TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2
RECEPTION AT 5:00, TALK AT 5:30
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.
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.