ABSTRACT
In January 1961, Air Force veteran James Meredith sought to transferfrom Jackson State College to the University of Mississippi in Oxford. As a Mississippi resident with many college credits, the 28-year-old Meredith was entitled to attend the state’s premier university and citadel of white supremacy, but he faced very long odds. Five black men had tried unsuccessfully to integrate higher education in the Magnolia State before Meredith. One was admitted to a mental institution instead, while another was sentenced to seven years on a chain gang on a trumped-up charge of stealing chicken feed. Indeed, not a single black student had gone to any white school in Mississippi since Brown prohibited segregated education. Despite this record of futility, Meredith believed that his ‘divine responsibility’ was to crack the color line at Ole Miss by forcing a national crisis. Just days before Meredith made his plans, he learned that Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes had peacefully ended 175 years of segregation at the University of Georgia.
