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NAME: Dr. James MeredithDOB: 6/25/1933 |
We wonder what the hell James Meredith was buying to sell his soul to the devil as much as he did. For those who know the history of the Civil Rights Movement and recognize that name, yes it is the same James Meredith that thirty years ago became the first black student at the University of Mississippi, one of the more pivotal moments in the movement. Yes, it is the same James Meredith that marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and almost killed for standing up for his civil and human rights, and who said the objective for all of us is "complete freedom, complete rights and privileges for each citizen in this democracy." Why is he here? Meredith rejects all of this now, to the point of one time working for Jesse Helms and endorsing David Duke when he ran for the US Senate in Louisiana. It is a sad, sad fall that breaks a lot of hearts, but the insult that is James Meredith will not go on any further without a response.
Born June 25, 1933, in Kosciusko, Mississippi, Meredith served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1960, including a tour of duty in Japan. He then attended Jackson State College for two years before attempting to transfer to the University of Mississippi, After being twice rejected, Meredith, with the help of the NAACP'S Medgar Evers and NAACP attorney Constance Baker Motley from New York City, filed a complaint with the district court in May 1961. Meredith's allegations that he been denied admission because of his color was rejected by the district court. However, on appeal, the Fifth Judicial Circuit Court reversed this ruling. By a 2 to 1 decision the judges decided that Meredith had indeed been refused admission solely because of his race and that Mississippi was maintaining a policy of educational segregation. The court ordered the university to desegregate and admit Meredith.
This did not go unopposed by whites in Mississippi, most notably then-governor Ross Barnett. By accounts, Barnett's actions and his demagogically climactic stadium speech at a football game at Jackson at the end of September 1962, were deliberately designed to foment racist mob violence, an account that is supported by the fact Barnett was a White Citizen Council member. The next day, thousands of heavily armed white Mississippians milling around downtown Jackson in a huge sea of Confederate flags -- many of the armed people, six and eight abreast, surrounding the Governor's Mansion in order to "protect" the Governor from the US marshals who were rumored to be coming to arrest him on contempt charges for multiple violations of US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and US Supreme Court orders (The US marshals never came). White Citizens Council leaders were haranguing the huge crowd with bull-horns from the Plaza Building, right across from the Gov's Mansion. That night, all hell broke loose at the University's Oxford Campus, Meredith's first night there. Things got to the point that US Attorney General, Robert Kennedy sent federal marshals to protect Meredith from threats of being lynched. When the smoke cleared, 160 marshals were wounded (28 by gunfire) and two bystanders were killed. Bob Dylan would later write the song "Oxford Town" about this day.
The first semester was tough, Meredith saying that he was not made to feel like a student at the school, but he did return the following semester. "I (went) back for a second semester because I saw signs that gave me hope that I will be able to go to school in the future under adequate, if not ideal, conditions," he said at the time. "No student should have to be subjected to the sort of fanfare I underwent during the first semester. Though no price is too high to pay for liberation, I am convinced that you can pay a price for one piece of freedom that is greater than the benefits you get." Meredith successfully graduated in 1964, and his account of this experience, Three Years in Mississippi was published in 1966. Of that book, a reviewer for Newsweek wrote, "Seldom is a piece of violent history so dispassionately dissected by one of its participants as it has been by James Meredith in this three-years-later study of his breakthrough at the University of Mississippi. Part report and part legal brief, part manifesto, part tract, it is a valuable and fascinating account."
1966 was also the year that Meredith organized the "Walk Against Fear," a one-man march from Memphis to Jackson against the physical violence faced by African-Americans exercising their voting rights. While on that march, Meredith was shot by a sniper hiding in a grove of trees. He took a month to recover from that attack and when he was physically able to resume the march, he did so, joined this time by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other prominent civil rights leaders of the day.
His one other milestone in this era was an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1972. As the years went on he had written several books and has spoken at numerous colleges. Then he started to lose it.
