Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  Life had begun to run more of Moore’s civil rights work on a picked-up basis, and the chief photographer on the medium-sized Southern daily was feeling restless again. With his saved stake (he’d been slipping $20 bills into a top drawer in his bedroom whenever he was able), he resigned from the Advertiser and loaded up his Austin-Healey and headed for Manhattan in June 1962—where, in that steamy summer, separated from his wife, from his own people, missing his children and feeling guilty about having left them, encountering Eastern elitism and condescension, he quickly turned miserable. He’d gone to New York with the idea of trying fashion photography and perhaps also the celebrity and corporate worlds of photography. One morning, he went down to get his car and found it smeared with raw eggs. He felt he knew why: the Alabama plates.

  The discouraged freelance got in to see Howard Chapnick, founder of the Black Star Photo Agency. He had his portfolio with him. Instantly, Chapnick saw the loneliness and unhappiness—and the giftedness. “Look,” he said, “this town’s no place for you. You belong on your own ground. The civil rights story is getting bigger and bigger. I think there’s going to be serious violence down there in the next year or two. You’ve already done some amazing stuff. I’ll put you on a retainer and make you one of our photographers, and what you’re going to do is go back home and document it all. What do you say?” The air seemed hardly dry on the offer before Moore was loading his car. He slipped the noose of his lease and of the Manhattan freelance fantasy in the middle of the night. He drove through the Lincoln Tunnel and he didn’t slow down until he was at the Chesapeake Bay, about dawn. When he crossed into Virginia, Southern soil, he got out and almost kissed the ground. He got back in the sports car and barely stopped until he was in Montgomery. In less than two months, he was going to take some pictures in Mississippi that would splash themselves across the pages of Life. One, in particular, taken with a Nikon and a 100-millimeter lens, would be published in a double-truck spread. His career was about to find its turning point. A son of the white South was on the verge of becoming utterly disloyal: shooting photographs from the point of view of the oppressors and their evil. One of Moore’s gifts over the next several years would be knowing where to stand: right behind the poisoned power source of it all. In his glands, the returning native must have known he’d soon encounter implied death threats such as this: “Know what, boy? You’re worse than a nigger. You’re a white nigger. And worse than that, you’re a white Life magazine nigger.” It was never a visceral hatred of his subjects that was going to come through Moore’s lens—not in his pictures at Oxford, not in the ones from Bull Connor’s Birmingham in the following spring, not in the images recorded on Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in March 1965. He was just going to get his people as they were. It’s what James Agee, another loving and utterly disloyal son of the oppressor South, in his lyric prose meditation on Alabama tenant farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, termed “the cruel radiance of what is.” But here is a question: For an essentially gentle man to achieve such a magnificent documentary portrait of his own kind, wouldn’t he almost have to break himself in half?

  At the point the photojournalist was ditching the East Coast and turning spy in his own country, a man he’d not yet heard of had already spent about a year and three-quarters trying to gain admission to Mississippi’s premier public institution of higher learning. (Premier, yes, as far as it goes. But as Willie Morris, native Mississippian, deceased, a fine writer and a fine man, who, among other literary accomplishments, served as the youngest and best editor-in-chief in the history of Harper’s Magazine, once wrote: “Ole Miss is an institutional symbol, a pseudo-genteel outpost of brainless young beauties, incipient drunks, and winning football teams. Faulkner was not allowed to speak there.” Time magazine was only a little less kind when it wrote, during the Meredith crisis: “[It] has its attractions—a green and pleasant campus, a perennially powerful football team, and very pretty coeds, two of whom won the Miss America contest in successive years, 1958 and 1959. But it is a cheerfully unintellectual institution with nothing special to offer the mind of an earnest man of twenty-nine.”)

