Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  In an earlier part of Three Years, Meredith defined “lynching time”: “What are the essentials of a lynching ceremony? There must be a common victim for the lynching community and he must be guilty in the minds of the lynchers of threatening the virtue or purity of the white woman. It is important to understand that the whole community is always involved in a lynching, even though the actual violence itself may be done or even observed by only a small group from the community. If the community is not totally involved, it would not constitute a lynching.”

  In an oral history of the Kennedy presidency, published in 1993 and entitled Let Us Begin Anew, Meredith is quoted as saying: “In order to prevail, I had to get the federal government on my side.… I was well aware of the contact between Ross Barnett and the Kennedys. Between them I was always sure the U.S. government was going to win.”

  Early in the afternoon, Robert Kennedy and Ross Barnett were trying to fashion their most harebrained and self-serving scheme to date: make it seem as if the federal side was barging its way in with drawn guns. A skit right from the Old West. There would be the pulling of at least one (unloaded) gun by the chief marshal, accompanied by the slapping of holsters on the part of the other marshals—or at least this was Kennedy’s sense of how the scene should be played. Taylor Branch, in his book Parting the Waters, in a lengthy and authoritative chapter called “The Fall of Ole Miss,” wrote of this surreal conversation: “Drifting inexorably into public relations, they fashioned an agreement to stage a fake showdown at the gates of the campus. Two dozen armed U.S. marshals would support Meredith, and Barnett, yielding reluctantly to superior force, would retire to the new task of getting Meredith out of Ole Miss. Ironically, this solution faltered when Kennedy’s desire to appear accommodating did not quite satisfy Barnett’s desire to look as though he was being pushed around.” Yes, that’s basically what happened. But there would be another way to view the secret conversation of that day: as deeply revelatory of the character of a pair of moral opportunists who’d do almost anything for a favorable out. In this respect, Barnett and Kennedy were brothers under the skin. If Barnett was pathetic and weak and willing to take a whole state down with him, Kennedy, a smarter and braver and more guilt-ridden man, was all about ad hoc opportunity. To study September 27 through the prism of a single photograph, and through the seven lives in that photograph, and in what has traveled downward from those lives, is to see things convincingly in the context of a self-serving, whipped-up hatred—which the seven in the picture were only too glad to have whipped up. But the fact remains that they never knew—not even later, some of them—the extent to which they were dupes of expedient men. They were simple enough in their loyalties and loves to believe their governor when he cried, “Never!”

  In the South, as has been observed, people who aren’t victims of injustice often are victims of irony. It was the kind of coincidence the South seems to crave: the hour when RFK and Barnett were giving themselves away on tape to future generations of historians may have been the very same hour when seven ignorant cops (“ignorant” being invoked deliberately here) were getting their picture snapped. These Southern cops, seething, peacocking, making their dirty jokes, along with all the other seething and peacocking and grinning bigots in that overflowing garden, assumed things were as they were, that Dixie was going down, unless they took their stand to live and die.

  It’s 2:50 P.M. in Washington, 12:50 in the Grove. A thirty-one-year-old slight-framed Alabamian, who also has no idea of what is going on behind the stage, may right this moment be picking his way through the Grove. Here he is, picture him, Charlie Moore, coming on Billy and the boys, sizing up a sudden great shot.

  Barnett: Hello, General, how are you?

  RFK: Fine, Governor, how are you?

  Barnett: I need a little sleep.

  RFK [further on]: I will send the marshals that I have available up there in Memphis … and they will come with Mr. Meredith and … I will have the head marshal pull a gun and I will have the rest of them have their hands on their guns and their holsters. And then as I understand it he will go through and get in and you will make sure that law and order is preserved and that no harm will be done.…

  Barnett [further on]: General, I was under the impression that they were all going to pull their guns. This could be very embarrassing. We got a big crowd here and if one pulls his gun and we all turn it would be very embarrassing. Isn’t it possible to have them all pull their guns?

  RFK: I hate to have them all draw their guns.… Isn’t it sufficient if I have one man draw his gun and the others keep their hands on their holsters?

