The Ole Miss Riot Over James Meredith
What Happened
On the night of September 30, 1962, a white mob rioted at the University of Mississippi in Oxford as James Meredith, escorted by U.S. marshals, arrived to register as the school's first Black student. The crowd — stoked by Governor Ross Barnett's defiance and inflamed by the sight of federal authority in Oxford — fired on the marshals, and before the night ended two civilians were dead: Paul Guihard, a French journalist, and Ray Gunter, a jukebox repairman. More than a hundred and sixty marshals were injured before President Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and sent in the Army. The next morning, October 1, 1962, Meredith registered and enrolled — the University of Mississippi was integrated at the point of federal bayonets.
Why It Matters Today
The Ole Miss riot was the last full convulsion of segregation's doctrine of massive resistance. A governor had promised defiance, a university had promised resistance, a mob had promised blood — and one Black Mississippian walked through all three to register for classes. The two deaths made that night the costliest battle of the civil rights era's campus wars, and the integration of Ole Miss marked the end of the argument about whether federal law would be obeyed in the Deep South.
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