In June 2002, the high sheriff of Adams County realized the most powerful dream of his life and saw himself installed as president of all the sheriffs of the United States. Tommy Ferrell’s “inauguration” (as his late father once called it), with Tommy’s mother and his wife and children and granddaughter and other family members in attendance, occurred on the concluding night of the annual convention of the National Sheriffs’ Association in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The NSA represents nearly 3,100 sheriffs in America; the full membership of the organization is over 20,000. Approximately 3,500 conventioneers came to Oklahoma for the sixty-second meeting. During the cocktail hour, before the big installation banquet, Tommy had said he was “scared as hell—but, hell, scared is good, right?” Did he have his inaugural address ready? “Been working on it for weeks.” Several weeks before the convention, I had asked him on the phone if his hometown paper, the Democrat, had been devoting the proper amount of coverage to its local son and his big moment. “Not in my opinion,” he had said immediately.
The high executives of the association were brought into the convention hall in ascending order of rank. Spotlights flooded each vice president and his spouse. The lawmen wore white dinner jackets; the ladies were in formal evening wear. Tommy and Carole Ferrell came in waving, with music playing. They took their places at the two-tiered head table. That day, in California, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had ruled that the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance were unconstitutional. The convention hall stood to recite the pledge. At the disputed words, Tommy leaned into the mike and said in his basso profundo, “UNDER GOD!”
The outgoing president was presented with a sword and a commemorative pistol. Many speeches were made. Tommy introduced his mother, who got up and waved. He introduced his son, “a federal agent for the Department of Justice.” Ty stood, looking very uncomfortable. The new president spoke of his long climb to the top, which had taken fourteen years. “Twenty-seven committee assignments later and various vice presidencies, and here I am.” He paraphrased Robert Frost—“miles to go before we sleep.” He told the audience it was his “greatest sadness” that his father—legendary Mississippi lawman and a good, good man—wasn’t present. He spoke of what a righteous and wonderful place his native state was. He talked of how the nation more than ever, in the wake of what had happened nine months before, on September 11, must gather behind and trust in its law enforcers. Through all of it, he seemed a peace officer in total control.
Afterward, I spoke briefly to Ty. He said the big news was that he and his wife and daughter were going to be transferred back to Mississippi, not to Natchez, but to the Gulf Coast. He didn’t have a precise date but hoped the transfer would take effect in the early months of 2003. “Going home,” the inheritor said.
Joe Meredith, for whom Mississippi has never really been home, received his doctorate in business administration at Ole Miss in May 2002. He spent most of his last year in Oxford looking for a teaching position. The more he sent out résumés, the more discouraged he became. On March 27, 2002, I received this email: “I know as a good writer I shouldn’t use worthless modifiers but this is how I feel: utterly disappointed, absolutely devastated. I’m not even close to getting a job. I’ll get trying. May 11 is the big day. I’ll be crowned the best PHD graduate student to come to olemiss and like the weakest link I LEAVE WITH NOTHING.”
It turned out not to be true. The following month, Joe flew up to North Carolina for an interview at a small liberal arts school, Elon University. It offered him a job on the business faculty for good money, and he accepted. Right after he got back to Mississippi, we had dinner. I had been in Oxford for a few days, waiting for his return. Joe was more buoyant than I’d ever experienced him. We drove to a catfish joint out in the country. “I sent letters to Texas schools and got no interest whatever,” he said. “I wanted to be near my daughter. I was giving up all hope.” At Abbeville Catfish, we heaped our plates twice and went back for dessert. Joe said offhandedly that he had received the 2002 Outstanding Doctoral Student Achievement Award in the school of business. He said just as offhandedly, “In the morning I’m supposed to do an interview with my father on CNN. The university is promoting me big-time. They’ve caught onto this story, me getting my Ph.D. in the fortieth anniversary year of my father integrating the school. They’ve discovered me. Ha. I’m supposed to show up at 7 o’clock at a TV studio on campus. Bishop Hall.”
“Your dad will be here in the morning?”
“I guess,” Joe said.
“He’ll be coming up from Jackson?”
“I assume.”
“Where’s he staying?”
“No idea. He hasn’t communicated with me.”
Early the next morning, Joe’s white Nissan Maxima was parked outside of Bishop Hall. By then, I had in my possession a university press release, written as a feature story: “Civil Rights Activist’s Son Named Outstanding Student.” There was a nice picture of Joe with a caption describing him as the “son of the man who integrated higher education.” The release said: “History has come full circle at the University of Mississippi. Forty years after James Meredith integrated the campus, his son has been named a distinguished graduate student at the same university. Joseph Howard Meredith, thirty-four, receives his doctorate in business administration during commencement ceremonies May 11, just 200 yards from the spot where federal marshals and troops fought an angry mob.… Unlike his father, Joseph Meredith maintained a low profile during his studies. Many of his classmates remained unaware of his relationship to the man who broke the color barrier at the university. The younger Meredith says his independence began to blossom during his younger days in private boarding schools. ‘Independent thinking comes from being different,’ he said. ‘It also comes from being in boarding school for years and not having anyone to rely on but myself.’ ” The press release ended with this quote from Joe: “My idea of success is not living on the east coast making $300,000 a year and appearing on ‘Larry King Live’ wearing a bow tie. Success for me is looking at my daughter as she peacefully sleeps.”
