off an 18-month legal battle. Mississippi's white authorities had already demonstrated that they would try virtually anything to avoid integrating the state's colleges and universities. A black teacher, Clennon King had been committed to a mental institution in 1958 for attempting to attend summer school at Oxford. Another black man, Clyde Kennard, was sent to prison on trumped-up charges after attempting to enroll at the University of Southern Mississippi. In Meredith's case, state officials resorted to a variety of legal ploys, but in June 1962, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered Meredith admitted to the university. Nevertheless, Mississippi's racist governor, Ross Barnett, personally intervened to bar Meredith physically from entering Ole Miss. In a televised address, Barnett incited white resistance and warned: "There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration." Finally, late in September, Kennedy ordered federal troops and Justice Department officials to enforce the court order admitting Meredith to school. On Sunday afternoon, September 30, 1962, Meredith arrived on campus accompanied by a federal entourage that included over 120 U.S. marshals and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. The result was a night-long riot that resulted in two deaths, 175 injuries, and 212 arrests. Despite one of the most violent challenges to federal authority since the Civil War, Meredith was quietly registered the next day. Enduring taunts and abuse from many of his fellow students, in August 1963 Meredith became the first black graduate of the University of Mississippi.

In 1964-65, Meredith studied economics at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. The following year, he proposed to walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to encourage blacks to register to vote. The walk attracted widespread attention after a white supremacist wounded Meredith with a shotgun blast, and black leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael, flocked to Mississippi to help him complete his trek. Meredith later moved to New York City where he bought an apartment house and experienced a variety of financial and legal problems, among them a conviction for harassing his tenants. Meredith briefly considered running for Congress against Harlem's incumbent Adam Clayton Powell. In 1968, Meredith received a law degree from Columbia University, but by the early 1970s, he had returned to Mississippi, where he continued to pursue a variety of business, political, and community activities. In 1972, Meredith ran unsuccessfully as a Republican against Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland. He served as a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati in 1984-85, and was defeated in 1986 in a race for a position on the Cincinnati school board. In recent years, Meredith has been associated with conservative causes and candidates, but his historical significance derives from his integration of Ole Miss, which heralded the changes that would eventually come to the most racially divided state in the nation.

Further Reading

Flynn, James J., Negroes of Achievement in Modern America, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1970, pp. 159-167.

Lord, Walter, The Past That Would Not Die, Harper & Row, 1965.

Metcalf, George R., Black Profiles, McGraw-Hill, 1968, pp. 219-254.

civil rights activist; lecturer; writer

Personal Information

Born James Howard Meredith, June 25, 1933, in Kosciusko, MS; son of Moses "Cap" (a farmer) and Roxie (Smith) Meredith; married Mary June Wiggins (deceased), 1956-79; children: John Howard, Joseph Howard, James Henry; married Judy Alsobrooks (television news reporter), 1981; children: Kip, Jessica Howard.
Education: Attended Jackson (Mississippi) State College, 1960-62; University of Mississippi, B.A., 1963; University of Ibadan, Nigeria, certificate, 1964-65; Columbia University, J.D., 1968.
Politics: Conservative Republican.
Religion: Christian.

Career

United States Air Force, reaching the rank of sergeant, 1951-60; first black to enroll in University of Mississippi, 1962; civil rights activist, 1963-c.1968; Meredith Enterprises, independent businessman, 1968--; ran unsuccessfully for several political offices, 1972-79; University of Cincinnatti (Ohio), visiting professor of Afro-American Studies, 1984-85; domestic policy advisor to Senator Jesse Helms (Republican, North Carolina), 1989-91; Meredith Publishing, owner and operator, 1991--.

Life's Work

When James Meredith became the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi in 1962, he became one of the civil rights movement's most recognizable figures. His enrollment at the previously all-white school sparked riots and required the combined forces of the National Guard and the U.S. Army to enforce a court order. Since that time, Meredith frequently has shocked civil rights backers with his unusual and controversial views on race and politics. These views have led Meredith to forge some surprising alliances in later years, including well-publicized associations with conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Louisiana politician David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Along the way, Meredith repeatedly has proclaimed that he was selected by divine forces to save western civilization from its own self-destructive ways.

Meredith was born on June 25, 1933, in rural Kosciusko, Mississippi, the seventh of 13 children. His father, Moses "Cap" Meredith, owned an 80-acre farm, on which he grew cotton, corn, and a variety of other food crops. Cap Meredith was a strong-willed, fiercely independent patriarch, who refused to accept the second-class status thrust upon blacks by the white south. His way of combating white domination was to isolate his family from white society altogether. Cap's philosophy kept James--who went by his initials J. H.--from even entering the homes of white neighbors throughout his childhood. On a train trip home from Chicago at the age of 15, James and his brother were forced to move to a "colored car" as the train moved into southern territory. Meredith has often pointed to that event as the launching point of his personal battle against the racism that saturated every facet of southern life.

At 16, Meredith was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the public schools offered a much better education than was available in Kosciusko. He finished high school in St. Petersburg. Since there was no money for college, Meredith joined the Air Force, which was generally perceived as the least segregated of the U.S. armed services. Meredith served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1960 where he began going by the name James rather than J. H.

