(5 of 7)
During the next few hours, additional military units poured into Oxford in a swelling tide that by early morning had engulfed the campus and the town. Shortly before 8 a.m., Marshal McShane and two other men accompanied Meredith in a car to the battered Lyceum to register. They met with no resistance. Meredith listed his academic goal as a degree in political science, claimed credits (from extension courses) that would enable him to get a degree in a year and a half.
The campus was a nightmarish shambles, strewn with wrecked vehicles, hunks of concrete, countless tear-gas canisters, and the green chips of thousands of smashed Coke bottles. Oxford and its environs swarmed with soldiers—some 16,000 of them, more than the combined civilian population of town and university. As if making up for calling out troops belatedly, the Administration had finally called out far more than could possibly have been needed.
Death in the Dark. Two men had been killed, both of them noncombatants gunned down in the darkness of the campus. Paul Guihard, a French newspaperman representing Agence France-Presse, was shot in the back while covering the battle. An Oxford workman named Ray Gunter was shot in the forehead while merely watching it. A total of 166 marshals, 30% of all those sent to Oxford, suffered injuries or wounds, along with some 40 soldiers and National Guardsmen.
Most of the attackers, operating in darkness as members of a mob, escaped not only injury but arrest. Marshals and MPs took about 200 prisoners, but most of them were soon released for lack of solid evidence. Of those prisoners, only 24 were Ole Miss students; another score or so were students from other Mississippi colleges and from Southwestern at Memphis College. The rest, pretty seedy specimens, were intruders who had nothing to do with any university." A dozen of them, including men from Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas as well as Mississippi, were arraigned on charges of insurrection, seditious conspiracy and other serious offenses.
The only prisoner with a claim to fame was Edwin A. Walker. He had arrived in Mississippi the day before the battle, proclaiming that the court orders on Meredith were part of "the conspiracy of the crucifixion by Antichrist conspirators of the Supreme Court." On the night of the battle, he was observed by newsmen and a campus minister to be holding forth at a sort of informal command post. Every now and then somebody would run up to him and ask for military counsel. One man who got close to him reported that "there was a wild, dazed look in his eyes." Late that morning, soldiers at a roadblock arrested Walker as he was attempting to leave town in a car. He was arraigned on charges of insurrection and seditious conspiracy and sent to the U.S. prison and medical center in Springfield, Mo., for observation. At week's end he was released on $50,000 bond.