In the campus TV studio, Joe sat on a stool, wired for sound, staring into a monitor. He looked elegant in a sport coat and loafers and red tie and neatly laundered shirt. He was perspiring.
“Uh, my dad’s not coming,” he said. “I found out he’s doing it from down there.”
Now he was on the air. These words showed up on the screen: “A Father’s Footsteps. History Comes Full Circle.” A CNN anchor in Atlanta said hello to the audience and to the two Merediths. The screen cut to a full picture of a wispy man in a white beard and dark suit. That man, approaching seventy, seated in a studio in Jackson, was licking his lips, darting his eyes, hunching forward.
“James, do you hear me all right?” the anchor said.
Silence. “I can’t distinguish too much. I want to say …”
“Can you hear me, James?”
They got the sound wired correctly. The anchor asked Meredith how he felt about his son’s Ph.D.
“It’s the vindication of my entire life.” Adding quickly: “You called me an African-American. I’m a Native American.” You could tell that the Choctaw thing was rising up in him.
The anchor tried to cut in. “Joseph, I can tell your dad is a tough guy,” she said. She tried to get Joe to talk. Joe’s dad was still talking. “You gotta remember I was fighting a war. My goal was the total destruction of white supremacy.”
Joe found himself. He said that in his own way he was still fighting his dad’s war. He talked of his difficulty in finding a job, and he cited statistics he had dug up on the still shamefully low percentage of black professors on college faculties. “A very covert system in place now.” He spoke slowly, convincingly, and it was as if the deliberateness had a clearing effect on the terrible mind of the bearded man in the other studio 160 miles away. “You see, it’s more vicious now because it’s largely unseen,” James Meredith said at the end,
with sudden force and beauty.
Ole Miss itself can be a place of such sudden force and beauty. All you have to do is drive down Fraternity Row on a sunlit morning in spring—those stunning houses with their pillars and dewy white rockers out front. There’s something so redolent of the old customs, acceptances, dispensations, symbols, encoded in the shorthand name for the University of Mississippi. Will that name, with its more-than-faint racist overtones, ever be formally abandoned? It seems improbable. The name is too cherished, entrenched. There isn’t any doubt that the University of Mississippi has made progress in its race relations, nor any doubt that there is much ground still to be gained. For almost all of the forty years after Meredith’s admission, there were still only two civil rights memorials on the campus, and both were very modest. One was the plaque in the lobby of Baxter Hall (which is now the high-tech telecommunications building) noting that Meredith had once lived there. The other was a maple tree in front of the Lyceum, in the Circle, with a small stone at its base noting that the tree was dedicated to the memory of Mae Bertha Carter, mother of seven black Ole Miss grads.
Almost 13 percent of Ole Miss students are black. In the first year of the new century, Ole Miss elected its first black student body president. Nick Lott ran as a conservative Republican. There exist now at the university courses and curriculums in Afro-American history. (About 5.5 percent of the faculty is black.) There exists now the Institute for Racial Reconciliation, and its early guiding light was a white native Southerner (from Georgia) named Susan Glisson, who has a way of bearing strange gifts to authority. “What often happens in Mississippi is progress that’s in an absence of information,” says Glisson. “But I still believe that Mississippi in general and Ole Miss in particular can be a leader and impetus for healing in the nation, because of all that happened here.” Several years ago, under Glisson’s prodding and leadership, the university began planning a civil rights monument. The site chosen for the memorial, intended from the start to be large and prominent, was the plaza between the Lyceum and the new library, in the heart of the campus.
The name given the memorial was “Open Doors.” It was designed by an artist from Brooklyn, New York, and featured a pair of archways and etched glass doors, with bronze bells resting atop the words “Freedom Henceforth—Justice Forevermore.” Forty years after the riot and Meredith’s forced integration of the university, on the last weekend in September 2002, a model of the work was officially presented to Oxford and the university community. (The monument itself wasn’t scheduled to be completed until April 2003.) Many dignitaries and players from the old drama came for the fortieth anniversary: Meredith; long-retired U.S. marshals; Senior Judge Constance Baker Motley of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York; Charles Moore, who drove himself over from his home in Alabama with a new digital camera. It was Moore’s first time back in Oxford and on the campus since 1962. He had only half deliberately stayed away all these years. He barely slept at all the night before he drove to Mississippi.
All weekend, the weather was dry and sunny and full of good piney smells. Autumn wasn’t quite in the air. Football was, although Ole Miss didn’t have a game scheduled that weekend. Sorority and fraternity rush was on, and that seemed to consume the real energy of much of the student body, along with campuswide election campaigns for Colonel Reb and Miss Ole Miss. Still, there was a lovely quiet; at moments the Grove and the Circle felt almost churchlike. University officials had constructed a self-guided walking tour for “Remembering the Events of 1962.”
