The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss

by Charles W. Eagles

Overview

When James Meredith enrolled as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi in 1962, the resulting riots produced more casualties than any other clash of the civil rights era. Eagles shows that the violence resulted from the university's and the state's long defiance of the civil rights movement and federal law. Ultimately, the price of such behavior--the price of defiance--was not only the murderous riot that rocked the nation and almost closed the university but also the nation's enduring scorn for Ole Miss and Mississippi. Eagles paints a remarkable portrait of Meredith himself by describing his unusual family background, his personal values, and his service in the U.S. Air Force, all of which prepared him for his experience at Ole Miss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807895597
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/15/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	584
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Charles W. Eagles has taught history at the University of Mississippi since 1983. His books include Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama and The Civil Rights Movement in America.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Ole Miss and Race
1 "Welcome to Ole Miss, Where Everybody Speaks"
2 Following Community Mores: J. D. Williams and Postwar Race Relations
3 "I Love Colored People, but in Their Place": Segregation at Ole Miss
4 "Negroes Who Didn't Know Their Place": Early Attempts at Integration
5 Integration and Insanity: Clennon King in 1958
6 They Will "Want to Dance with Our Girls": Unwritten Rules and Rebel Athletics
7 "Mississippi Madness": Will Campbell and Religious Emphasis Week
8 Nemesis of the Southern Way of Life—Jim Silver
9 "On the Brink of Disaster": Defending States' Rights, Anticommunism, and Segregation
10 "Thought Control": The Editor and the Professor

Part 2: James Meredith
11 The Making of a Militant Conservative—J. H. Meredith
12 "I Regret to Inform You . . . "
13 Meredith v. Fair I: "Delay, Harassment, and Masterly Inactivity"
14 Meredith v. Fair II: A "Legal Jungle"
15 Negotiations: A Game of Checkers

Part 3: A Fortress of Segregation Falls
16 Initial Skirmishing: September 20-25, 1962
17 Confrontations: September 26-30, 1962
18 "A Maelstrom of Savagery and Hatred": The Riot
19 "Prisoner of War in a Strange Struggle": Meredith at Ole Miss
20 J. H. Meredith, Class of '63
21 "The Fight for Men's Minds"

Notes
Essay on Sources
Acknowledgments
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Has the potential to teach us all a great deal about who Meredith was and is and about a transformational event in Mississippi's history.—Sid Salter, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, syndicated review

Vivid. . . . Provides a perspective only a dedicated historian can do, tapping deeply into sources, files and unknown documents to bring alive one of the historical civil rights moments of the 20th century.—Bill Minor, Jackson Clarion-Ledger

The Price of Defiance is indisputably the definitive history of James H. Meredith's historic desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962. Eagles's detailed and compelling account of one of the landmark events in the African American freedom struggle is scholarly history of prize-winning quality.—David J. Garrow, University of Cambridge

If one is seeking a single book that details most vividly the fanatical intensity of the struggle to maintain racial segregation in the South, this is that volume. It is a remarkable and well-researched chronicle of the historical, political, and social forces that lay behind the violent confrontation at Ole Miss one night in 1962.—William F. Winter, former Governor of Mississippi

The Price of Defiance is a compelling account of the eventual integration of Ole Miss and an important case study in the interaction of politics and higher education. James Meredith's brave determination was pitted against the intransigent white racism of a university that surely knew better and that paid a huge price for the resulting conflagration. In this case the political problem was racism, but university administrators would do well to understand where a confluence of education and politics regarding any popular prejudice can lead.—Nicholas Katzenbach, former United States Attorney General

Editorial Reviews

University of Mississippi historian Eagles turns a critical eye on his own university in this exhaustive and exhausting look at racism at Ole Miss. Although James Meredith, the school's first black student, figures prominently in the title, he takes center stage only in the book's second half, which examines the opposition to his historic 1962 enrollment. With painstaking research and detail, Eagles explores the university's history, from its founding in 1848 as an alternative to Northern universities, where students might be exposed to abolitionist ideas. Eagles also shows how the foundation for Meredith's enrollment was laid by earlier black applicants, who included Medgar Evers (turned down for the law school in 1954) and a pastor named Clennon King, also rejected and placed in a mental hospital for 12 days following a politically motivated "lunacy hearing" after his rejection. In chapters dense with material from court rulings and memoirs by the parties involved, Eagles traces the legal and political standoff before Meredith's first day on campus and the university's eventual confrontation, with the fatal riot that ensued. Photos. (Aug. 1)

