History – like any person’s story – is messy +t doesnot fit into neat Doxes
Kavita Puri is a journalist and broadcaster for BBC Radio 4 whose history series include Three Pounds in My Pocket. She is also the author of (Bloomsbury, 2019)
EIGHTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD JAMES MEREDITH walks into Bully’s Soul Food Restaurant, a traditional eaterie in Jackson, Mississippi. He is wearing a snappy white suit and cap, and is greeted like a hero. Everyone knows who he is. Black Americans stop him: they want to take a selfie, shake his hand, thank him for what he has done, tell him how his actions changed their life.
BBC radio producer Conor Garrett recounted this anecdote to me shortly after that telling episode. He had recently gone to Jackson to interview Meredith about a key moment in the civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, Meredith applied and fought all the way up to the US Supreme Court for the right to be the first black American to be accepted into the all-white state University of Mississippi. At the time Mississippi was the most racially segregated state in the US.
Meredith’s epic fight is an extraordinary story. It culminated in President John F Kennedy calling the state governor, Ross Barnett, demanding that he apply the Supreme Court ruling and allow Meredith to enrol. The court was enforcing the landmark 1954 judgment of Brown v Board of Education, which ruled that segregation in education was unconstitutional.
Garrett has documented the twists and turns of this period of history in Breaking Mississippi, a 10-part BBC podcast based on a lengthy interview with Meredith, presented by US public radio journalist Jenn White, and using archive audio from the time.
Listening to this series, it’s shocking to hear journalist Alan Whicker’s BBC reports from the campus as white students – as well as members of the Ku Klux Klan and clergymen carrying guns – protest against Meredith, and explain why he should not be allowed to join the university. The demonstrations led to riots in which two people died. The events have been described as the last battle of the American Civil War.
Eventually, on 1 October 1962, Meredith was allowed to start his studies at the University of Mississippi – its first black American student – after the president sent federal marshals to ‘Ole Miss’. But his harassment didn’t end. Someone bounced a basketball on the floor above his room at all times of the day and night so he could never sleep. Ostracised, vilified and harassed, he nonetheless graduated in 1963 with a degree in political science.
This is not a story about which I knew – and neither did Garrett when he was asked to take part in the project. Though it’s more familiar in the US, it made me think about who we remember in history and who we don’t. Because if you dig deeper into James Meredith’s story, you discover how complicated it is, and what a controversial figure he later became.
Meredith’s actions in the 1960s were key in the civil rights movement, but he did not see himself as part of it, and was sometimes critical of its leaders. He disavowed Martin Luther King’s repudiation of violence, and believed it could be necessary to take up arms.
He went on to support the unsuccessful 1967 gubernatorial bid of Ross Barnett – the former Mississippi governor who so strongly opposed Meredith’s enrolment into the university, and who had declared that “no school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your governor”. Meredith also backed David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, for governor of Louisiana in 1991, which is hard to understand.
But history – like any person’s story – is messy. It doesn’t fit into neat boxes, and neither should it. Stories like Meredith’s are important to tell and re-tell. We like to think of those times, those attitudes, as having been relegated to the past. At one stage in the BBC radio documentary, Meredith says: “I am George Floyd.” He believes that a line can be traced from his experience to the murder of Floyd in Minnesota at the hands of a policeman in May 2020, refuelling the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide. Meredith – who was born in 1933, at a time when the Jim Crow laws were still in force – believes that his lifelong, if unconventional, fight for racial justice and equality is still relevant, and should be learned from around the world. His crusade is also a living reminder of the power of the individual to instigate change.