Ole Miss Still Speaks Volumes Today

Todd Nelson
Aug 23, 2017 · 4 min read

Robert C. Nelson’s Western Union dispatch in 1962

By Todd Nelson

My father was a journalist and covered the height of the civil rights movement, going to Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. In 1962, he covered the integration of Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, by James H. Meredith. I just discovered his coverage.

September 1962 had been a terse month. On the 10th, the Supreme Court ruled that African-American student and veteran James H. Meredith must be admitted to the university. On the 26th, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, ordered state troopers to prevent it. On Sept. 30th riots erupted. On Oct. 1st, Meredith became the first African-American student at the university. President Kennedy had ordered U.S. marshals to ensure his safety. Dad witnessed it all.

A few weeks ago, my son discovered archives at the University of Mississippi containing my dad’s dispatches. “Annotated article by Robert C. Nelson to The Christian Science Monitor, 30th September 1962,” is the title of his yellow Western Union copy sheet. There was his distinctive handwriting in the margins correcting, revising, changing the vocabulary he used to describe the violence. Then he wired it to Boston.

It has resurfaced at an interesting moment.

Here is his lede: “All the ugliness of a mob unleashed swirled around the decisive, historic final effort to register a Negro (sic) at the University of Mississippi.”

And then the “nut ‘graph.” “Even as President Kennedy broadcast an appeal to Mississippians to substitute dignity for defiance in the case of James H. Meredith, Ole Miss students at riot pitch mauled cars, shouted obscenities at women, jumped photographers, let air out of U.S. Army truck tires, set fire to their tarpaulins, threw rocks and roared “We want Meredith” and “Get a rope.” Mississippi State highway patrolmen stood by until the rioters had smashed a Texas cameraman’s car, pummeled him and screamed vulgarities at his wife before they casually stepped in and sped the pair away in a squad car. Mr. Meredith stayed out of sight in a guarded campus apartment.”

His syntax and verbs alone suggest dad was simmering, struggling for objectivity. The events sounded like Charlottesville, August 2017. Are they a distant mirror?

The second paragraph gave context for the disintegration of order and rapidly veering events. “Speaking from his official mansion in Jackson shortly after President Kennedy’s nationally broadcast comment, Governor Barnett expressed his sadness at the Meredith mission being accomplished on the campus of his alma mater. Federal authorities, he charged, were destroying the Constitution. His capitulation, he said in effect, had come only after federal forces had encircled his cause.”

The images Charlottesville, of the largest white supremacist rally in decades, felt like a hoary ghost of America past — confrontation masquerading as free speech, hate speech, purposeful violence, declaration of an emergency, and the tragic death of a protestor. Echoes of Nazi Germany, torch lit processions and chants of “Blood and soil,” reverberated around the world. “Free Speech” Demonstrators wore helmets and carried long guns, sticks, pepper spray…in an open carry state.

Déjà vu? No, this is new, precisely because it is a scene we assumed we had outgrown.

But the past is prologue in terms of the dangers of equivocation — the wrong kinds of tolerance and intolerance. We’re confronted once more with the ancient adversary: our worst selves.

Dad also referenced “…the complete silence of voices of reason — from members of the Ole Miss faculty and administration.” He said it “has left the way open for the voices of emotion to hold sway throughout much of the Meredith crisis. Governor Ross R. Barnett’s political leadership rooted in repeated defiance of national laws and in unyielding devotion to racial segregation, has dominated the scene.” Sound familiar?

Still to come? Selma, Birmingham, the March on Washington, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a couple of weeks away, that pivotal confrontation with a foreign adversary, that also feels eerily echoed by recent events in North Korea. From the vantage point of 1962, it was not yet certain that our better selves would move this arc toward justice. They did.

Todd R. Nelson is an educator and writer in Penobscot, Maine. Robert C. Nelson was Midwestern correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in 1962, and went on to be a foreign correspondent and American News Editor for the paper. He was a Neiman Fellow at Harvard in 1969.

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