James H. Meredith

As the first black to attend the University of Mississippi, James H. Meredith (born 1933) scored one of the earliest important victories against segregation in Mississippi.

Born on June 25, 1933, near Kosciusko, Mississippi; son of Moses "Cap" and Roxie Meredith; married: Mary Jane Wiggins, 1956; children: John Howard, Joseph Howard, James Henry; married: Judy Alsobrooks, 1991; children: Kip and Jessica Howard

Fiercely independent and keenly intelligent, James Meredith was the great iconoclast of the civil rights movement. As the first black to attend the University of Mississippi, Meredith scored one of the earliest important victories against segregation in Mississippi. At the same time, he remained largely aloof from the established civil rights organizations. Medgar Evers and the NAACP helped Meredith win his legal battle to integrate Ole Miss, but as Meredith proudly noted, "Nobody hand picked me. I made the decision myself. I paid my own tuition."

Born on a small farm near Kosciusko, Mississippi, on June 25, 1933, Meredith was the seventh of Cap Meredith's 13 children, and the first of seven by Cap's second wife, Roxie. Meredith, baptized simply as "J.H.," inherited his independent streak from his father. The family was poor and their home lacked running water, but they were self-sufficient. "I was taught," Meredith said later, "to believe the most dishonorable thing a Meredith could do was to work in a white woman's kitchen and take care of a white man's child." Seeking a better education than he could attain in Mississippi, Meredith moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he lived with an aunt, and graduated from high school in 1951. Lacking money for college, he joined the U.S. Air Force, under the name "James Howard Meredith." To the young Mississippian, attacking Jim Crow meant self-improvement, and that required money and education. In the service, Meredith saved much of his modest pay and routinely took classes at nearby schools, including the University of Kansas, Washburn University in Topeka, New Mexico Western College, and even the University of Maryland's Japan campus. After a nine-year hitch in the Air Force, Meredith returned to Mississippi and entered the all-black Jackson State University. His decision to seek admission at the all-white University of Mississippi reflected his strategy to attack a system of segregation that limited the economic opportunities open to blacks. "Before I could engage in business at the level I desired," he believed, "the system would have to be broken." Convinced that the new president, John F. Kennedy, would support his efforts, Meredith, on January 21, 1961, the day after Kennedy's inauguration, wrote Ole Miss for an application form.

Meredith Enters Ole Miss

Meredith's letter touched off an 18-month legal battle. Mississippi's white authorities had already demonstrated that they would try virtually anything to avoid integrating the state's colleges and universities. A black teacher, Clennon King had been committed to a mental institution in 1958 for attempting to attend summer school at Oxford. Another black man, Clyde Kennon, was sent to prison on trumped-up charges after attempting to enroll at the University of Southern Mississippi. In Meredith's case, state officials resorted to a variety of legal ploys, but in June 1962, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered Meredith admitted to the university. Nevertheless, Mississippi's racist governor, Ross Barnett, personally intervened to bar Meredith physically from entering Ole Miss. In a televised address, Barnett incited white resistance and warned: "There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration." Finally, late in September, Kennedy ordered federal troops and Justice Department officials to enforce the court order admitting Meredith to school. On Sunday afternoon, September 30, 1962, Meredith arrived on campus accompanied by a federal entourage that included over 120 U.S. marshals and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. The result was a night-long riot that resulted in two deaths, 175 injuries, and 212 arrests. Despite one of the most violent challenges to federal authority since the Civil War, Meredith was quietly registered the next day. Enduring taunts and abuse from many of his fellow students, in August 1963 Meredith became the first black graduate of the University of Mississippi.

The Graduate

In 1964-65, Meredith studied economics at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. The following year, he proposed to walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to encourage blacks to register to vote. The walk attracted widespread attention after a white supremacist wounded Meredith with a shotgun blast, and black leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael, flocked to Mississippi to help him complete his trek.

