The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [400]
Meredith was black, and the governor did not intend to allow a man of another race to attend what he considered a white man’s university. Barnett read a proclamation that he did “hereby finally deny you admission to the University of Mississippi.” The crowd beneath, listening on portable radios, heard the words and hooted and screamed as the three men departed. “Communist!” they shouted at Meredith. “Nigger, go home!”
Kennedy had tried to use the law as the engine to advance civil rights. Again and again in these crisis-filled years, moments such as this arose, when the law of the land came up against customs that were considered higher law codifying an immutable social logic. Kennedy sought accommodation, not confrontation, but not at the price of turning back from what he considered the forward march of justice and freedom. He was a politician, however, and he knew that these spectacles of protest and defiance risked tearing apart the Democratic coalition. He could win all these battles except for the last one, his reelection in 1964. Thus, justice had to be meted out gingerly, with full warning given to allow those who opposed him to back off without penalty or strife.
Those who believe that history provides a series of axioms to live by are as doomed to make mistakes as those who ignore the lessons completely. Bobby attempted to do in Mississippi what he had successfully managed in the Freedom Rider confrontations the previous spring in Alabama. At that time he had worked with a segregationist governor who realized that the high price of anarchy would be paid primarily by his fellow Alabamians. He had worked also with a few police officials to whom law and order was more than a slogan. In the end the mob had stepped back from the precipice of massive bloodshed, their anger boiling itself out primarily in taunts and shouts. Unfortunately, Governor Barnett of Mississippi was not Governor Patterson of Alabama, Colonel Thomas B. Birdsong of the Mississippi highway patrol was not Floyd Mann of the Alabama state police, and the rabble of Mississippi were far readier for a brutal, bloody confrontation than their counterparts in Alabama.
There would be those who would view these protesters descending on the college town of Oxford as beady-eyed cretins pouring out of the thickets and the swamps, the trailer parks and shacks. The reality was that the student protesters were many of the proudest sons and daughters of old Mississippi. And it was the good citizens of their parents’ generation who loudly sang the song of anarchy, unlocking the doors to shadowy men willing to do their deeds.
“Thousand Said Ready to Fight for Mississippi,” headlined the Jackson Daily News, as if this were 1861, not a century later. On Saturday evening, September 29, 1962, Barnett appeared in Jackson at Memorial Stadium, where Ole Miss played the Kentucky Wildcats. “I love Mississippi,” he shouted over the loudspeakers from the fifty-yard line. “I love her people.” And then, as the applause rose to a deafening ovation beyond even that merited by the triumph of Ole Miss on the football turf, the governor screamed: “I love our customs!” There were those in the stadium ready to march at that moment, and when they left after the game, they saw the rebel flag flying from homes and office buildings and turned on radio stations playing “Dixie,” a marching song not of nostalgia but of war.
The following afternoon the president called Governor Barnett for the first time. As was often the case around the Kennedy men, there was jock bravado, a joshing, taunting air.