  Meredith had come back to his home state in August 1960, his will and imagination centered on one thing: entry into the university at Oxford. He’d come home with a wife and a young son. On January 21, 1961, five months after his discharge, and the day after John F. Kennedy’s inauguration (the election of Kennedy had fueled the sense of messianic resolve), the ex-sergeant wrote to the admissions office at the university, requesting a catalog and application forms. He was already in school on the G.I. Bill, enrolled at all-black Jackson State College. He’d earned college credits in the service and had something like three semesters remaining—about a year and a half—to get a degree. At Jackson State, Meredith sometimes went to class in a military uniform and a black leather biker jacket and pea cap and carrying a cane. He later would say it was because he wanted to look like a “hood.” Nothing hoody about those first correspondences with Ole Miss—the soul of politeness, he was.

  It’s important to stress that Meredith’s decision to strike at the most visible bastion of segregation in the South was personal and not directly related to what others spoke of as the movement in an uppercase way. To Meredith, “movement” was a nearly irrelevant word, a crutch word, implying weakness on an individual’s part. As crucial as the Meredith–Ole Miss story is to the story of civil rights in America, as powerfully symbolic as Meredith became for both blacks and whites, the events of Oxford in the fall of 1962 are essentially outside that history, aberrant, like the man himself. Indeed, as civil rights scholars like John Dittmer have made clear (Dittmer’s 1994 book, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, is an immensely helpful guide in studying Mississippi in the sixties), the immediate impact of the desegregation of Ole Miss was to turn things backward for blacks in the state. His admission merely intensified white Mississippi’s wrath—in already wrathful places like Greenwood and Natchez and Pascagoula. They’d been so humiliated by the Kennedys and their kind.

  The applicant heard from the school in less than a week—registrar Robert B. Ellis had assumed he was white. Meredith filled out the forms and mailed them back on January 31, 1961, slipping in a polite little stick of TNT: “I sincerely hope that your attitude toward me as a potential member of your student body reflects the attitude of the school and that it will not change upon learning that I am not a white applicant. I am an American-Mississippi-Negro citizen.” He pinned a formal portrait of himself to the top of the application. This sentence, and the photo, put into gear—by the university administration and the state attorney general’s office and the board of trustees and the governor’s office—a series of diversions, obfuscations, deceptions, delays, and ad hoc rewrites of school policies. The legal history of this has been told in numerous places. The nut of the story is that for the next year and seven months—from the end of January 1961 until mid-September 1962—the courts and the university rejected appeal after appeal and try after try by Meredith to get into the school while Ross Barnett fanned the already inflamed mind of the populace. Early in the process, knowing he couldn’t afford high court costs, Meredith sought the friendship and counsel of Medgar Evers, local field secretary of the NAACP. He also wrote to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. (In later years, he’d hotly proclaim, “They joined me. They joined me. You understand that?”) Thurgood Marshall, director of the defense fund, a future Supreme Court justice, replied, “I think it should go without saying that we are vitally interested in what you propose.” The NAACP defense team was headed by Constance Baker Motley and Jack Greenberg.

  After two formal rejections, Meredith and the fund filed suit in federal district court. A hearing was set for June 12, 1961, in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was rescheduled and moved to Jackson. It was put off again. More delays. After 118 days—December 1961 by then—the judge ruled against the plaintiff. The school’s admissions policies, he said—“and I find as
a fact”—were not designed “in any attempt direct or indirect to discriminate against anyone solely on the grounds of race and color.” The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld the lower court but reversed the district judge on several key points. Accordingly, the Fifth Circuit sent the case back to the district court and demanded a full trial. That trial opened on January 16, 1962—but got delayed. A year had passed since Meredith had written for the forms. He’d endured abuse in the papers and in the streets. He’d missed three potential semesters. And he was undeterred.

  At his trial, the state attorneys called him a troublemaker who was lacking in moral fiber—it was for these reasons, rather than race, that the university felt morally obliged to deny him admission. On February 3, Judge Sidney J. Mize ruled against him again. Another appeal to a higher court. It was five more months, June 25, 1962, before the Fifth Circuit overturned the district court. “We find that James Meredith’s application for transfer to the University of Mississippi was turned down solely because he was a Negro,” wrote U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Justice John Minor Wisdom. Meanwhile, state officials had tried to prosecute Meredith on a charge that he’d violated state law in 1960 by listing Hinds County as place of residence on his voter registration while listing Attala County on his university application.