In the week leading up, Meredith had said his usual strange things. “It was an embarrassment for me to be there, and for somebody to celebrate it, oh my God,” he told a wire-service reporter for the AP. “I want to go down in history, and have a bunch of things named after me, but believe me that ain’t it.” Of the civil rights movement: “It was of no concern to me basically. Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.” He was sixty-nine and in the used-car rental business now. He had taken over a two-story brick garage near the railroad tracks west of downtown Jackson, and he was spending his days sitting in an almost empty room, answering his own phone, using a big white board on the wall to keep track of his fleet of ten-year-old Fords, Pontiacs, and Hondas. “I really consider this of equal if not greater significance than what I started forty years ago,” he told a reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. “I’ve got a used-car-dealer license, but it’s not really about that.”
On Sunday evening, before Meredith arrived, there was an outdoor movie on the square in downtown Oxford—two movies, really, both old documentaries made by movement people. People were invited to bring lawn chairs; the police had cordoned off the streets. The lights from the black-and-white films flickered eerily against the east side of Mr. Faulkner’s stone white courthouse, even as forty years before, on the same Sunday night, other lights—from guns and gas and Molotov cocktails—had illuminated the community. Four decades of September Sundays had come and gone. There weren’t two dozen people watching the films.
An hour before, as it was growing dark on campus, Moore and I walked through the Grove toward the Lyceum. A still-wiry photographer in his seventies—recently back from a photojournalism conference in France, where he had been honored for his life’s work—Moore said, “I risked my life here, it’s true.” He kept turning around, looking to the left, to the right, as if trying to get his bearings, his balance. “This wasn’t here,” he said of a new stone walk. We walked over to the approximate spot where he had taken the photograph of Billy Ferrell and his cohorts on the early afternoon of September 27, 1962. “You see something, it’s there, and you shoot it,” he said. Later that evening, after the movies on the square, Moore and I sat out front of his hotel. He spoke of maybe moving on from Florence, Alabama—maybe back to Asheville, North Carolina, maybe somewhere else. He told a story about flying many years ago as a young newspaper photographer in the private plane of the governor of Alabama, John Patterson. He was a staffer at the Montgomery Advertiser. This was before Oxford and 1962. The governor of his state got hold of Moore’s arm and said, “Listen, Charles, you get a lot of that nigger pussy, right? You really love it, right, Charles?”
On Tuesday evening, October 1, Anniversary Day (of Meredith’s registration as an Ole Miss student), Ole Miss hosted a three-dollar-a-head community dinner in the Grove. There was gospel singing. Twenty-seven hundred people came. Meredith joined in a candlelight symbolic walk through the Lyceum, to the spot where the monument would be erected. Members of his family were present. Not his son Joe, however. Joe stayed away. He was up in North Carolina at his new teaching job at Elon University. (Later, we exchanged emails. “No, I didn’t make it,” he wrote. “I’m not enthused with the university right now.… From what I read, blacks didn’t care enough to attend events.” He mentioned the newspaper piece about his dad in the Memphis paper. “The usual stuff.”)
Things had been arranged so that Meredith didn’t formally speak. Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of Medgar Evers, who was also being honored on campus that weekend, gave the address. Meredith sat on the dais behind her. He was quiet, dignified. He seemed to understand. You could believe everything about the South really had changed. Not least James H. Meredith. Not least the University of Mississippi.
And still the retreats to the past. You’ll just come on them. They can be so jolting. If you go out to the Beacon Restaurant on North Lamar early on a Saturday morning, you’ll probably have to wait in line for one of the best breakfasts in the South. The hostess may stick you in the Red Room, which is aptly named, because the Red Room features a blindingly red wall of Ole Miss Rebel symbols.
“The problem with Mississippi, you see, is that it’s essentially premodern,” Ole Miss professor of history Charles Eagles once said, early in my travels in the state, and the truth of that remark has only seemed to grow greater. (In the spring of 2002, the con
troversy in Jackson, debated on talk radio and editorial pages, was “yard parking.” The city council had put in an ordinance to ban parking in yards, and much of the citizenry felt it an infringement of personal rights.) Eagles is writing the definitive story of race at his university. His book is a couple of years off; it will be worth waiting for.
On the campus, so pastoral, so architecturally beautiful, so fragrant, so white, the collective visual memory of the Confederacy and the lost cause and sixties apartheid seems never very far away. The reminders are there in the Rebel mascot at all athletic events, in the Confederate statue guarding the school’s entrance, in the James O. Eastland Room on the third floor of the Law Center. The room, which is generally kept locked, is a replica of Eastland’s Senate office in Washington. Some while ago, archivists carted down from the Capitol the great racist’s red leather sofa and matching chair and immense desk and his nameplate and seal, not to say boxes and boxes of photographs of the great man with other great Washington men. On May 27, 1954, a week after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Eastland rose in the Senate and spoke floridly for close to an hour. “Mr. President, a court cannot enforce its will in these fields. Racial instincts are normal, natural, human instincts.… The southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony.… Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself.… Segregated schools will be maintained by the proper and legitimate use of the police power inherent in every State, regardless of what the Supreme Court says.… The future greatness of America depends upon racial purity and the maintenance of Anglo-Saxon institutions.”
Sons of Mississippi Page 44