Attempts to Enter Politics

Meredith later moved to New York City where he bought an apartment house and experienced a variety of financial and legal problems, among them a conviction for harassing his tenants. Meredith briefly considered running for Congress against Harlem's incumbent Adam Clayton Powell. In 1968, Meredith received a law degree from Columbia University, but by the early 1970s, he had returned to Mississippi, where he continued to pursue a variety of business, political, and community activities. In 1972, Meredith ran unsuccessfully as a Republican against Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland. He served as a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati in 1984-85, and was defeated in 1986 in a race for a position on the Cincinnati school board. In recent years, Meredith has been associated with conservative causes and candidates, but his historical significance derives from his integration of Ole Miss, which heralded the changes that would eventually come to the most racially divided state in the nation.

In 1989 North Carolina's conservative Republican senator Jesse Helms offered Meredith a $30,000-a-year position as domestic policy advisor, researcher, and writer. They dissolved the relationship later and by 1991 Meredith was in the news again, this time as endorser of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, gubernatorial candidate in Louisiana.

Educator

Meredith began to devote more time to writing and research. In 1991 he established Meredith Publishing, located in Jackson, Mississippi, the outlet for his multi-volume set, Mississippi: A Volume of Eleven Books, and other works. In 1996 Meredith launched another march. This time he called for a Black Man's March to the Library, which aimed to promote reading and the writing of standard English. He set out from a Memphis library on June 1 for a repeat walk along U.S. 51 to reach Jackson on June 25, his sixty-third birthday. Slowed by prostate cancer surgery in April, he had to be driven the last 50 miles.

Attention was called to Meredith's historic work at Ole Miss when the film Ghosts of Mississippi was released in 1977. The film was an reenactment of the life of Medgar Evers, Meredith's close advisor in the integration of Ole Miss. In 1997, Meredith presented his papers to the University of Mississippi where they were placed in a special collection. In the fall of that year he created the Meredith Institute at Ole Miss, offering weekend classes to teach black American English. The program is closed to girls and women. The Institute also planned to open its Library School for Black Boys and Men in Jackson in January 1998 and another in February of that year in San Diego. In founding the James Meredith Institute, the civil rights leader said that the key to making black males competitive in American schools is to change "the concept of the black race." The problem, as Meredith saw it, was that, "The black race is against intellectual development. Particularly for a black male, to be an A student,...you become unacceptable."

In the fall of 1998, Meredith lead the Black Man's March for Education to the University of Mississippi. "My goal is to raise Mississippi from the bottom to the top...Presently, the average black man in Mississippi reads and writes at the third-grade level or below. My plan is to raise that level to above the fifth grade," he said. The University's provost, Gerald Walton, noted, "Today's students, of course, know Dr. Meredith only from their history books and have very little idea of the contribution he made to higher education in this state. Unfortunately, it took an individual like Dr. Meredith to pave the way for integration in higher education in Mississippi. He was extremely courageous, highly motivated and truly committed to the cause. Had it not been for his actions, it might have been several more years before this campus became integrated and offered out educational opportunities for all races."

Meredith had three children by his first wife: John Howard, Joseph Howard, and James Henry. Two years after the death of his first wife in 1989, he married Judy Alsobrooks, a television reporter in Cincinnati; their children are Kip and Jessica Howard. Although Meredith has demonstrated an interest in politics and writing, he is known primarily as the first black to graduate from the University of Mississippi.

Further Reading

• "Institute teaches blacks language skills," Reprinted from USA Today,November 24, 1997. Available from http://www.usc.edu/dept/education/CMMR/NEWS/USAToday_Nov24_97.html.
• Flynn, James J., Negroes of Achievement in Modern America, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1970, pp. 159-267.
• "James Meredith Brings Literacy Project To Oxford, Speaks at Ole Miss." University Of Mississippi, September 1998. Available from http://www.olemiss.edu/news/newsdesk/story326.html.
• Lord, Walter, The Past That Would Not Die, Harper & Row, 1965.
• Metcalf, George R., Black Profiles, McGraw-Hill, 1968, pp. 219-254.