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This chapter examines the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down state-mandated segregation in public education, and its implications for southern authoritarian enclaves. With the Brown shock, Mississippi's rulers faced their first major black insurgency in decades. A standoff between the state's governors and the White Citizens' Council (WCC) forces led to a stalemate over the development of an effective coercive apparatus, with negative consequences for managing the desegregation crisis at the University of Mississippi. The chapter first considers the state of black education prior to Brown before discussing the crisis, triggered by the university's refusal to admit James Meredith—who was black— and Mississippi's resistance to the decision. It shows how a combination of intraelite dissensus and weak party–state capacities help explain the enclave's navigation of the desegregation crisis at the University of Mississippi.

In this chapter the author recounts Nichols’s last years. From 1846 until 1848, Nichols moved to northwestern Mississippi and completed his last large-scale project: the planning and building of the University of Mississippi in Oxford. His later designs, the Chickasaw Female Academy in Pontotoc, the Yazoo County Courthouse in Yazoo City, and his final design, the Lexington Female Academy in Lexington, were quite modest. He did design one last grand residence, Shamrock, a brick, three story, square-built Greek Revival in Vicksburg. Still designing, Nichols died in 1853 and was buried among strangers in an Odd Fellows Cemetery in Lexington, Mississippi, nearly 900 miles away from the shores of North Carolina where his journey in America had begun fifty-three years earlier.

Through an examination of the existing records of slaves once held at Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, contributor W. Ralph Eubanks explores the connection between these slaves who helped build the University of Mississippi and Faulkner’s fiction, as well as a new narrative that is evolving about Faulkner, slavery, and the University of Mississippi. Further, the essay evokes questions about how Faulkner constructed the relationship between Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, a relationship that has the University of Mississippi as a backdrop. Whether or not Faulkner had knowledge of the connections between the University of Mississippi and slavery, this new narrative twist makes us look at this relationship—as well as its historical context—in a new light.

This chapter examines the theologies of supporters and opponents of the controversial “Born of Conviction” statement, signed by twenty-eight white ministers from Mississippi as a declaration of their opposition to segregation. Written in the wake of the riot that erupted at the University of Mississippi in September 1962, “Born of Conviction” became a full-fledged argument among whites in Mississippi about the civil rights movement and the efforts of those behind it to end the segregation as well as white supremacy. This chapter discusses the significance of “Born of Conviction” in relation to the local congregational publics of white Mississippi Methodism and in bringing about change in race relations in the state.

This introductory chapter traces the history of the University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) scholarly journal, the Southern Quarterly, which it established in 1962. From its beginnings as a modest in-house publishing venue to showcase the work of the Southern Miss faculty, to its transformation into an up-and-coming journal of southern studies published by USM, to its editorial drift as a mature journal in the 1990s and early 2000s, and then to crisis and revival in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Southern Quarterly has always been a work in progress.

On 17 May 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled unanimously in Brown v The Board of Education that segregated public schools are unconstitutional. This chapter describes massive resistance organized by politicians and white supremacist groups throughout the South. Crises are described at Clinton High in Tennessee, Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama, Tuskegee High School in Alabama, and Clemson University in South Carolina as well as the courage of the Reverends Turner, Boggs, Cartwright, Ogden, Campbell, Gray, Davis, Sellers, Morris, Cousins, Lyles, Jackson, and Webster at these locations. It includes statements in support of the decision by the governing boards of major religious denominations, twenty-eight young ministers of the Mississippi Methodist Conference, and contributors to South Carolinians Speak, a booklet on moderation. Later the Supreme Court backed away from enforcing school integration. Scholars Wright, Jacoway, Wolters, Bell, Higgins, and Snider comment.

This chapter examines the implications of James Meredith's attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962 for the Jim Crow South and the white leadership in Mississippi. The central question arising from the Meredith crisis was how far members of the white hierarchy would be willing to go to maintain segregation in higher education. Ross Barnett and the Citizens' Council forced a reluctant federal government to intervene, resulting in the eruption of violence on the campus. Others, like Joe T. Patterson, were more willing to bend in order to maintain as much power as possible. This chapter first discusses Meredith's fight for admission to Ole Miss that culminated in Meredith v. Fair as well as Patterson's attempt to keep Meredith out of the university. It then considers the US Supreme Court ruling in favor of Meredith and the US Department of Justice's involvement in the case. It also explores Patterson's the behind-the-scenes efforts to finally allow Meredith to enter the campus.

This chapter focuses on the pressures faced by University of Mississippi historian James Silver after he published the book Mississippi: The Closed Society in 1966. Silver, president of the Southern Historical Association (SHA) in 1963, found himself ostracized by whites from Jim Crow South that year after he called white Mississippi a “Closed Society” intolerant of new thinking on issues of race. As a staunch defender of James Meredith’s right to an education at Ole Miss, he did something that was a definite taboo in white southern society: he provided written testimony to the U.S. Justice Department about the riots on campus the night Meredith enrolled. Nevertheless, state education leaders found a way to encourage and allow him to leave Mississippi without sparking national condemnation.