  Barnett: They must all draw their guns. Then they should point their guns at us and then we could step aside. This could be very embarrassing down here for us. It is necessary.

  RFK: If they all pull their guns, is that all?

  A few exchanges later, the lieutenant governor comes on the line.

  Johnson: It is absolutely necessary that they all draw their guns.

  RFK: Can you speak a little louder?

  Johnson: We are telling them to lay their clubs aside and to leave their guns in their automobiles. But it is necessary to have all your people draw their guns, not just one.

  An hour later. It’s 1:50 P.M. in the Grove, 3:50 in Washington. Barnett and Johnson are in their campus headquarters; the lieutenant governor has circled the campus in a state police car, barking into a loudspeaker, “The nigger isn’t here yet.… I plead with you.… Someone could easily be killed.…” Has the photograph that will end up in Life now been made—or is Moore right now positioning himself behind the shadowy trooper and elevating the small box to his eye?

  Barnett: General, I felt like I ought to call you back.… Why can’t you wait until Saturday morning.… The people probably will find it out.

  RFK: There’s not going to be any mention of it from here.

  Barnett: Certainly not here. Our conversations weren’t taken down here.

  RFK: You never had anything that’s come out of this office and I never said I talked to you.…

  Barnett: One man said, “You will all compromise in this thing?”

  RFK: You are not compromising—you are standing right up there.

  A few exchanges later, the lieutenant governor is back on.

  Johnson: General Kennedy, we are trying to be completely honest about this thing. We got a few intense citizens here, got a lot of men who are not directly under us who are involved to hold the fort such as sheriffs and deputies. We cannot assure anybody that those people or someone maybe hotheaded won’t start shooting.… We’ve got to have time in order to discreetly move these sheriffs out of here.…

  RFK: You’ve got a couple of hours to tell the sheriffs and others to go home and suddenly I will call at four o’clock your time and tell them he is coming in.

  Johnson: I can’t move these people out of there, General. Some won’t leave.

  Barnett [skipping down a few exchanges]: If half a dozen people got killed it would hurt me, you, the lieutenant governor, all of us.

  There is more talk between the two, with increasing panic on Barnett’s end. It’s 6:35 P.M. in Washington, 4:35 in Mississippi. Barnett has been touring the campus and the town. This thing could get out of hand. The caravan bringing Meredith from the naval air station in Tennessee is on the way to Oxford. Meredith, McShane, and Doar are speeding southward on the newly completed interstate at somewhere between 90 and 110 miles per hour. FBI Teletypes are clacking into Washington regarding KKK Klaverns mobilizing their members from all over the South. Shadows in the Grove have lengthened. Surely, seven lawmen beneath a tree have dispersed, and the man who has frozen them inside his camera has also gone somewhere else.

  Barnett: General, I’m worried—I’m nervous, I tell you. You don’t realize what’s going on. There are several thousand people in here in cars, trucks.…

  RFK: I had better send them back.

  Barnett: There is liable to be a hundred people kill
ed here. It would ruin all of us.… A lot of people are going to get killed. It would be embarrassing to me.

  RFK: I don’t know if it would be embarrassing—that would not be the feeling. [When you listen to this exchange on the tapes, it’s as if Bobby is suddenly coming awake from a very bad dream.]

  Barnett: It would be bad all over the nation.

  RFK: I’ll send them back.

  Barnett: General, do that, please. I just have to take the consequences tomorrow.

  RFK: I’ll send them back.

  An order was flashed from the Justice Department through military channels to a communications plane accompanying the thirteen-car caravan, and from there it was beamed down to John Doar, who was in the lead car with Meredith and McShane. In the Clarion-Ledger the next day, beneath a headline that said “600 U.S. Marshals Group at Memphis,” the story began: “James Meredith was batting ‘0 for 4’ late Thursday in his attempt to be the first Negro to register at the University of Mississippi. In fact, the 29-year-old student did not make it to the campus because of a last-minute change of plans by the Justice Department.… More than a hundred steel helmeted highway patrolmen with gas masks and long night sticks were stationed at every campus approach. They were reinforced by more than seventy sheriffs representing all sections of the state.… At 6 P.M., sources close to the governor said that he had been informed of the change in plans.” The story described Barnett as appearing pale and tired. There was a photograph of him waving to the crowds from the back seat of his sedan.