During his Air Force years, Meredith was able to further his education. While stationed in Kansas, he took extension courses at the University of Kansas and at Washburn University in Topeka. Between 1954 and 1960, he also enrolled in the U.S. Armed Forces Institute, which offered courses to military personnel through colleges and universities all over the country. He also spent time in Japan, where he attended the Far Eastern Division of the University of Maryland. In 1955 Meredith met Mary June Wiggins at a USO dance. They were married the following year.

In 1960 Meredith returned to Mississippi. By this time, he had concluded that it was his mission in life not only to vanquish white supremacy in Mississippi, but also to return civilization itself to its proper, more humane course. Upon their arrival in Mississippi, both James and Mary June entered all-black Jackson State College (now University). By 1961, however, Meredith believed that the time was ripe for the color line to be broken at the state's premier academic institution, the University of Mississippi, known affectionately throughout the region as "Ole Miss."

A number of factors contributed to Meredith's decision to begin his battle at that time. President John F. Kennedy had just been elected on a pro-civil rights platform, and it was widely believed that African Americans accounted for a significant share of Kennedy's slim victory margin. Meredith correctly presumed that Kennedy's administration would therefore be on his side if enrollment at Ole Miss boiled down to a power struggle between the federal and state governments. On January 31, 1961, Meredith submitted his application to the registrar at the university, along with a photograph of himself and the statement, "I am an American-Mississippi-Negro citizen." As expected, he was denied admission.

At this point, Meredith enlisted the help of Medgar Evers, Mississippi's field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Evers suggested that he contact Thurgood Marshall, director of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. With the NAACP working on Meredith's behalf, the matter became a legal battle, and the case was assigned to well-known civil rights attorney Constance Baker Motley. In May of 1961, Meredith filed a class-action suit in U.S. District Court claiming that the university's application process was discriminatory. The court ruled in favor of Ole Miss. In June of 1962, however, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision, and ordered that Meredith be admitted as a student.

Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi had other ideas. Barnett refused to accept the court's decision, and when Meredith showed up to enroll, Barnett personally and physically blocked his entrance into the university. President Kennedy was enraged and ordered that federal marshals escort Meredith into the school. Barnett still refused to yield, invoking the concept of the state's right to control the affairs of its schools. Finally, the National Guard was brought in, and Meredith was able to enter the university by sheer force. Meanwhile, the campus around him was in turmoil. Violent riots left two men dead while scores more were injured and more than 200 were arrested amidst the tear gas fumes and debris. Not until approximately 33,000 Army troops joined the National Guardsmen already on the scene was some semblance of order restored to the campus.

Despite the ultimate success of Meredith's mission to enter Ole Miss, his life there was anything but routine. Because of ongoing harassment and threats, federal marshals had to escort him to class every day. Students and professors who tried to befriend Meredith often were ostracized or tormented. He considered leaving school many times, but his supporters managed to convince him to stay. In August of 1963, Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi with a bachelor's degree in political science.

After graduating from Ole Miss, Meredith spent time in Nigeria, where he studied economics at the University of Ibadan. When he returned to the United States, Meredith settled in New York City and entered law school at Columbia University. In 1966 Meredith's autobiography, Three Years in Mississippi, was published. While at Columbia, he continued his work as a civil rights activist and organizer.

One such effort almost proved fatal. In June of 1966, Meredith organized a "March Against Fear" along Route 51 from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. The purpose of the march was to encourage black voters to overcome the fear that too often kept them away from the polls. On the second day of the march, Meredith was wounded by scores of shotgun pellets fired by a would-be assassin named James Aubrey Norvell, who had waited in ambush along the march route. Many of the pellets have remained in Meredith's body since the attack, a proof and permanent reminder of his growing belief that nonviolent means of change are futile in a violent society.

By the late 1960s, Meredith was already at odds with a lot of the civil rights movement's most visible figures. He clashed with the NAACP, for example, over whose idea his enrollment at Ole Miss had been and about its policy of nonviolence. He also angered many Harlem residents by challenging the popular Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. for his congressional seat in 1967. Powell was being censured by the House of Representatives at the time, prompting many to believe Meredith was simply a pawn in the scheme to remove another powerful black man from his position of authority.

Meredith received his law degree from Columbia in 1968. He returned to Mississippi in 1971, settling in Jackson. Over the next several years, nightclubs, investment banking, cosmetics sales, farming, and television repair were among the businesses at which he tried his hand, mostly with little success. A healthy share of his income came from appearances as a guest lecturer, for which he was in fairly regular demand. Meredith also ran, unsuccessfully, for public office at least five times during the 1970s, including a run in the 1972 Republican senate primary in Mississippi. He also started his own church, the Reunification Under God Church, which sought, among other things, to teach African Americans to grow their own food.

The 1970s brought more changes. Meredith began to feel that the true enemies of blacks in America were not white supremacists, but white liberals. He believed the liberal-sponsored social welfare programs kept African Americans from becoming self-sufficient. Not surprisingly, these views alienated him even further from the civil rights mainstream.

