I was not-quite seven years old the night of the Meredith riot. It was warm enough that the windows at my parent’s house were open. We lived on Eagle Springs Road, which goes up the tallest hill on the north side of town; the bottom for Toby Tuby Creek runs between that hill and the hill on which most of the town sits (if you know Oxford, Price Street comes off the hill on North Lamar and goes down to the bottom as it runs to the Molly Bar Road). Because that hill Eagle Springs ascends faces the hill on which the town and University sit, sounds carry across from the campus– football games, concerts in the Grove, riots and gunfire…
So, my dad was practicing law just off the Square (where I practice now, on Jackson Avenue) and was an adjunct professor at the law school. At the time, the law school was located in Farley Hall, which now houses the Journalism Department. My father was close to Bill Murphy, a constitutional law and labor law professor, and the Dean of the law school, Bob Farley, who ultimately left Mississippi because of their views that the Supreme Court desegregation decisions in Brown where the law of the land.
Dad was on campus when the riot started, over at Farley Hall. Later, I heard that he organized law students he knew to take down tag numbers of cars that were coming into the area, and the tag numbers were given to the FBI.
Meanwhile, I was at home with mom and my brother (aged 5) and sister (aged 3). One of my most distinct memories– a memory that I’m reasonably sure is not based on later family story-telling, but on what I remember from the time– was hearing what sounded to all of us like gun-fire while watching President Kennedy on television calling for calm, too late.
My mother was understandably anxious about her husband’s safety. From across that Toby Tuby bottom, tear gas canisters and gunfire sounded pretty much the same, so what we heard was shooting on campus where my father was. That’s my memory of that night.
I’m not sure whether I remember, or was told, about the planes coming into the airport all night full of soldiers. I’m sure I remember being excited by riding as my father drove through military checkpoints in the succeeding days (there was one pretty close to where Price Street met Vivian Street, I am pretty sure, near where Will Hickman then lived). And I remember going out to the airport and seeing all the military transport planes lined up, wing-to-wing, out there.
I remember enjoying being off from school (the second grade; I was in the first grade at Bramlett Elementary). And then, a lawyer from Houston, Mississippi, who had been one of my father’s law clerks, and was an officer in the National Guard troops who were nationalized to contend with the riots, took dad, my brother, and I on a jeep ride through the national guard camp south of town on Billy Ross Brown’s farm on what is now Old 7 south of the hospital. I came away with great prizes: being able to say I’d ridden in a military jeep, and a box of Army c-rations, which, when school came back into session, I somehow smuggled back to school to show to friends.
As a six-year old, I had no idea what all this was about until much later. My next encounter with the collapse of Jim Crow was in the seventh grade, when a very few “freedom of choice” children enrolled in the all-white school– one, Alva Green, who sat in front of me in math class, and when one of the first Black teachers was assigned to teach science in the white school I attended. That’s another story for another time.
Any truth to the story that the Feds disarmed the local police and actually took the local sheriff into custody? My dad was temporarily transferred that school year, my second grade, so we weren’t in Oxford for the festivities. I vaguely remember the U.S. Army heading south, through Holly Springs, towards UM.
Professor Eagles gave a lecture here last week on the riot. He holds the Winter History Chair at the University now and was introduced by the former Governor who simply stated he was “keeping his head down”. Professor Eagles who was touting his book on the subject called out Charles Clark for representing the Governor. No words of judgment 4 Governor Winter who also had an eye on higher office and was later a member of the Sovereignty Commission. If the Sovereignty Commission minutes were available for historical research we would all be free to make our own minds. The historical period up to 1972 makes this jurisdiction suspect for DOJ review and preclearance of laws.
Your account reminds me of the fear and excitement I felt in response to similar events of the sixties. I envy your having such deep emotional ties to the place you are living your life.
How things change. The feds moved James Meredith in Baxter accross the hall from me. My roommate and I returned from Jackson the night of the riot. We could not get in the front of the campus but went around to the back and made it to our dorm. We then went down to the circle and watched the riot. Teargas was so bad we would go back to our room put wet towels over our eyes for a while and then return to the action. Many years later Meredith ran for some office in Jackson. Had I lived there and been able to vote, I would have voted for him.
Maybe one day all of the Sovereignty Commission files will be opened but we are likely two generations away from that. Does anyone know if the MS Democratic party has ever requested the opening the records? I hazard the answer is “no”, since too many of their stalwarts were members and still have their names to protect.
In the late 70s, the Mississippi ACLU sued to preserve and open the records and won on the preservation front. A couple of the ACLU’s class representatives (Ed King and ____ Salter) splintered” from the group and demanded that people mentioned in files have a right to keep their files under seal. The court ultimately ruled that people would have a personal right to keep their files under seal, although very few people availed themselves of that opportunity. But the files themselves are preserved and open in the State Archives. You can search online to see if a particular name is mentioned, and then look at the documents themselves online.
