Jim Meredith, Ole Miss, and Now

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Note by Hunterbear:

This is a post of personal Mississippi recollection and assessment that I
made about a year ago.  Today, on Juan Williams' NPR radio program --
Morning Edition -- I commented on the fact that Jim Meredith is a
casualty -- a psychological casualty -- of the Movement and one who has
"clearly gone over the edge." [This is under my former name of John R
Salter, Jr]  Karl Fleming, in those days the key Newsweek reporter in the
Southern Movement struggle and a good friend, and I have been visiting
recently and a number of times about those days.  At his request -- I sent
him a copy not long ago of Governor Barnett's highly incendiary speech --
given at Jackson on the very eve of the segregationist insurrection at Ole
Miss.

This is the 40th anniversary of the desegregation of Ole Miss -- first break
of the seg barrier in any public educational institution in Mississippi.  It
was extraordinarily dramatic, marked by massive White rioting, deaths, and
the destruction of part of the university.  In the end, the Kennedys had to
send 40,000 Federal troops and Federalized National Guardsmen into the
situation.  Meredith stood up very well at that point -- but later went very
much over the edge.  Read on for that.

Here are my comments of a year ago -- and my current assessment.  This is
posted on our large website.

Hunter [Hunterbear] [formerly John Salter, Jr]


ANOTHER KIND OF MISSISSIPPI TRAGEDY:   JIM MEREDITH AND HISTORY    [HUNTER
GRAY   11/25/01]

The first racial desegregation in any public educational institution in
Mississippi occurred at the end of  September, 1962, when James Meredith,
Black, from Attala County, sought and finally -- after
months and months of high drama climaxing in a bloody racist upheaval --
entered the University of Mississippi [Ole Miss] at Oxford.  Among other
things, 40,000 Federal troops were required at the University and in the
immediate region.

This was a major epochal event in American history.

Got this yesterday from Easy.  Here are his questions -- and, following
that, my answers.  [I've expanded them for this posting.] Others may have
seen the
C-Span interview or picked this up at other points -- or are just simply
interested.

We were in Mississippi long before, during, and long after the
Meredith crisis.  We knew Jim Meredith to some extent in those days.
Hunterbear



----- Original Message -----
From: "Easy" <Easyabcd@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2001 10:56 AM
Subject: (off-line) James Meredith


> Hi Hunter,
>
> Thanks to CSPAN I was able to listen to James
> Meredith speak - in a QA session about a recent
> book about the Mississippi National Guard units
> actions during the Oxford riot. He was one of the
> few, very few non-white people in the audience.
>
> Meredith indicated that [Governor] Ross Barnett's actions
> including his speech at the football game were
> intended to protect blacks by focusing the white
> reaction towards Kennedy and the US Government. In
> your book 'Jackson, Mississippi' I don't get the
> sense that Barnett was trying to be helpful. Your
> thoughts and comments on this are most welcome.
>
> Meredith also said that his ancestry includes
> Choctaw and that his father would have been
> the next 'leader' if the Choctaws would not have
> been disbanded (in the 1830s?).  Meredith outlined
> that it was his father that was the primary
> influence on him taking on Ole Miss and that his
> father played a major role in the strategy making
> of when and what to do.
> I'd like to hear your comments on this and James
> Meredith in general.
>
>
> Take care, Easy
>
> Spokane
> Easyabcd@xxxxxxxxx
> http://www.lsw.org/nx
>
>
=====================================================================
>From Hunter Gray [Hunterbear]

First, Jim Meredith, a man of great courage, flipped out -- and badly --
many years ago.

We knew him 'way back.  At the annual state meeting of NAACP branches at
Jackson, in early November, 1962, Medgar Evers [Mississippi NAACP Field
Secretary -- martyred in June, '63]  made a special point of seating Jim and
his wife with Eldri and me at the dinner.  Not long after that, we were at a
small party at
Medgar's home and the Merediths were among the guests. Jim Meredith,
who was going through much, was basically OK in those days

 My  friend,  Jim Silver, embattled history prof at Ole Miss. who soon
thereafter wrote the
classic work, Mississippi: The Closed Society, befriended Meredith and
helped tremendously and  very openly to give him the social backing he
needed in
the very difficult Ole Miss situation.  Although there were some quietly
friendly faculty and students at the University, the general atmosphere for
Meredith was hateful and dangerous,

After his Ole Miss graduation [Summer, '63], Meredith began to, initially
very very slowly, "get funny."  It was only evident at that point to
relative insiders. He wrote a book, Three Years in Mississippi, which was
well received.

 He started his own individual and much publicized one-
man Mississippi civil rights march in June '66 out of Memphis -- which was
OK but a kind of dangerous grandstanding -- and, when shot and injured by a
racist ambusher, the march was  quite rightly continued by  others.