Meredith began looking for college teaching positions in the 1980s. After failing to catch on at Ole Miss, his top choice, Meredith was offered a year-long job as a visiting professor in Afro-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati (Ohio). Controversy quickly surrounded Meredith at Cincinnati, as it had everywhere else he had made his home. He outraged university and city officials with claims of discrimination that were not supported by fact. He also provoked a confrontation with police by refusing to produce his identification at a health club--of which he was a paying member-- so that he could then accuse both the club and the police of racism. Meredith made at least one friend in Cincinnati, however. In 1991, two years after the death of his wife, Mary June, he married a local television reporter, Judy Alsobrooks.

In 1988 Meredith wrote a letter to every member of Congress and to the governor of every state. In the letter he proclaimed that he was destined to become the most important black leader in the world. He also wrote letters to newspapers outlining his belief that liberals were to blame for most of what was wrong with the United States. One of the two politicians who responded to Meredith's letter was Jesse Helms, the conservative Republican senator from North Carolina. Helms offered Meredith a $30,000 a year position as domestic policy advisor in 1989, an act of great irony given Helms's harsh criticism of Meredith in the 1960s.

As a member of Helms's staff, Meredith's odd and infuriating statements grew in number and shrank in credibility. In 1989 he told a Washington Post reporter that 60 percent of black leaders were involved in the drug culture and 80 percent were involved in corruption of one sort or another. He also turned the rhetoric up another notch about his role as the divinely appointed leader of the black race. In 1990 Meredith issued a press release on Helms stationery charging, among other things, that many NAACP officials and other black leaders were puppets of an elite group of white liberals. He did not offer any names or any evidence.

Meredith eventually found even Jesse Helms too liberal for his tastes, and the two parted company. In 1991 Meredith managed to shock those who had become accustomed to his flights of political fancy by throwing his support to the Louisiana gubernatorial campaign of David Duke, an acknowledged former Ku Klux Klan leader. Meredith asserted that Duke's current beliefs were actually fairly close to his own, since both felt that the restoration of family values and the elimination of affirmative action and other liberal social programs were among the keys to saving the country from ruin.

Throughout his life, but especially in the later years of his life, Meredith began devoting more of his time to writing, while still making an occasional lecture appearance. He formed Meredith Publishing in 1991 as an outlet for his own works. The bulk of his writings are contained in Mississippi: A Volume of Eleven Books, which covers topics ranging from his own experiences as a young man in Mississippi to his research on his ancestors, the Choctaw Indian Nation. The company has also published some small, Meredith- authored booklets that purport to educate black families on subjects like money, education, and politics.

In 1996 Meredith launched another march. This time he called for a Black Man's March to the Library, which aimed to promote reading and the writing of standard English. He set out from a Memphis library on June 1 for a repeat walk along U.S. 51 to reach Jackson on June 25, his sixty-third birthday. Slowed by prostate cancer surgery in April, he had to be driven the last 50 miles.

Attention was called to Meredith's historic work at Ole Miss when the film Ghosts of Mississippi was released in 1977. The film was a re-enactment of the life of Medgar Evers, Meredith's close advisor in the integration of Ole Miss. In 1997, Meredith presented his papers to the University of Mississippi where they were placed in a special collection. In the fall of that year he created the Meredith Institute at Ole Miss, offering weekend classes to teach black American English. The program is closed to girls and women. The Institute also planned to open its Library School for Black Boys and Men in Jackson in January 1998 and another in February of that year in San Diego. In founding the James Meredith Institute, the civil rights leader said that the key to making black males competitive in American schools is to change "the concept of the black race." The problem, as Meredith saw it, was that, "The black race is against intellectual development. Particularly for a black male, to be an A student,...you become unacceptable."

In the fall of 1998, Meredith lead the Black Man's March for Education to the University of Mississippi. "My goal is to raise Mississippi from the bottom to the top...Presently, the average black man in Mississippi reads and writes at the third-grade level or below. My plan is to raise that level to above the fifth grade," he said. The University's provost, Gerald Walton, noted, "Today's students, of course, know Dr. Meredith only from their history books and have very little idea of the contribution he made to higher education in this state. Unfortunately, it took an individual like Dr. Meredith to pave the way for integration in higher education in Mississippi. He was extremely courageous, highly motivated and truly committed to the cause. Had it not been for his actions, it might have been several more years before this campus became integrated and offered out educational opportunities for all races."

Meredith had three children by his first wife: John Howard, Joseph Howard, and James Henry. Two years after the death of his first wife in 1989, he married Judy Alsobrooks, a television reporter in Cincinnati; their children are Kip and Jessica Howard. Although Meredith has demonstrated an interest in politics and writing, he is known primarily as the first black to graduate from the University of Mississippi.

There is no doubt that James Meredith's unusual political meanderings and occasionally overzealous self-promotion have alienated him from many influential African American leaders. His position in history nevertheless remains secure. Despite the inevitable failure of his own messianic urges and predictions, Meredith remains an important icon in the struggle for racial justice in America.