Unfortunately, the files themselves were probably purged– for years before the ACLU sued (a suit prompted because the state was going to destroy the papers), the files were in a room in the state capitol that any legislature could enter (and make sure nothing embarrassing might be contained therein). There is a cache of them, probably not purged, in the papers of Earle Johnston, who was Barnett’s campaign manager and then press secretary (and wrote a book about it, I Rolled With Ross, which always sounded to me like I Was A Communist For The FBI.
One of the first things I did on the internet was in 1998. The week before the papers went public, I got a list of the names mentioned and created a series of tables that allowed people to search through it, set it up in HTML, and made a web pages that allowed anyone with internet access to learn who was mentioned in the papers. I happened to be learning to use HTML at the time because I was creating my law firm’s web page…. In any event, the first day the papers were public, I had a way for people to search the names up on the state ACLU’s website.
Hootie: I defer to you greater knowledge of Sovereignty Commission files, but I was under the impression that ALL that crap was ordered to be, and was, delivered to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and that MDAH digitized everything and made it available on the Internet. What remains undisclosed … and why … where … by whom … under what authority?
Ben, see my comment, just before yours. To my knowledge there are perhaps three files– Ed King and another early 60s civil rights figure (who was a friend of King’s) and Richard Barrett (who weirdly enough put his file online at the same time he was opposing it being public. I think his file may be available now)– that are not public. And it’s possible even all of those are now in the public domain.
Ahead of the curve again, Tom–
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/us/university-of-mississippi-commemorates-integration.html?ref=us
I think you mean John Salter, NMC. John was a colleague of Ed King’s, and was in the car with him when a group of local whites here in Jackson forced another car into the path of their vehicle, causing a wreck that seriously injured both of them. That was in the summer of 1963.
That’s right, Dragoman.
The minutes or the proceedings of the Sovereignty Commission would clearly show the politician’s dirty laundry as opposed to the files on the government suspects. The investigative arm of the state is now in the Governor’s Office or perhaps the Highway Safety Patrol. Governor Waller killed the Sovereignty Commission. He was a former military counterintel officer and district attorney so he could handle his own investigation files. It would be a great service if Jerry Mitchell would find the missing minutes of the commission.
I dreamed that someone copied quite a number of the files on the theory that they would be destroyed and that they ought to be preserved. In my dream I was told this, by the copier, over cocktails and don’t know what happened to the copies, but I enjoyed the cocktails.
Some of these files are terribly inaccurate. I looked up the name of a man I knew in my home town and he was in the online files. He was paid an official visit at his real estate development at Snow Lake, Mississippi.
He told the investigators that he was a native-born Mississippian, than he was a staunch segregationist, and that the shareholders in his corporation were from Alabama. I don’t doubt that he said these things, but in fact he was from Missouri, he was relatively moderate and kept the hard-liners out of the local academy, and his business partners were from Massachusetts. The reason he was investigated was because the Sovereignty Commission had heard he was selling to blacks (he wasn’t) from another real estate developer who was trying to close him down, and he was more than willing to tell any story to stay in business. My point is don’t trust these files overmuch.
I’ve looked at a lot of the files, much of which consist of newspaper clippings, with occasional re-telling of gossip. The most interesting thing is the sort of thing your describing, CRS, and how it connects to actual reality.
One of my favorite investigations took place in Philadelphia, within a year or so the killing of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. There was a gas station downtown. It did not have a “Colored” restroom. There was a Black employee at the station. When he was the only one on duty, he’d duck behind the station, where there was a hedge that gave him privacy, when nature called.
The hedge was cut down. Nature called when he was alone, and he looked both ways, and slipped into the men’s room. Someone saw him, and reported it to the Sov. Comm., which sent an investigator. The station owner assured the investigator that his employee was a good man, not a threat to the Southern way of life, and that it was just a combination of unfortunate facts. The investigator questioned the employee, and came away convinced it was a one-off thing and not a men’s room sit in, went back to Jackson, a wrote a memo about the investigation.
The investigator questioned the employee, and came away convinced it was a one-off thing and not a men’s room sit in, went back to Jackson, and wrote a memo about the investigation.
My first thought is: Izzat for real, Tom? But within two heartbeats I recognize: Yep … that’s the way it was.
We read history with the smug assuredness that Germany’s Gestapo, East Germany’s Stasi, Iran’s Savak, the modern derivatives of Russia’s Cheka, Saudi Arabia’s Mahabith, China’s MSS, and other state secret police are merely aberrations of totalitarian regimes somewhere way across the pond from us. We need to read it again: we have done it to ourselves in the past and I’d venture that odds are good we’ll do it again.
There are some scary people out there. Put two or more of them together … you can get some fierce results. The fact that they often are pure fools does not diminish their potential levels of dangerousness.
I sometimes wonder if Meredith’s Ole Miss experience permamently traumatized him. He often says things that strike me as coming from someone with mental problems.