At Ole Miss: Echoes of a Civil War's Last Battle

Twenty years ago this week, the campus of the University of Mississippi was shattered by riots protesting the admission of the first black student. TIME asked Mississippian Willie Morris, the author (North Toward Home, Terrains of the Heart) and former editor of Harper's magazine, to examine changes at Ole Miss since then.

As one strolls across this hauntingly lovely campus in the beginnings of the great Southern autumn, it is difficult to conceive the chaos and mayhem of Sept. 30, 1962—the gunshots and burning vehicles, the bricks and tear-gas canisters, the federal marshals and National Guardsmen and airborne troops confronting the mob. Two people died, and scores were injured. It was the last battle of the Civil War, the last direct constitutional crisis between national and state authority. James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran, was enrolled as an Ole Miss student the next day. As a native Mississippian, I think of the lines of Yeats:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

One of the sadnesses was that many Mississippians believed the assurances of their leaders that defiance could succeed. A close friend of impeccable Mississippi lineage (his great-grandfather was wounded in the charge at Gettysburg) was captain of a National Guard unit that was federalized. The other day we were standing on the back porch of my bungalow on the fringes of the campus. He gazed out toward a beautiful wooded terrain. "This was where we dug in," he said. "This was the left flank of our perimeter. We went all the way up to the law school." What impressed him the most, he said, was that the country boys under his command were against everything Meredith was trying to do, yet they were completely loyal to the American flag. He said, tenderly almost, "I guess it must've been the discipline they'd learned in the military."

This is the 20th anniversary not only of Meredith, but of the death of William Faulkner. He died less than three months before the crisis; he lies now under a towering oak in the town cemetery up the way. The events of that September would likely have broken his heart, as they did the hearts of many Mississippians. "The white people have already lost their heads," he said of those years. "It depends on whether the Negroes can keep theirs." Between then and now there was to be more suffering.