Works

Writings

• Three Years in Mississippi, Indiana University Press, 1966, pp. 23-27.
• Mississippi: A Volume of Eleven Books, Meredith Publishing, 1994.
• "Big Changes are Coming," Saturday Evening Post, August 13, 1966.

Further Reading

Books

• Flynn, James J., Negroes of Achievement in Modern America, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1970, pp. 159-167.
• Lord, Walter, The Past That Would Not Die, Harper & Row, 1965.
• Metcalf, George R., Black Profiles, McGraw-Hill, 1968, pp. 219-254.

• Ebony, December 1984, pp. 38-40.
• Esquire, December 1992, pp. 101-110.
• Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1991, p. E1.
• New York Times, July 21, 1990, p. 8.
• People Weekly, October 16, 1989, p. 40.
• Southern Sentinel (Blue Mountain, Mississippi), February 23, 1995.
• Star-Herald (Kosciusko, Mississippi), February 16, 1995, p. 1A.
• University Of Mississippi (news desk), September 1998. Available from http://www.olemiss.edu/news/newsdesk/story326.html.
• USA Today (reprint). November 24, 1997. Available from http://www.usc.edu/dept/education/CMMR/NEWS/USAToday_Nov24_97.html.
• Washington Post, November 3, 1989, p. C1.

— Robert R. Jacobson

Civil rights pioneer and activist James Howard Meredith put his life at risk by being the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi in 1962. After the state repeatedly blocked his attempts to register at the university, a legal battle waged by Meredith and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) achieved a landmark victory for integration. When violence erupted on the day that Meredith enrolled, President John F. Kennedy sent several thousand U.S. Army troops to the campus to quell bloody rioting. Armed federal marshals protected Meredith in every classroom until he graduated in 1963. In 1966 the James Meredith March against Fear united traditional and radical civil rights leaders in a voter registration march across Mississippi. Meredith was shot, but he recovered and joined MartinLuther King, Jr., and others in a month-long demonstration that marked a turning point in the civil rights struggle. In later years, Meredith, who had always maintained independence from the inheritors of the civil rights movement, became one of their sharpest critics.

Meredith was born June 25, 1933, in Kosciusko, Mississippi. He was one of ten children of Roxy Patterson Meredith and Moses Cap, a poor farmer in Kosciusko, in Attala County. As a young child, Meredith became aware of racism. He would refuse the nickels and dimes that a local white man regularly gave to black children, calling the gifts degrading. More painful was the realization he made as a young man on a trip to visit relatives in Detroit, where he saw blacks and whites sharing the same public facilities. Riding the train home from this brush with integration, when he arrived in Memphis, the conductor told him to leave the whites-only car. "I cried all the way home," Meredith later recalled, "and vowed to devote myself to changing the degrading conditions of black people." He also had other ambitions and goals. Ever since a childhood visit to a white doctor's office, he had harbored a dream of attending the University of Mississippi, the physician's alma mater.

After high school, in 1951, Meredith joined the U.S. Air Force. He rose to the rank of staff sergeant, earned credits toward a college degree, and served in the Korean War. Following his discharge in 1960, he attended all-black Jackson State College. But the courses he wanted to take were offered only at the state university. As a twenty-eight-year-old, he followed with hopefulness the speeches of John F. Kennedy, which promised greater enjoyment of opportunity for all U.S. citizens. Change was in the air, and many African Americans were heartened by the portents in Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address. On the same day that Kennedy became president, Meredith applied to the University of Mississippi.

The school turned down his application. Mississippi still practiced segregation, and that meant no African Americans could attend the all-white university. Even seven years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), southern states resisted complying with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that compulsory segregation was unconstitutional. Knowing that he had a constitutional right that the state refused to recognize, Meredith turned to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. This arm of the civil rights organization, accustomed to fighting segregation cases, extended help to him. Meredith and his attorneys fought some thirty court actions against the state.

At last, a federal court ruled that a qualified student could not be denied admission on the ground of race. Meredith had won, but the court order infuriated segregationists. Playing to popular sentiment, Governor Ross Barnett, of Mississippi, promised to stop Meredith. Barnett pressured the state legislature to give him authority over university admissions, a power usually exercised by the state college board.

As Meredith's enrollment date, September 20, 1962, approached, death threats were made against him, Barnett continued to promise to prevent his enrollment, and segregationists spread the word to be at "Ole Miss" to save it from integration. On the day Meredith arrived to register, white students massed around a Confederate flag chanting anti-integration slogans. Barnett stood blocking the door to the admissions office. A university official read a proclamation naming Barnett acting registrar, by order of the university's board of trustees, and a satisfied Barnett told Meredith that his application was denied.

The governor's action was good politics in his home state. Across the South, leaders such as Governor George Wallace, of Alabama, were prospering politically by staging similar acts of defiance. However, Barnett's refusal to let Meredith in was a serious problem for Washington, D.C. It represented a challenge to the authority of the federal courts, and in a short time, the U.S. Department of Justice entered the dispute. Attorney General Robert F.Kennedy confronted Barnett, demanding assurances that Meredith's next attempt to register would be successful and that the student would be protected. Barnett gave none. He replied that the situation was beyond his control. Where civil rights were concerned, the young attorney general was quickly learning that only federal intervention could bring the southern states under the mandate of the courts. He sent five hundred federal marshals to the University of Mississippi campus with strict orders: they were to protect Meredith, but not to shoot anyone. Only tear gas and clubs were to be used for their own defense.