  And at the same time, real life had gone eerily on in Oxford. There was a want ad in the local paper that offered “Quail, dressed, $18 a dozen. Phone 234-3434 or office of Lyric Theatre. Ask for Bob Williams.” A newsman for the Chicago Daily News, Raymond Coffey, filed a dispatch late Thursday evening, describing events away from the campus: “[That morning], in the heart of town, a couple of elderly Negroes set up a watermelon stand on the courthouse lawn, just as they had every day for many weeks. At Jackson and Lamar, a block off the courthouse square, dozens of Negro women gathered, laughing and exchanging small talk to wait for the white women to arrive to drive them to their homes for domestic work. Near the center of town, several Negro laborers worked on the construction of the new Lafayette County Jail. More than 140 newsmen from outside the South milled around the campus restlessly.… In the residential areas, garbage cans were set along the curbs awaiting the usual pickup.” The piece appeared on the front page of the Daily News on Friday. A world away, in Moscow, the communist youth paper Komsomolskaya Pravda described in its Friday edition the events thus far in Mississippi, and then concluded: “All this is being done merely to prevent 29-year-old James Meredith from becoming the first Negro student at the University of Mississippi, so as not to stain the purity of the educational establishments of the state.”

  Taylor Branch, in his closely argued, intricately reported Parting the Waters, wrote that Kennedy was drawn steadily against his will and judgment into that weekend’s conflagrating events. It’s clear from the tapes as well as from the vantage point of years that the Kennedy brothers weren’t much interested in civil rights in general (at this point anyway) nor in Meredith’s admission in particular—and yet this was a constitutional crisis they had to meet. The overriding fear in the attorney general’s mind was that the use of armed federal force would make America look bad in the eyes of the world. “His only alternative,” Branch wrote, “was to collaborate privately with Barnett to produce an inspired theatrical effect, worthy of Shakespeare. None but a genius could hope to orchestrate the desired illusion of normalcy and control, especially since Kennedy and Barnett simultaneously sounded public war trumpets that attracted hordes to overrun their stage.” But perhaps September 27 is worthier of Kafka’s imagination. A whole state was being set up. Not that this could ever excuse anybody for his conduct, and not that seven particular bigots had any kind of starring role in the violent end three nights later. Indeed, most of these seven weren’t around. They’d scattered, as they’d been ordered to do by their governor and lieutenant governor. They ended up missing the show. It’s another thing the South is pretty good at: anticlimax.

  What was Billy Ferrell—and the six fellow Mississippi peace officers at his side—swinging at, on September 27, 1962, before the tear burst? At Meredith’s unseen head? Yes. At Bobby Kennedy’s functionaries, who thought they could come in and gracelessly intrude their will on Mississippi? Without doubt. But there must have been so many other dreams and dreads possessing each. A hundred-year-old way of life was cracking beneath them, and they knew it, and all they could do was swing.

  The full story of the rest of that weekend can be found in almost any comprehensive history of civil rights in the South. Even now, the precise number of troops mobilized and the number of injuries sustained and prisoners taken are still the subject of argument. William Doyle’s detailed study of the riot, An American Insurrection, published in 2001, reports: “A grand total of nearly 31,000 federal troops were mobilized in the invasion of northern Mississippi in the first week of October 1962, including 11,000 Mississippi National Guardsmen called into federal service and 20,000 regular army troops. Of the Guardsmen, 2,700 were deployed directly into the Oxford area, including the entire 108th Cavalry Regiment and two battle groups of the 155th Infantry Dixie Division. The remainder of the Mississippi National Guardsmen were held at their hometown armories, including Lieutenant Ross Barnett, Jr., in Jackson.”

