The States: The Edge of Violence

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Ole Miss 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 29. As a symbol of the Negroes' struggle for justice, Meredith's cause was worth all the trouble it stirred up, but as an individual's aspiration for intellectual fulfillment, it was hardly persuasive.

Footless Argument. Lawyer Barnett did indeed claim legality. His actions, he insisted, were solidly based on the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Those reserved powers, the argument ran, include the authority to preserve order and protect public safety, and the interests of order and safety required him to "interpose and invoke the police powers of the state."

But this was a constitutionally footless line of argument. The old states' rights doctrine that a state can interpose its authority so as to void a federal law within its own borders was struck down long ago —pragmatically by the Civil War and legally by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1932 Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, speaking for a unanimous court, declared it to be "manifest" that a state Governor could not invoke his powers to infringe anyone's rights under the Federal Constitution. In the Little Rock decision in 1958, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous opinion that the school desegregation decision "can neither be nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executive or judicial officers, nor nullified indirectly by them through evasive schemes."

The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states only powers that the Constitution does not prohibit; the 14th Amendment prohibits any state from depriving any person of "life, liberty or property without due process of law," and from denying any person "the equal protection of the laws." In 1954 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment. In keeping with that decision, James Meredith's right to attend Ole Miss was affirmed by a federal district court, confirmed by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and upheld by Justice Hugo Black, speaking with the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Collision Course. After that, there was only one way for Governor Barnett to prevent Meredith's admission to the university without coming into head-on conflict with the Federal Government: he could shut down the university. But the students at Ole Miss, with their futures at stake, wanted it to stay open. So did their parents. So did the townsmen of Oxford, dependent on the university for economic survival. So did many Mississippians who have never seen the university's campus but follow the fortunes of its football team with impassioned pride. And as long as the university remained open to other Mississippians, it remained open, by orders of the federal courts, to James Meredith.