On September 30, Meredith arrived at Ole Miss to try to enroll for a second time. Protected by the marshals, he finally registered, and then took refuge in his dormitory. As students and outsiders began gathering, an angry mob shouted attacks on Meredith. Whites began throwing rocks at the outnumbered marshals, who were soon besieged by thousands of new protesters streaming onto the campus. A vicious riot erupted, the armed agitators firing shots and hurling rocks, bricks, bottles, flaming gas, and acid. By late evening on the same day Meredith registered, a French journalist and an onlooker were dead. More than 160 marshals were wounded, the rest were exhausted and their tear gas was running out. Reluctantly, Kennedy dispatched five thousand Army troops to Ole Miss; their numbers were finally enough to disperse the mob and regain control of the battered campus.

Meredith attended classes under armed guard, but persevered, graduating in August 1963. By the summer of 1966, Meredith was enrolled at Columbia University Law School. But he interrupted his studies to launch a bold personal demonstration for civil rights. Meredith announced plans to march across the state of Mississippi, covering the 220 miles from Memphis to Jackson in sixteen days. The James Meredith March against Fear would show African Americans that they could safely assert their right to vote, despite years of legal obstruction, harassment, and murder. As he had at Ole Miss, Meredith ignored several death threats, proclaiming that he would survive his long march along the state's back roads.

On June 5, 1966, Meredith set out from Memphis with an ebony walking stick that had been given to him by an African chieftain. When he crossed into Mississippi the following morning he was ambushed and shot; remarkably, he survived. His assailant, an unemployed member of the Ku Klux Klan, pleaded guilty and received a five-year prison sentence (of which three years were suspended). While Meredith recovered in his hospital bed, he was visited by the leaders of major civil rights organizations. A group including Stokely Carmichael, of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and King wanted to stage a protest. Meredith wanted to go on. He continued the march joined by other civil rights workers.

The marchers completed their journey by late June against often violent opposition. It was a great symbolic victory for civil rights, but the movement itself had begun to factionalize. King and his supporters, who advocated peaceful resistance, were at odds with Carmichael's Black Power movement, which advocated violence if necessary to secure equal rights for African Americans.

Meredith returned to Columbia, completing his law degree in 1968. In the years that followed, Meredith embarked on a series of pursuits. He studied economics at a Nigerian university, established the African Development and Reunification Association, and worked as a consultant, financial planner, tree farmer, and educator.

In the 1980s, Meredith returned to the public eye, this time as a critic of integration, welfare, and affirmative action, programs that he believed did more to hurt black people than to help them. He joined the staff of conservative senator JesseHelms and later supported former Ku Klux Klan member David Duke, whose welfare views he praised, in Duke's campaign for governor of Louisiana. He also took a series of walks, reminiscent of his 1966 march, to promote his conservative vision. Meredith is the author of Three Years in Mississippi (1966).

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For other people named James Meredith, see James Meredith (disambiguation).

James Meredith
James Meredith
Born	June 25, 1933 (1933-06-25) (age 78) Kosciusko, Mississippi
Education	University of Mississippi; Columbia Law School, LL.B.
Known for	becoming the first black student at the University of Mississippi

James H. Meredith (born June 25, 1933) is an American civil rights movement figure, a writer, and a political adviser. In 1962, he was the first African American student admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi, an event that was a flashpoint in the American civil rights movement. Motivated by President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Meredith decided to exercise his constitutional rights and apply to the University of Mississippi.^[1] His goal was to put pressure on the Kennedy administration to enforce civil rights for African Americans.^[1]

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 University of Mississippi 3 Education and activism 4 Political career 5 Political viewpoint 6 Books 7 Marriage and family 8 Representation in popular culture 9 References 10 Further reading 11 External links

Early life and education

Meredith was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi of Choctaw^{[citation needed]} and Black American heritage. Thousands of Choctaw had stayed in Mississippi when most of the people left their traditional homeland for Indian Territory in the removal of the 1830s.

After attending local segregated schools and graduating from high school, Meredith enlisted in the United States Air Force. He served honorably from 1951 to 1960.

He attended Jackson State University for two years, then applied to the University of Mississippi which, under the state's legally imposed racial segregation, had traditionally accepted only white (European-American) students. In Brown v. Board of Education (1955),the US Supreme Court ruled that publicly supported schools had to be desegregated.

University of Mississippi

Meredith wrote that he wanted admission for his country, race, family, and himself. Meredith said, "Nobody handpicked me...I believed, and believe now, that I have a Divine Responsibility...^[2] I am familiar with the probable difficulties involved in such a move as I am undertaking and I am fully prepared to pursue it all the way to a degree from the University of Mississippi." He was denied twice.^[3] During this time, he was advised by Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader.