  Just to sketch the riot itself, the inevitable end point of what had been building for weeks: Two died that Sunday night—a French reporter for Agence France-Presse named Paul Guihard (he got a bullet in his back near the Peabody Building) and an Oxford bystander and jukebox repairman named Walter Ray Gunter (he was shot in the head on the opposite side of campus). At least 160 marshals and about 50 Army soldiers were injured on the night of September 30. About thirty of the wounded marshals were hit by sniper gunfire. Before it was over, the mob had swelled to about 3,000. The battle, according to estimates in the New York Times, resulted in about 370 military and civilian casualties. There were said to be over 300 arrests at the riot and in the several days after. A relatively small number of these were Ole Miss students. Most of the rioters, at least as the night of destruction wore on, had no real relationship to the university.

  One of the aiders and abettors was former Major General Edwin A. Walker of Texas, a West Point graduate, who had commanded the 101st Airborne when President Eisenhower dispatched federal troops to Central High in Little Rock. But after that civil rights crisis, something in Walker took a dark turn. In 1961, he’d resigned from the Army in protest, after being disciplined for insubordination. He devoted his time to the John Birch Society to help combat the communist vermin overrunning the country. In the days before Oxford, he was on the radio from his home in Texas, orating that he had been on the wrong side in the Little Rock crisis. On Wednesday the twenty-sixth, during a call-in radio show on a station in Shreveport, Louisiana, the ex-general called out the citizen-rednecks to the barricades of Ole Miss: “It’s time to rise.… Now is the time to be heard. Ten thousand strong from every state in the nation.… Bring your flag, your tent, and your skillet.”

  The night before it all erupted, on Saturday the twenty-ninth, the great double-dealer and chief executive of Mississippi had sent 46,000 people into a state of frenzy at the Ole Miss–Kentucky football game at Memorial Stadium in Jackson. At halftime Ross Barnett went down onto the field and stood at the fifty-yard line as the world’s largest Confederate flag was unfurled. Billy Ferrell and his wife, Hazel, were in that stadium, and perhaps two other sheriffs from Moore’s photograph. Someone who wasn’t a sheriff later wrote that it was probably a little like being at a Nazi rally in Nuremburg—those rebel flags in every hand might well have been swastikas. The governor pumped his right arm, with his fist clenched. He cried into the microphone and floodlights: “I love Mississippi! I love her people! I love her customs!” After the game, he called th
e Justice Department and was patched through to Bobby Kennedy at home. Barnett said that any deals were off. Earlier that afternoon, the governor had been on the phone with the president himself, promising that the registration would take place. Until Saturday, John F. Kennedy had not been asked by his brother to speak personally to Barnett to try to cool events. If a person interested in history and these specific events went now to the right government or university archive, and pulled up Dictabelt 4-A of Presidential Recordings, September 29, 1962, and listened to the stabbing, nasally Massachusetts voice attempting to converse with the mesmeric and oozy Mississippi voice, he or she would surely think: This is all too hilarious, except that it’s also all too shameful.

  JFK: Well, I’m glad to talk to you, Governor. I am concerned about, uh, this situation, uh, down there, as I know, uh …

  Barnett: Oh, I should say I am concerned about it, Mr. President. It’s, it’s, it’s a horrible situation …

  JFK: Right. Well, of course …

  Barnett: And …

  JFK: … the problem is, Governor, that, uh, I got my responsibility, just like you have yours …

  Barnett: Well, that’s true. I …

  At the end, Barnett said, “I appreciate your interest in our poultry program and all those things.” You can hear Kennedy trying to choke down a cackle. You can picture him putting the phone down and saying to the room, more or less: You’re not going to believe what that cracker just said.

  On Sunday, Bobby Kennedy and Barnett kept trying to find a way out. The attorney general lost his temper. He said the president was going to expose the secret talks.

  RFK: The president is going on TV tonight. He is going through the statement he had with you last night. He will have to say he called up the National Guard; that you had an agreement to permit Meredith to go to Jackson to register …