Eyewitnesses and Others: Readings in American History, Volume 2
Page 358-366

James Meredith Cracks Ole Miss (1962)

In 1955 I reenlisted. I always had it in mind to come back to Mississippi and study law, but I didn't think I was ready then for the responsibilities I would have to face, so I reenlisted. I was in Japan from 1957 till 1960, and there isn't any doubt that this was the settling-down point for me. I decided not only what I wanted to do, which I have known for a long time in a vague way, but how to go about doing it.

Being in Japan was an amazing experience. Negroes say, "When you're in Japan you have to look in a mirror to remember you're a Negro'" and it's true. Japan is the only place where I have not felt the "air of difference."

I was surprised that the Japanese people were so aware of the racial situation in America. For instance, I met a boy--I don't suppose he was more than 12 or 13--and he knew more about Little Rock that most American kids that age. He was amazed when I told him I was from Mississippi and that I intended to go back. This kind of reaction further convinced me that I would go back to Mississippi and try to improve these conditions. I was discharged in July, 1960, and by the end of the month I was back in Kosciusko [Mississippi].

I entered Jackson State College, a Negro school in Jackson, and quickly met other students who felt as I did--that Negroes in Mississippi did not have the rights of full citizens, including the right to the best education the state offered. Someone had to seek admission to the University of Mississippi, and I decided to do it. But there were many of us involved. Although the lawsuit was mine, the others were with me, and I sought their advice on every move I made.

As soon as I filed application for admission, I contacted Medgar Evers, Mississippi field secretary for the N.A.A.C.P. [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], and through him I asked for N.A.A.C.P. legal aid. Mrs. Constance Motley, associate counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, came to my assistance. The N.A.A.C.P. was prompt and efficient, and that was of prime importance. There was a great morale factor here, and every time we called them, they were there.

The court fight was long, and there were times when I wondered if it would be successful. I kept winning in court, but I didn't get any nearer the university. Finally, after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had said I should be registered, I felt the responsibility was the Federal Government's; it was out of my hands to do anything.

People have asked me if I wasn't terribly afraid the night we went to Oxford. No, my apprehensions came a long time before that. The hardest thing in human nature is to decide to act. I was doing all right in the Air Force. I got married in 1956, and my wife was able to work as a civil servant on the same bases where I was stationed. I had to give this up, this established way of things, this status, and try something new and unknown. That's where the big decision was--not here, last month, but there, a couple of years ago. Once I made that decision, things just had to happen the way they happened.

I think maybe a quote from Theodore Roosevelt that I read somewhere was more important than anything else in helping me make this decision. I think I read it around 1952, and I clipped it out, and everywhere I've gone since then--every place I've lived or everywhere I've worked--I have put that saying in front of me. I guess I must have read it two or three thousand times by now. It says, "It is not the critic who counts.... The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place will never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." At different times different parts of that quotation have been important to me, but when I made the decision to return to Mississippi and later to enroll at the university, the part I kept seeing was the part about "cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat." I didn't want to be one of those.

As far as fear of death or personal injury goes--and I consider this most important for everybody to understand--I put death or the fear of getting hurt in the same category with legal objections to my entering the university, or moral objections, or objections on grounds of custom. They are all on the same level. They are all just way to keep me out of the university, and no one is any more important that any other. It wouldn't matter if I stumbled and fell and couldn't go to classes or whether I cut my finger and couldn't write for a month or whether I was shot and killed--they're all just things in my way. I might do quite a bit to put a stop to the act of being killed. I have done this several times already--I've taken the advice of the Federal marshals on several occasions, for instance. But this was because, if something happened to me, it would have put everything back as far as the Negroes in Mississippi are concerned. If I have lost an hour's sleep in recent weeks, it has been over some philosophical point, or through apprehension of not succeeding in entering the university, and of discouraging others from trying if I failed, but not over what might happen to me personally.

I was sure that if I were harmed or killed, somebody would take my place one day. I would hate to think another Negro would have to go through that ordeal, but I would hate worse to think there wouldn't be another who would do it.

I had an older brother who was scary as a boy. Back home he wouldn't go certain places after dark or walk here or there. I always walked wherever I wanted. I walked four miles to Scout meetings at night, and I always went through all the hollows [valleys] and the places where you were supposed to be afraid to go. I must admit my hair has stood up on my head at times, but I never ran. They used to say, "If you see a 'hant' [ghost] put your hand on it." Most of the time you find it isn't there. I think it's an utter waste of time to worry about dying. It's living that matters--doing something to justify being here on God's green earth. I do what I do because I must. I've never felt I had a choice. There is some urge that I can't explain easily--I guess that's as close as I can come to defining it.

There is something else here, too, and it's hard to say right. People can misunderstand it. But it's this--generally at home I was always thought to be pretty smart. I wasn't particularly proud of it, it was just almost a fact of life. There was an expectation or a more or less acknowledged fact that I was one of the sharpest in the group. I was a champion in my group in Mississippi, but then, when I went to Florida to change high schools, I wasn't a champion at all. I had to fight to keep up. I hadn't been prepared. Since then, one of the biggest things in my life is that I have always felt I was never able to develop my talents. I have felt many times that, given the opportunity, I could develop into practically anything. Many times I have been angry at the world for not giving me an opportunity to develop. I am sure this has been a strong motivating force with me, and I'm sure it is with many Negroes. But that's not good enough. We have to see ourselves in the whole society. If America isn't for everybody, it isn't America.