On May 31, 1961, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed suit in the U.S. District Court, alleging that the university had rejected Meredith only because of the color of his skin, as he had a highly successful record. The case went through many hearings and finally to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that Meredith had the right to be admitted to the state school.^[4] Though Meredith was legally entitled to register, the Governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, tried to block him by having the Legislature pass a law that “prohibited any person who was convicted of a state crime from admission to a state school.” The law was directed at Meredith, who had been convicted of “false voter registration.” Since passage of its 1890 constitution, the state had voter registration rules that effectively disfranchised black voters.

The US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy consulted with Governor Barnett, who agreed to have Meredith enroll in the university. After being barred from entering on September 20, on October 1, 1962, he became the first African-American student at the University of Mississippi.^[5] White students and anti-desegregation supporters protested his enrollment by rioting on the Oxford campus.

Robert Kennedy called in 500 U.S. Marshals to take control, who were supported by the 70th Army Engineer Combat Battalion from Ft Campbell, Kentucky. They created a tent camp and kitchen for the US Marshals. To bolster law enforcement, President John F. Kennedy sent in U.S. Army military police from the 503rd Military Police Battalion, and called in troops from the Mississippi Army National Guard and the U.S. Border Patrol as well.^[6] In the violent clash, two people died, including the French journalist Paul Guihard,^[4] on assignment for the London Daily Sketch. He was found dead behind the Lyceum building with a gunshot wound to the back. One hundred-sixty US Marshals, one-third of the group, were injured in the melee, and 40 soldiers and National Guardsmen were wounded.^[4][7] The US government fined Barnett $10,000 and sentenced him to jail for contempt, but the charges were later dismissed by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Meredith's entry is regarded as a pivotal moment in the history of civil rights in the United States. He graduated on August 18, 1963 with a degree in political science.^[8]

Many students harassed Meredith during his two semesters on campus but others accepted him. According to first-person accounts chronicled in Nadine Cohodas's book The Band Played Dixie (1997), students living in Meredith's dorm bounced basketballs on the floor just above his room through all hours of the night. Other students ostracized him: when Meredith walked into the cafeteria for meals, the students eating would turn their backs. If Meredith sat at a table with other students, all of whom were white, the students would immediately get up and go to another table.^{[citation needed]}

Education and activism

Meredith continued his education, focusing on political science, at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.^{[citation needed]} He returned to the United States in 1965. He attended law school through a scholarship at Columbia University and earned an LL.B (law degree) in 1968.

During this time, Meredith organized and led a civil rights march, the March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi beginning on June 6, 1966. This was his public effort to encourage blacks to register and vote after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which promised federal enforcement of rights. He hoped to help blacks overcome fear of violence at the polls. During this march he was shot by Aubrey James Norvell.^[9] Jack R. Thornell's post-shooting photograph of Meredith won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1967.^[10][11] Meredith recovered from his wound and rejoined the march before it reached Jackson. During his march, 4,000 black Mississippians registered to vote.^[12]

Political career

In 1967 while living and studying in New York, Meredith decided to run as a Republican against the incumbent Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. in a special election for the Congressional seat in Harlem, but withdrew. Powell was re-elected.^[13] Meredith said, "The Republican Party [of New York] made me an offer: full support in every way, everything." He had full access to top New York Republicans.^[14]

After returning to Mississippi to live, in 1972 Meredith ran for the US Senate against the Democratic senator James Eastland, who had been the incumbent for 29 years.^[15] Meredith conceded that he had little chance of winning unless Governor George Wallace of Alabama entered the presidential race and split the white vote.^[13]

An active Republican, Meredith served from 1989-1991 as a domestic adviser on the staff of United States Senator Jesse Helms. Faced with criticism from the civil rights community for working for the former avowed segregationist, Meredith said that he had applied to every member of the Senate and House offering his services, and only Helms' office responded. He also wanted a chance to do research at the Library of Congress.^[16]

In 2002, officials marked the 40th anniversary of Meredith's historic admission to the University of Mississippi with a year-long series of events. Of the celebration, Meredith said,

"It was an embarrassment for me to be there, and for somebody to celebrate it, oh my God. I want to go down in history, and have a bunch of things named after me, but believe me that ain't it."^[16]

He said he had achieved his main goal at the time by getting the federal government to enforce his rights as a citizen. He saw his actions as "an assault on white supremacy."^[16] That year he was far more proud that his son Joseph Meredith graduated as the top doctoral student at the university's business school.^[16]

During the anniversary year, Meredith, 69, was the special guest speaker for a seminar at Mississippi State University. Among other topics, Meredith spoke of his experiences at Ole Miss. During a question-and-answer session, a young white male asked Meredith if he had taken part in a formal rush program. Meredith replied, "Doesn't that have something to do with being in a fraternity?" The young man replied "Yes," and Meredith did not respond further. It was enough for the audience to remember that as a 29-year-old veteran, he had to be accompanied by armed military personnel to secure his safety at that time.^{[citation needed]}

Political viewpoint

Meredith has identified as an individual American citizen who demanded and received the constitutional rights held by any American, not as a participant in the U.S. civil rights movement. There have been tensions between him and representatives of the Movement. When interviewed in 2002, the 40th anniversary of his enrollment at University of Mississippi, Meredith said, "Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind."^[16][17]

In a 2002 interview with CNN, Meredith said, "I was engaged in a war. I considered myself engaged in a war from Day One. And my objective was to force the federal government—the Kennedy administration at that time—into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen."^[18]

Books

• 1966, his memoir Three Years in Mississippi, was published by the Indiana University Press.
• He also self-published several books.