Shockwave No. 1 came in 1989 when he signed on for a stint on the staff of arch-conservative (read: racist) Senator Jesse Helms during his re-election campaign against Charlotte Mayor Harvey B. Gantt, himself the first black man to enroll at Clemson University in 1963. This was the campaign that Helms was almost certain to lose until he came out with an ad campaign weeks before the election that played on the fears of whites in North Carolina of African Americans taking their jobs away from them with affirmative action. Helms went on to win that, cheered on by Meredith who started to feel the heat from those who felt he abandoned him. The heat got turned up a notch when in 1991, Meredith endorsed David Duke in his bid for US Senate "The difference between James Meredith and other civil rights leaders is that Meredith came to realize that forced integration was not a good thing for black people or for white people," Duke said at the time. "He thinks that integration has really beheaded the black community. It has hurt the integrity of the black community. It's hurt the educational standards for blacks. It's really brought about a lot of racial tension. Integration has produced things in this country like skinheads. There are massive numbers of white young people with intense dislike of minorities."
Now folks were pissed and wanted to know what was going on.
Meredith had by this time explained himself in a 1990 interview published in the neo-Confederate Southern Partisan. In the interview, he said that he had always been on the right and that the liberals through the media kept the population thinking he was one of them. "The white liberals were the ones who concocted the scheme of the so-called civil rights movement, and their principal objective was to establish the black as a second class of citizenship," he said. "That's something that had never been attempted before."
Never been attempted? What the hell would he call him being denied admission to Ole Miss? "Well as far as I'm concerned, (whites) would have been crazy not to fight against me, because I went there to fight them," he said. "I went there to take their good thing away from them." Years later on CSPAN, he even defended Gov. Barnett's actions in Oxford, saying that they, including his speech at the football game, were intended to protect blacks by focusing the white reaction towards Kennedy and the US Government!"
He didn't stop there. In the Southern Partisan interview he railed against virtually everything and everyone that fought and died for him. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. was blasted. "There's no question in my mind but that his philosophy was damaging to the black race," he said. "No citizen should ever give up his rights. To give up your rights is un-American." Meredith is referring to King's philosophy of non-violence, which he says acceding to is "giving up your manhood."
In 1998, Meredith went back to his alma mater to lecture students during his "Black Man's March for Education," which was part of an effort to raise awareness about the problems of black illiteracy. It was there that Meredith dropped a bomb saying that he was did not consider himself African American but rather native American! "In the Choctaw Nation, just like in England still, you have aristocratic nations," Meredith said. "The people who govern society belong to specific families. I'm in that line. If the Choctaw Nation was still in existence, my father would have been the leader."
He continued by saying that white leaders began enslaving Native Americans and calling them "blacks" during the 1830's. Meredith said that most black Mississippians were probably descendents of the Choctaw Indians. "That's the last time I'm hearing Afro-American without straightening it out," he corrected one student. "I'm not Afro-American; I'm Native American. Afro-American is a politically-correct term."
Not content with insulting the assembled black student body that much, he then went on to say he believed blacks should be taught English as a second language to insure that they can read, write and spell proper English. "The black students here do not know the basic rules of the language," Meredith said. "Whether any of you learn it or not, I feel like it is my responsibility to tell you that. I don't care if you get mad as long as you correct the problem."
And mad is what they got. Many of the black students knew they did not deserve that, and certainly did not consider themselves a part of the problem that needed to be corrected. One freshman shouted at him in tears before leaving saying, "I will honor what you did in 1962, and I will honor you for taking that bullet for your cause. I came here expecting to hear what you went through, but today you have disgraced me and made me feel ignorant." There were more outbursts of anger before the lecture was cut after a heated exchange between Meredith and the head of the Black Student Union.
Meredith's account of his lineage had been questioned on a discussion board a few years back. One particular post correctly noted that almost all Southern Blacks have some Indian ancestry, and with the exception of the Eastern Cherokee, located in the NC mountain country, almost all Southern Indians have some African ancestry. The post also notes that the Mississippi Band of Choctaws is and always has been very much intact and have they handily survived various efforts to do away with them as a tribe. Most importantly, there is no way whatsoever that Meredith's father could have become a Choctaw chief. Even with some Indian ancestry, he was not an Indian -- and another family has had the Choctaw chiefdom sewn up down there for a hell of long time!
In 1991 Meredith went back to Mississippi after working with Helms and staged more political campaigns, once again for Congress and another for Mayor of Jackson, Miss. Both were unsuccessful as they should be. That discussion board poster said it best: "Jim Meredith is a human tragedy. He went through an incredibly challenging crucible -- stood up extraordinarily well. And then, over time, he began to crumble. The pieces are now widely scattered. Not all Movement casualties have come from bullets and clubs and dynamite and rigged auto wrecks."