Through all that has happened I have tried to remain detached and objective. I have had all sorts of reactions to things that have happened, but mostly they have been personal reactions and realistic reactions, both at the same time. When I was in the middle of the force of marshals being gathered to take me to Oxford I thought, personally, how utterly ridiculous this was, what a terrible waste of time and money and energy, to iron out some rough spots in our civilization. But realistically I knew that these changes were necessary. I knew change was a threat to people and that they would fight it and that this was the only way it could be accomplished.

I have tried to be detached and realistic. When we were turned away the first time I tried to register at the university, and especially the second time, at the State Capitol in Jackson, I saw the mobs and heard them jeering, "Go home, nigger" and that stuff, but I never recognized them as individuals at all, even those who showed the greatest contempt for me. I felt they were not personally attacking me but that they were protesting a change and this was something they felt they must do. I thought it was impersonal. Some of them were crying, and their crying indicated to me even more the pain of change and the fear of things they did not know. I feel the people were keyed up by he actions of their leaders. With Gov. Ross Barnett taking the position he did, the people were bound to act that way, and it didn't really have anything to do with me personally. That's the way I saw it.

I might add that I thought the governor put on a pretty good performance. The first time, when he turned us away at the university, he reminded me of Charlton Heston, I believe it was, in a movie about Andrew Jackson. Very dramatic.

I don't think I have had a real low point in recent weeks. It always seemed to me it was the Government's job to carry out the court order and it would be done. The most annoying time was when there was so much talk about a possible deal between the Federal Government and Governor Barnett. But when the Federal officers told me we were going that Sunday, just a few minutes before we took off to Oxford, the annoyance disappeared.

When we landed in Oxford it was almost dark. We got in a car and I remember seeing a truckload of marshals in front of us and one behind. I went straight to the university and was taken to my rooms--an apartment, I guess you would call it. Since they knew some Government men would be staying with me, I had two bedrooms and a living room and a bathroom. The first thing I did was make my bed. when the trouble started, I couldn't see or hear very much of it. Most of it was at the other end of the campus, and besides I didn't look out the window. I think I read a newspaper and went to bed around 10 o'clock. I was awakened several times in the night by and shooting outside, but it wasn't near me, and I had no way of knowing what was going on. Some of the students in my dormitory banged their doors for a while and threw some bottles in the halls, but I slept pretty well all night.

I woke up about six-thirty in the morning and looked out and saw the troops. There was a slight smell of tear gas in my room, but I still didn't know what had gone on during the night, and I didn't find out until some marshals came and told me how many people were hurt and killed. I had gotten to know these marshals pretty well in recent weeks, and I was so sorry about this. Some supposedly responsible newspaper asked me if I thought attending the university was worth all this death and destruction. That really annoyed me. Of course I was sorry! I didn't want that sort of thing. I believe it could have been prevented by responsible political leaders. I understand the President and the attorney general were up most of the night. They had all the intelligence at their disposal, and I believe they handled it to the best of their knowledge and ability. I think it would have been much worse if we had waited any longer. Social change is a painful thing, but it depends on the people at the top. Here the were totally opposed--the state against the Federal Government. There was bound to be trouble, and there was trouble.

Monday morning at eight o'clock I registered, and at nine I went to a class in Colonial American History. I was a few minutes late, and I took a seat at the back of the room. The professor was lecturing on the background of England, conditions there at the time of the colonization of America, and he paid no special attention when I entered. I think there were about a dozen students in the class. One said hello to me, and the others were silent. I remember a girl--the only girl there, I think--and she was crying, but it might have been from the tear gas in the room. I was crying from it myself.

I had three classes scheduled that day. I went to two, and the third didn't meet because there was too much gas in the room. No marshals were in the classrooms with me, nor were they all week.

I have received hundreds of telegrams and more than 1,000 letters, most of them expressions of support. One guy sent me a piece of singed [scorched] rope, and another sent a poem, I guess you'd have to call it:

Roses are red, violets are blue,
I've killed one nigger and might as well
make two.

But most of the letters and telegrams have supported me, and some of them have been really touching--letters from 10- and 11-year-olds who think I'm right and offer me their help and that sort of thing.

As far as my relations with the students go, I make it a practice to be courteous. I don't force myself on them, but that's not my nature anyway. Many of them-most, I'd say--have been courteous, and the faculty members certainly have been. When I hear the jeers and the catcalls--"We'll get you, nigger" and all that--I don't consider it personal. I get the idea people are just having a little fun. I think it's tragic that they have to have this kind of fun about me, but many of them are children of the men who lead Mississippi today, and I wouldn't expect them to act any other way. They have to act the way they do. I think I understand human nature enough to understand that.

It hasn't been all bad. Many students have spoken to me very pleasantly. They have stopped banging the doors and throwing bottles into my dormitory now.

One day a fellow from my home town sat down at my table in the cafeteria. "If you're here to get and education, I'm for you." That seemed fair enough to me.