Marriage and family

James Meredith in 2007

James Meredith's sculpture at University of Mississippi

Meredith was married to Mary June Wiggins Meredith, now deceased.^{[citation needed]} They had one daughter, Jessica Meredith Knight, and three sons: James, John and Joseph Howard Meredith.

In 1989, the junior James Meredith (then 20) was sentenced to one year's house arrest for his role in a 1987 car crash, in which two of his co-workers were killed and he suffered serious injuries.^[19]

In 2002, Joseph Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi as the most outstanding doctoral student in the School of Business Administration. Joseph had previously earned degrees from Harvard University and Millsaps College. James Meredith said of the occasion, "I think there's no better proof that white supremacy was wrong than not only to have my son graduate, but to graduate as the most outstanding graduate of the school...That, I think, vindicates my whole life."^[20] Joseph Meredith died in 2008 at age 39 of complications from lupus. At the time of his death, he was an assistant professor of finance at Texas A&M International University.^[21] He was survived by his wife and a daughter, Jasmine Victoria.^[21]

James Meredith currently lives in Jackson, Mississippi with his second wife, Judy Alsobrook Meredith.^{[citation needed]}

Representation in popular culture

• Bob Dylan sang about Ole Miss.
• J. B. Lenoir sings about the 1968 shooting in the song "Shot on James Meredith".
• The film Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) portrayed the life of Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist who advised Meredith during the integration of Ole Miss.
• James Meredith is a role in Peter Maxwell Davies' 2011 opera Kommilitonen!.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Bryant 2006, 60.
2. ^ Schlesinger 2002, 317.
3. ^ "James Meredith". Spartacus Educational. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmeredith.htm. Retrieved 2007-10-02. 
4. ^ ^{a b c} "The States: Though the Heavens Fall". TIME. 1962-10-12. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829233-5,00.html. Retrieved 2007-10-03. 
5. ^ "1962: Mississippi race riots over first black student". BBC News - On this day. 1962-10-01. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/1/newsid_2538000/2538169.stm. Retrieved 2007-10-02. 
6. ^ Schlesinger 2002, 317-320.
7. ^ Farber, David and Beth Bailey. The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s. 
8. ^ Leslie M. Alexander; Walter C. Rucker (2010). Encyclopedia of African American History, Volume 1. ABC-CLIO. p. 890. 
9. ^ "6 June 1966: Black civil rights activist shot". BBC News - On this day. 1966-06-06. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/6/newsid_3009000/3009967.stm. Retrieved 2007-10-02. 
10. ^ "The Pulitzer Prize Winners - 1967". The Pulitzer Board. http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/1967. Retrieved 2008-09-29. 
11. ^ "James Meredith", Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, 1966-1968, photos, Seattle Times, 2008
12. ^ "Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Movement". pbs.org. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/profiles/56_ms.html. Retrieved 2011-10-18. 
13. ^ ^{a b} ""Meredith Makes Bid For U.S. Senate in Mississippi"". Jet. March 2, 1972. http://books.google.com/books?id=ckQDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28&dq=Meredith+Makes+Bid+For+U.S.+Senate+in+Mississippi&source=bl&ots=Ocp8Wt_2HU&sig=uwKVl_tnFMp1qNqNNBnqeFPFfDg&hl=en&ei=ypmdTu6cGIejiAKzus32CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Meredith%20Makes%20Bid%20For%20U.S.%20Senate%20in%20Mississippi&f=false. 
14. ^ Haygood, Wil (2006). The King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.. HarperCollins. p. 363. 
15. ^ Nash, Jere; Andy Taggart and John Grisham (2009). Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2008. University Press of Mississippi. p. 51. 
16. ^ ^{a b c d e} Shelia Hardwell Byrd (21 September 2002). "Meredith ready to move on". Associated Press, at Athens Banner-Herald (OnlineAthens). http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/092102/new_20020921041.shtml. Retrieved 2007-10-02. 
17. ^ Christine Gibson (June 6, 2006). "A Shooting—And the Civil Rights Movement Changes Course". American Heritage. Archived from the original on 2009-01-09. http://web.archive.org/web/20090109174610/http://americanheritage.com/articles/web/20060606-james-meredith-education-ole-miss-columbia-segregation-martin-luther-king-black-power-march.shtml. 
18. ^ "Mississippi and Meredith remember". CNN. 2002-09-29. http://edition.cnn.com/2002/US/South/09/30/meredith/index.html. Retrieved 2007-10-02. 
19. ^ "Boston Globe, August 24, 1989". http://fiji4.ccs.neu.edu/~zerg/lemurcgi/lemur.cgi?d=0&i=54622&q=star. 
20. ^ "James Meredith returns to see son take top honors at Ole Miss - noteworthy news - University of Mississippi Brief Article". Black Issues in Higher Education. 2002. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_8_19/ai_87853135. Retrieved 2007-12-01. 
21. ^ ^{a b} "Son of James Meredith dies from complications of lupus". Star Herald. http://www.starherald.net/local/local_story_044102202.html. 

