In September 1962, James Meredith became the first African American
admitted to the University of Mississippi. A milestone in the civil
rights movement, his admission triggered a riot spurred by a mob of
three thousand whites from across the South and all but officially
stoked by the state's segregationist authorities. Historians have called
the Oxford riot nothing less than an insurrection and the worst
constitutional crisis since the Civil War. The escalating conflict
prompted President John F. Kennedy to send twenty thousand regular army
troops, in addition to federalized Mississippi National Guard soldiers,
into the civil unrest (ten thousand into the town itself) to quell
rioters and restore law and order.
James Meredith and the Ole Miss Riot is the memoir of one of the participants, a young army second lieutenant named Henry Gallagher, born and raised in Minnesota. His military police battalion from New Jersey deployed, without the benefit of riot-control practice or advance briefing, into a deadly civil rights confrontation. He was thereafter assigned as the officer-in-charge of Meredith's security detail at a time when he faced very real threats to his life.
Gallagher's first-person
account considers the performance of his fellow soldiers before and
after the riot. He writes of the behavior of the white students, some of
them defiant, others perceiving a Communist-inspired Kennedy conspiracy
in Meredith's entry into Mississippi's "flagship" university. The
author depicts the student, Meredith, a man who at times seemed
disconnected with the violent reality that swirled around him, and who
even aspired to be freed of his protectors so that he could just be
another Ole Miss student.
In September 1962, James Meredith became the first African American admitted to the University of Mississippi. A milestone in the civil rights movement, his admission triggered a riot spurred by a mob of three thousand whites from across the South and all but officially stoked by the state's segregationist authorities.