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Meredith's battle to get into Ole Miss was a continuation of a struggle that traces back to when he was 15 years old. As a boy on his father's farm in the Mississippi backlands. he had never perceived the gulfs that separated whites and Negroes. But when he was 15. his father drove the family to Detroit to visit relatives. James and a brother stayed behind when the family went back to Mississippi. When the time came for the brothers to go home, they went by train. "The train wasn't segregated when we left Detroit.'' Meredith recalls. "But when we got to Memphis the conductor told my brother and me we had to go to another car. I cried all the way home from Memphis, and in a way I have cried ever since.''
In January 1961. after nine years in the U.S. Air Force, Meredith wrote a letter applying for admission to the University of Mississippi. The university fended Meredith off in the courts, but once the legal battle was lost, they were prepared to submit and let Meredith enroll. Then Mississippi's fumbling Governor Ross Barnett interfered (TIME. Oct. 5). Barnett's overt defiance of the law provided a cause to rally around, not only for Ole Miss students, but for racists all over Mississippi and in other Southern states.
In Texas, a weird call to arms was sounded by Edwin A. Walker, sometime U.S. Army major general, who resigned his commission after being officially admonished for wild right-wing talk. Walker appealed to Americans "from every state" to march to Barnett's aid. His cry rang out all over the Deep South with a special meaning—for Walker was the man who commanded the U.S. troops that President Eisenhower sent to Little Rock in 1957.
A Haunting Gibe. After several abortive attempts to get Meredith registered, it became dismayingly obvious that it was going to take a very large force to carry out the court's orders. Attorney General Robert Kennedy summoned 500-odd federal marshals and deputy marshals from all over the nation to the U.S. Naval Air Station near Memphis. Tenn.. 80 miles from Oxford. President Kennedy put aides to work drafting two speeches to the nation—one to be delivered if Barnett stepped aside, the other if he persisted in his defiance. The President still hoped to avoid sending military forces into Oxford. At one point during the 1960 campaign, he had said in reference to Little Rock: "There is more power in the presidency than to let things drift and then suddenly call out the troops." All during the Ole Miss crisis, that gibe at Eisenhower must have haunted John Kennedy. He desperately wanted to be able to avoid any accusations that he had let things drift and then suddenly called out the troops.
The day before his TV speech, the President sent Barnett a telegram demanding to know "this evening" whether the Governor and his officials would "cooperate in maintaining law and order." Barnett telephoned the President at 7:30 p.m. and evasively asked for more time to frame his reply. At 10 p.m., he called Attorney General Kennedy and said that he could not agree to the President's demands.