Then,   gradually, he began unraveling and drifting into very strange
waters.  In 1989, he  became Jesse Helms' Black pr man in North Carolina for
the 1990 US Senate election -- in which Helms, an obvious racist -- was
opposed unsuccessfully by the very capable mayor of Charlotte, Harvey Gantt,
who had in January 1963, been the first Black student  admitted to Clemson
University in South Carolina. During all of this, Meredith was extremely
weird and bizarre in his statements.

Several years later, he emerged as  Klansman David Duke's Black
pr man in Louisiana in an election in that state.

After that, I pretty well lost track of him.  Mrs
Doris Allison was the long-time president of  the Jackson NAACP.  With
Medgar and me [NAACP Youth Council Advisor], she  was the other co-signer of
our  famous May 12, 1963 letter to the various components of the Jackson and
Mississippi power structure -- throwing down the gauntlet and launching our
massive non-violent demonstrations which shook Jackson, all of Mississippi,
and far beyond to their very roots.  Mrs Allison talks with me every week or
two.
Now well into her 80s, she is quite
sharp and keeps me posted on all Magnolia news.
She hasn't mentioned Jim Meredith for years.

We were, of course, in Jackson and Mississippi during the whole sweep.
Governor Ross Barnett's actions and his demagogically climactic stadium
speech at the football game at Jackson at the end of September, 1962, were
deliberately designed to
foment racist mob violence. He and others had been doing that for months and
a number of Blacks had been killed across the state in the rapidly rising
atmosphere of racist-incited hatred.  Eldri and I listened to Barnett's
speech at the stadium on the radio and  I have a copy of that
extraordinarily negative oratory.

It was followed the next day by thousands of heavily armed white
Mississippians milling around downtown Jackson in a huge sea of Confederate
flags -- many of the armed people, six and eight abreast, surrounding the
Governor's Mansion [which is just off the
main downtown street, Capitol Street] in order to "protect"  the Governor
from the US marshals who were rumored to be coming to arrest him on contempt
charges for multiple violations of  US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and US
Supreme Court orders. [The US marshals never came.]  Eldri and I and Baby
Maria were
downtown, saw the whole hideously fascinating spectacle. Hundreds of kids
were pasting racist bumper stickers on vehicles and, when one tried to do it
on ours and I drove past him, several screamed curses at us. White Citizens
Council leaders were haranguing the
huge crowd with bull-horns from the Plaza Building, right across from the
Gov's Mansion.  Barnett, like virtually all Mississippi public officials at
that time, was a White Council
member.

That night, all hell broke loose at the University -- up at Oxford.  It
required more troops than George Washington had ever commanded to quell the
bloody racist riot that also destroyed a part of Ole Miss.  The troops --
40,000 or so -- were both Federalized Mississippi National Guard units plus
a vast number of Regular Army GIs.

Meredith doesn't look especially Indian.  Almost all Southern Blacks have
some Indian ancestry.  With the exception of the Eastern Cherokee, located
mostly 'way up in the NC mountain country, almost all Southern Indians have
some African ancestry.  Medgar was a not uncommon mix: African, Choctaw,
Scotch-Irish in about equal proportions [more or less.]  Maria's oldest,
Thomas [19], who lives here with all of us of course, is one-half
Mississippi Choctaw [his father is from Neshoba and Leake counties, the Red
Water area.]  Thomas obviously has some African ancestry.

As to Meredith's father etc:  First, the Mississippi Band of Choctaws is and
always has been very much intact: BIA, IHS,  reservation [just outside
of Philadelphia.]  They handily survived various efforts to do away with
them as a tribe. Secondly, there is no way whatsoever that Meredith's
father could have become a Choctaw chief.  Even with some Indian ancestry,
he was not an Indian -- and another family has had the Choctaw chiefdom
sewed up down there for a hell of long time!

The prime strategists regarding Meredith's admission to the University of
Mississippi were Medgar Evers at the Mississippi level and NAACP Attorney
Constance Baker Motley from New York City for the legal end of it.
[Meredith's father may certainly have encouraged Jim's efforts to enter Ole
Miss and certainly supported them,]

Anyway,  I saw and listened to Medgar Evers many, many times talking
strategy on the phone in his Lynch Street office about all of this. And I
was also present many times when Medgar talked -- often for an hour or more
at a time --  with Meredith after Jim was finally in the University and
attending classes and needed all the support he could get.

Jim Meredith is a human tragedy.  He went through an incredibly challenging
crucible -- stood up extraordinarily well.   And then, over time,  he began
to crumble. The pieces are now widely scattered.

Not all Movement casualties have come from bullets and clubs and dynamite
and rigged auto wrecks.

As Ever - Hunter [Hunterbear]

Hunter Gray  [Hunterbear]
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'






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