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Publishers Weekly

Both Eagles (history, Univ. of Mississippi) and Lambert (history, Purdue Univ.) chronicle James Meredith's efforts to receive the best education available in his home state by attending the University of Mississippi, where blacks were barred by de facto segregation. After serving in the air force, Meredith returned home in 1961 to seek what many veterans did under the G.I. bill: an education ensuring greater opportunity and a realization of the American dream. As Meredith hoped, the federal government committed (if reluctantly) to a show of support for desegregation by sending the U.S. Army and federalizing the Mississippi National Guard to restrain rioters and allow Meredith to register. Although successful in his quest to earn a degree, Meredith was never able to have what many undergraduate students take for granted, to form friendships with other students or find joy in higher education, because he had to be guarded by marshals and military police. To appreciate Meredith's struggle, one must situate him in the culture of 1960s Mississippi, effectively re-created by Eagles, who details the university's segregated way of life regarding everything from sports to beauty pageants while also meticulously presenting the court proceedings. Lambert's treatment of these events is concise, well paced, and more compressed than Eagles's, and it affords readers a greater emotional distance—interestingly so, because Lambert was a student at Ole Miss at the time. VERDICT While both books are good at portraying Meredith's bravery, academics seeking details on the Deep South of this era will prefer Eagles's title, and those without the time or inclination to delve as far into the complexitiesof 1960s Southern higher education and culture will go for Lambert's. —Jim Hahn, Univ. of Illinois Lib., Urbana

Library Journal

With painstaking research and detail, Eagles explores the university's history, from its founding in 1848 as an alternative to Northern universities, where students might be exposed to abolitionist ideas. . . . Traces the legal and political standoff before Meredith's first day on campus and the university's eventual confrontation, with the fatal riot that ensued.—Publishers Weekly

While there have been previous studies of this period, Charles W. Eagles had access to previously unavailable federal and state records, and personal records.—Inside Higher Ed

[A] definitive history of James H. Meredith's 1962 violent integration of the all-white university. . . . Provides a perspective only a dedicated historian can do, tapping deeply into sources, files and unknown documents to bring alive one of the historical civil rights moments of the 20th century.—Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

To appreciate Meredith's struggle, one must situate him in the culture of 1960s Mississippi, effectively re-created by Eagles, who details the university's segregated way of life regarding everything from sports to beauty pageants while also meticulously presenting the court proceedings.—Library Journal

Simply put, this is the best study of this dramatic episode we have. . . . An invaluable contribution to our understanding of an important, complex, arguably pivotal moment in American history.—History News Network

Eagles places the events of the fall of 1962 in the context of the times. . . . His narrative description of the years leading up to 1960 should be required reading for every Mississippi high school senior. . . . Nuanced, fully researched, comprehensive, and written in a way that conveys the immediacy of the events.—Jackson Free Press

Eagles' goal of presenting the wide context of Meredith's fight doesn't prevent him from giving readers a gripping rendition of the events that followed.—Chapter16.org

Never before has this tale of legal and physical skirmishing been told in such detail. . . . Thoroughly researched and clearly written.—American Historical Review

Eagles's work is extraordinarily well researched. . . . The resulting narrative provides an important picture for readers today of the ugliness and hypocrisy of segregation through one individual's valiant effort to end it.—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

A compelling . . . addition to an underdeveloped field of history. . . . Worthy of reading for those interested in the American history of interracial relationships.—Arkansas Review

A fine book. Calm, thorough, and patient, deeply researched and subtly argued.—Journal of American History

A suitably landmark volume for a deservedly landmark event in the civil rights movement.—Arkansas Review

[A] monumental work of scholarship. . . . Completely surpasses other accounts of the desegregation of the University of Mississippi. . . . An indispensable volume that deserves a prominent place on the crowded shelves of civil rights scholarship. . . . Fluently written, rich in informative new evidence, and illuminating on both the individual actors in the drama and the broader institutional dynamics of Mississippi politics and education.—Journal of Southern History

The product of a prodigious scholarly effort. . . . Will no doubt be considered by many to be the definitive account of the Meredith story. . . . A work of enormous scholarship that fills in the details of a turning point in the civil rights movement.—Review of Politics

Well-researched and thoroughly detailed, The Price of Defiance is a valuable study of one [of] the most influential episodes in American Civil Rights history….Well-written and engaging, this piece of modern biography is an accomplishment in the fields of Southern and Civil Rights history." —Southern Historian

The Price of Defiance will no doubt be considered by many to be the definitive account of the Meredith story….It is a work of enormous scholarship that fills in the details of a turning point in the civil rights movement.—The Review of Politics

This now stands as the definitive account of this seminal moment in the struggle for racial equality.—The Historian

From the Publisher