  Now a federal judge in Meridian, Mississippi, Ben F. Cameron, a member of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, began issuing stays. The judge issued three stays; the full court of the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans overturned them. The fourth stay, on August 6, 1962, was appealed by Meredith and his attorneys to the U.S. Supreme Court. The board of trustees of the school divested the university chancellor of any authority to act on Meredith’s application. On September 10, Justice Hugo Black in Washington vacated all stays and any further legal objections and ordered the admission of the applicant. That might have seemed the end of the legal road—but this was Mississippi. Three days after the Supreme Court ruling, the governor went on statewide television to invoke the long-discredited doctrine of “interposition,” demanding the resignation of any school official “who is not prepared to suffer imprisonment for this righteous cause.… We will not drink from the cup of genocide.… We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government, or stand like men and tell them NEVER!” This happened on Thursday evening, September 13, and in a sense everything up to here was but prologue. Over that weekend, unknown to anyone in Mississippi except several of his close advisers, and known to only a very few people in Washington, Ross Barnett began a series of telephone conversations with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The secret conversations were all about finding a way out and saving face—on both sides. They were all about staging a show of defiance while arranging a surrender under the table. For nearly a fortnight, each side tried to manipulate and bargain wtih the other—and both sides spiraled toward a bloody center, and nearly all of it got recorded on audiotape. And some cops under some trees getting their picture snapped at the penultimate moment—no more than the rest of a frothing state in that final week of September 1962—didn’t know, at least didn’t know at the time: that, really, they were bit players, pawns, peons, in what, at bottom, was a charade and a lie and a rank hypocrisy between Barnett and the Kennedy brothers. A lie and a charade and hypocrisy with so many tragic consequences.

  Here, it had to have been right about here, on the other side of these little guardrail posts with their drooping chains. The wooden posts, each about two feet high, spaced maybe ten feet apart and yoked to each other by the looping links of black chain, rim the outer edge of a large, oblong, parklike space known as the Grove. Anybody who’s ever stepped inside the Ole Miss gates has seen the Grove. It’s just past the stone railroad bridge on University Avenue, after you enter the central portal. The Grove spreads over something like six or seven acres; it dips and rolls and offers picnic tables and love benches under magnificent old trees. On fall football weekends, this space is jammed with elegantly dressed alumni, many of whom host lavish pregame picnics under tenting. The faithful start setting up the tables and tenting as early as 7 A.M.—even if the game won’t be played till evening. Some of the tents feature waiters in tuxes circling among the guests with silver trays. Some of the tents have their own jazz combos. Alumni wander about, tent to tent, family to family, embracing, storytelling. The male grads will be in their red Ole Miss blazers, the women in cocktail dresses and heels. About two hours before kickoff, the team, not yet suited up, leaves Kinard Hall and comes across campus toward the Grove and the Walk of Champions. The faithful form a human corridor for the players to walk through—this is a more solemn than fevered moment. The ritual is known as “Rebel Walk.” Afterward, these Ole Miss families, with their two and three generations of alums, exit the Grove and take their seats in the stadium and do the “Hoddy Toddy” cheer and watch the afternoon’s tilt in the warming sun against the Vanderbilt Commodores or the LSU Tigers. Until a few years ago, it was a commonplace for Rebel fans in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium to wave their Confederate battle flags after great plays. You’d even see the little flags being waved during the playing of the National Anthem before the first whistle. Recalcitrants still do it.

  But the photograph, and the taking of it: September 27, 1962. It must have been just to the right of this scarlet oak. Billy Ferrell remembered that it was snapped directly opposite the Alumni Center, on the edge of the street called Grove Loop. That would mean very close to this massive tree, which may be older than the university itself; which is almost 160 years. Moore himself can’t remember the precise spot, and what does it really matter anyway? If you face this way, northeast, toward Grove Loop and the Alumni Center, the Lamar Law Center will be on your left. That’s where Billy’s granddaughter Cricket studied for her law degree, which she earned in the spring of 2000. The law school building wasn’t up when the camera recorded her granddad making a proud, unwitting jerk of himself.