Further reading

• Meredith, James (1966). Three Years in Mississippi. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.  This book is readily available in the used book market and libraries.
• Meredith, James (1995). Mississippi: A Volume of Eleven Books. Jackson, MS: Meredith Publishing. 
• Bryant, Nick (Autumn 2006). "Black Man Who Was Crazy Enough to Apply to Ole Miss". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (53): 60–71. 
• Doyle, William (2001). An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0385499698. 
• Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur (1978, 2002). Robert Kennedy and His Times. New York: First Mariner Books. ISBN 0618219285.  This book is readily available.
• Stanton, Mary (2003). Freedom Walk: Mississippi or Bust. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1578065054. 
• Hendrickson, Paul (2003). Sons of Mississippi. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0375404619.  Contains revealing interviews with Meredith conducted by the author.
• Eagles, Charles W. (2009). The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807832731. 

External links

	Mississippi portal
	University portal
	Biography portal
	African American portal

• University of Mississippi biography (Archive)
• James Meredith Collection (MUM00293) can be found at the University of Mississippi, Archives and Special Collections.
• James Meredith Small Manuscripts (MUM00594) can be found also at the University of Mississippi.
• CNN: "Mississippi and Meredith remember"
• Associated Press: "Meredith ready to move on"
• U.S. Marshals Service and the Integration of the University of Mississippi
• BBC On this day in History 1 October 1962
• Facsimiles of letters to the Justice Department and Thurgood Marshall from the Kennedy library
• James Meredith's oral history video excerpts at The National Visionary Leadership Project
• James Meredith's website

v d e African-American Civil Rights Movement Topics and events (timeline) Albany Movement · Birmingham campaign ·  · Browder v. Gayle · Brown v. Board of Education · Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church · Chicago Open Housing Movement · Civil Rights Act of 1964 · Civil Rights Act of 1968 · Dexter Avenue Baptist Church · Emmett Till · Freedom Riders · Mississippi Freedom Summer · Greensboro sit-ins · Greyhound Bus Station (Montgomery, Alabama) · Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections · Little Rock Nine · Loving v. Virginia  · March on Washington · Mississippi civil rights workers murders · Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party · Montgomery Bus Boycott · Nashville sit-ins · Poor People's Campaign · Selma Voting Rights Movement · 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing · Twenty-fourth Amendment · Voting Rights Act of 1965 Activists Ralph Abernathy · Victoria Gray Adams · Ella Baker · James Bevel · Claude Black · Unita Blackwell · Julian Bond · Joseph E. Boone · William Holmes Borders · Margaret Davis Bowen · Stokely Carmichael · J. L. Chestnut · Shirley Chisholm · Septima Clark · Dorothy Cotton · Claudette Colvin · Vernon Dahmer · Annie Devine · Medgar Evers · Chuck Fager · James Farmer · James Forman · Marie Foster · Dick Gregory · Prathia Hall · Fannie Lou Hamer · Dorothy Height · Lola Hendricks · Aaron Henry · Myles Horton · T. R. M. Howard · Jesse Jackson · Jimmie Lee Jackson · T. J. Jemison · Judge Frank Johnson · Matthew Jones · Clyde Kennard · A. D. King · Coretta Scott King · Martin Luther King, Jr. · Bernard Lafayette · James Lawson · Bernard Lee · John Lewis · Viola Liuzzo · Z. Alexander Looby · Joseph Lowery · Clara Luper · Malcolm X · Thurgood Marshall · Ralph McGill · James Meredith · Amzie Moore · Irene Morgan  · Bob Moses · Bill Moyer · Diane Nash · E. D. Nixon · James Orange · James Peck · Rosa Parks · Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. · Al Raby · A. Philip Randolph · Cordell Reagon · Amelia Boynton Robinson · Bayard Rustin · Charles Sherrod · Fred Shuttlesworth · Modjeska Monteith Simkins · Kelly Miller Smith · Charles Kenzie Steele · C. T. Vivian · Wyatt Tee Walker · Roy Wilkins · Hosea Williams · John Minor Wisdom · Andrew Young · Whitney Young Activist groups Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) · Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) · Highlander Folk School · Leadership Conference on Civil Rights · Montgomery Improvement Association · National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) · NAACP Youth Council · Northern Student Movement · National Council of Negro Women · National Urban League · Operation Breadbasket · Regional Council of Negro Leadership · Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) · Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) · Women's Political Council Historians Taylor Branch · Clayborne Carson · Michael Eric Dyson · Chuck Fager · Adam Fairclough · David Garrow · David Halberstam · Diane McWhorter

Persondata
Name	Meredith, James
Alternative names	Meredith, James H.
Short description	An American civil rights movement figure. First African-American student at the University of Mississippi
Date of birth	1933-06-25
Place of birth	Kosciusko, Mississippi
Date of death
Place of death

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