JACKSON - My recent visit to the Ole Miss campus for the 40th anniversary of the institution's historic integration and last week's death of former legislative powerhouse C.B. Buddie Newman have reminded me of how close blundering Mississippi politicians led us to the brink of a catastrophe in 1962.
As it was, two persons were killed and dozens were wounded - among them 80 federal marshals, one of whom was shot in the throat - as bloody rioting erupted on Sept. 30 and Oct 1. The lovely tree-shrouded Oxford campus of the state's pristine university became a strewn battlefield over the federal court-ordered enrollment of James H. Meredith.
But only fate and restraint on the part of then-President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, prevented a shooting war that well could have resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of Ole Miss students in the campus rioting.
And hundreds more could have died 180 miles away in Jackson if the Kennedys had sought to arrest Gov. Ross Barnett, who three times earlier had defied federal decrees, precipitating the bloody showdown between state and federal power.
As rumors of Barnett's possible arrest were spread wildly over Jackson radio stations that fateful Sept 30, a rebel flag-waving mob of 2,000 locked arms in a "wall of flesh" around the historic residence to "protect" Barnett. The governor was holed up inside with his coterie of racial zealot advisers, chief among them William J. Simmons, the white Citizens Council's mastermind.
From an open window in an office building across the street from the Mansion, a prominent mortuary owner who headed the Jackson Citizens Council, egged on the mob to "let no one through."
For the entire month of September 1962, the state had mounted a bitter-end resistance led by an easily manipulated Barnett, surrounded by such advisers that included Newman, then a key Barnett administration legislative leader, to block the 28-year-old Meredith from breaking the state's revered educational color line.
Inevitably, Barnett's wildly conceived defiance would end in a bloody conflagration.
On Sunday afternoon of Sept. 30, Meredith arrived on the Ole Miss campus, escorted by 400 white-helmeted U.S. marshals, who made the Lyceum Building their command post.
Students, returning from a football weekend, began assaulting the feds with missiles and setting their vehicles afire with fire bombs. As the evening wore on, hundreds of outsiders, many armed with weapons, poured onto the campus, and a mini-Civil War had erupted.
By midnight, President Kennedy was forced to order in Mississippi National Guard and regular Army troops to relieve the besieged marshals. During the tumultuous night, embattled U.S. Justice Department officials who accompanied Meredith and the marshals, appealed to the Kennedys for permission to use live ammunition, but they refused.
That left the marshals only with tear gas to disperse the crowd, but as their stock of gas became depleted, the crowd still surged forward.
As would be learned later, Barnett had been secretly negotiating by telephone with both Kennedys, and knew in advance that Meredith would arrive with an escort of marshals. However, he failed to inform university officials.
Barnett had promised the Kennedys he would order the dozens of Mississippi highway patrolmen already in Oxford to maintain order on the campus. That, as it turned out, was a hollow promise.
Late in the afternoon of the 30th, Barnett had dispatched state Sen. George Yarbrough of Red Banks, the Senate president pro-tempore, with an executive order giving him full powers to act as governor to purportedly maintain order on the campus. Barnett sent Newman, Hinds County Judge Russel Moore and state Sen. John McLaurin to join Yarbrough.
But at a critical time as angry outsiders flowed onto the grounds of the 114-year-old university, Yarbrough pulled out the state troopers. Robert Kennedy on the phone entreated Yarbrough in vain to rescind his withdrawal of the troopers. While Yarbrough would later deny he had given such an order, photos and monitored radio communications reveal that patrol cars already were leaving the campus.
Even as President Kennedy at 9 p.m. went on national TV to address the nation, saying he would enforce the laws of the nation even if he had to use troops, and calling on Mississippi authorities to "preserve the law and the peace," a full-fledged battle raged on the campus.
Newman, meanwhile, had flown back to Jackson and rushed to the Governor's Mansion, where he disbelievingly learned that Barnett had issued a statement that he would abandon his course of defying the federal authority.
As this reporter learned weeks later from one of Barnett's more moderate counselors who was present inside the Mansion, Newman was the most vehement of the advisers in pushing Barnett to issue a second statement purportedly declaring he had not surrendered.
By then, however, Mississippi's crisis over admitting one black man to the state's university was writing a tragic chapter in the state's history.