  (Time out. Study it again. Have you focused yet on the blurry curve going down the left side? It’s a Mississippi state trooper. There’s the brim of his trooper’s hat. And his chin strap. The suggestion of a cheek or maybe an ear. The slope of his uniformed right shoulder. I remember the first time I “saw” this trooper. I was in the Grove, with my beat-up copy of Life, pacing and talking out loud, no doubt making an unwitting Northern jerk of myself. I think I gave out with something like a little Rebel whoop when I realized that it was a trooper’s shadow. I’d just sighted a fairly obvious thing in the picture.)

  On the day it was taken—a Thursday in America—this space must have seemed any color but green. Red, maybe. Hysteria had seized Mississippi, hysteria accompanied by a weird holiday mood. The riot itself was still three nights off, but things had reached a killing pitch, and not only in this patch of park. The Grove was fairly overrun with lawmen and reporters, although many professors were still trying to hold classes. Freshmen sported blue and maroon beanies; there were signs everywhere promoting candidates for homecoming queen. Across the state, some radio stations had suspended programming in place of bulletins, and these alternated with the playing of “Dixie.” In the capital city, roughnecks in slow-moving cars were blaring their horns through downtown streets. Inriders from other states, carting coolers and weapons, were headed to Oxford. (The FBI was filing a stream of reports to Hoover in Washington.)

  In the northerly town of Grenada, the Sentinel-Star reported: “Roughly 400 sheriffs, highway patrolmen, and deputy sheriffs have put away their weapons and are now armed only with Billy Clubs, tear gas and steel helmets. All entrances to the campus are blocked. Six police dogs, one about the size of a small horse, have been added to the force.” In the southerly town of Hattiesburg, where Bob Waller was sheriff, the American reported (it was a UPI wire story running on front pages all across the state): “A legislative leader for Gov. Ross Barnett said today it is ‘highly possible’ that a gunbattle could erupt on the University of Mississippi campus between federal authorities and s
tate officers. Rep. Walter Hester of Adams County told United Press International he thought it ‘likely’ that state, county and local law officers would attempt to fight off marshals if they tried to forcibly take Negro James Meredith into the school. However, Hester said he did not foresee an all-out insurrection. ‘We can’t win a shooting war with the U.S. Army,’ he said.”

  In Natchez, tucked down in the southwest corner of the state, on the big river, where Sheriff Billy Ferrell presided, the Democrat was telling its readers in a special edition (and the story would run again the next day, on Friday the twenty-eighth, with fill-ins): “At Oxford, Mississippi Thursday massed a citizen army of peace officers at the gates of the University of Mississippi.… From every corner of the Magnolia state came sheriffs and their deputies.… The exact role of county sheriffs and their deputies and the scattering of city police remained in official secrecy. Sheriff William T. Ferrell of Natchez, president of the sheriffs’ association, said he began the telephone relay that got the word around the state.… Ferrell mentioned receiving orders before he made the call. He declined to elaborate.”

  In Pascagoula, on the Gulf, where James Ira Grimsley was sheriff, the Chronicle published a story with a banner headline, which I quoted earlier: “Sheriff Goes to Oxford.” The sheriff had left for the campus in the middle of the night with three deputies. The paper’s editor, Ira Harkey, was drafting on his beat-up black Remington typewriter another of his stand-alone editorials. He’d written and published some brave and literate ones already. On September 14, the morning after Ross Barnett’s interposition address on TV, Harkey had written: “It is not ‘the Kennedy administration’ that is making demands upon Mississippi. It is the United States of America, it is democracy itself, it is the whole of humanity. These surely will not back down either.” Five days later, on the nineteenth, the editor had said: “In a madhouse’s din, Mississippi waits. God help Mississippi.” Since then, the bead of hate had done nothing but swell.