This chapter analyzes the implications of James Meredith's efforts to get into Ole Miss. It suggests that the fight for white men's and women's minds had not yet resulted in a victory for equality at Ole Miss, just as it had not in the rest of the nation. The University of Mississippi was not unique because the race problem in the white mind was not a problem specific to Ole Miss, Mississippi, or the South: it was an American dilemma. Conflicts between ideals and practices characterized race relations throughout the nation, not just in Mississippi or at Ole Miss.

This chapter describes the history, environment, students, and faculty of the University of Mississippi. In 1960 the university represented for whites one of the few remaining redoubts of the glories of the Old South. Ole Miss stood for the nobility of the Lost Cause, the honor of Confederate veterans, and the gentility of the state's landed aristocracy. Whites also expected their university to serve as a bulwark for the racial orthodoxy that stressed the continuation of racial segregation. In his challenge to the closed society, prospective student James Meredith understood the university's complex, prominent place in the lives of whites.

This chapter focuses on J. D. Williams, who worked to enhance Ole Miss within a context increasingly dominated by race, throughout his twenty-two years as chancellor (1946–68). Williams sought to transform the university “from a small and in some ways almost proprietary institution into a full-grown large university,” and realized that any agitation of the race question would imperil his primary objective by provoking retaliation by the state's segregationist leadership. After the momentous Brown decision in 1954, stiffening segregationist sentiment made his task of protecting Ole Miss even more difficult. As the civil rights movement strengthened, both in the nation and eventually in Mississippi, the dangers for the university posed by race only intensified.

This chapter examines how Joe T. Patterson handled the ruling in the James Meredith case as Mississippi attorney general. Patterson claimed that he had defied “a little band of would-be ruthless dictators” in defending his role in the integration of the University of Mississippi. He tried to balance his duties as attorney general and subsequent commitment to both state and federal law with his allegiance to Jim Crow and the flood of criticism over his role in the downfall of a segregated Ole Miss. He criticized the judicial and executive branches of the federal government, particularly their alleged use of the same tactics “again and again” to shift the issue of desegregation of higher education to the South. This chapter considers Patterson's attempt to clear his name as he prepared to campaign for a third term as state attorney general in the 1963 election against Senator Anselm McLaurin. It also discusses the gubernatorial race pitting James P. Coleman against Paul Johnson.

This chapter describes the riot spawned by the impending arrival of James Meredith and the presence of federal marshals at the University of Mississippi. In the riot's first hours, outsiders streamed in and swelled the mob to more than two thousand. During the evening more people came from various Mississippi communities but also from neighboring states. The army arrived to secure the campus and pushed the rioters into Oxford. Violence and chaos were not completely eliminated but merely transferred from gown to town.

This chapter focuses on black minister and college professor Clennon Washington King, who arrived at Ole Miss on June 5, 1958 to register for the first session of summer school. Weeks earlier King had announced his intention to break the color barrier, but unlike other blacks interested in attending the university, he actually went to Oxford. His family background and his experiences in Mississippi encouraged him to believe that he would be allowed to enroll, that he was prepared for such an intrepid move, and that conservative whites would support him. However, the results of King's quixotic action surprised and disappointed him; Mississippi once again demonstrated its intransigent opposition to integration at Ole Miss.

This chapter describes events that occurred following James Meredith's decision to register for the second semester at the University of Mississippi. He announced his intention to enroll as an individual and not as a symbol. Campus disruptions declined mainly due to factors such as reduced press attention and students's reduced interest in the integration issue. At 5:12 p.m. on August 19, 1963, thirty-one months after first applying to the university, Meredith walked to the platform and received his Ole Miss diploma from Chancellor Williams.

This chapter describes the many changes in Mississippi since the 1960s. These include the sale by the Hederman family of the Clarion-Ledger, the Daily News, the Hattiesburg American, and six weeklies to Gannett in April 1982; the growing number of African American students at the University of Mississippi; the passage in 2006 of legislation directing the State Department of Education to teach civil and human rights education in the state’s public schools, as well as creating the Mississippi Civil Rights Education Commission; and the large number of black officeholders in Mississippi compared to Alabama, and all other states.

The introductory chapter is an overview of William Nichols the man and William Nichols the architect. It details how the author became intimately familiar with Nichols’s work while serving as the historic architect for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kapp explores this simple question: Why is a man who had designed and built so many significant pieces of architecture throughout the South a virtual unknown, even though he is an emerging subject among architectural historians? I then provide the reader with a simple overview of the book and argue why it is important to preserve his few surviving buildings.

This chapter describes on James Meredith's efforts to get into the University of Mississippi. Upon receiving a rejection letter from the university, Meredith and his lawyer decided to file a federal lawsuit seeking his admission to Ole Miss.

This chapter describes James Meredith's experiences at Ole Miss. It details the harassment and threats Meredith received from students and the need for him to be constantly guarded by marshals. On the first day of classes in 1963, Meredith issued a typed, two-page statement announcing his decision not to register for classes during the second semester at the University of Mississippi, “unless very definite and positive changes are made to make my situation more conducive to learning.” Observers interpreted his statement as a publicity grab, an empty threat, a rationale for bad grades, an effort by Robert Kennedy to squeeze a little more political mileage out of the controversy, and an attempt to mobilize outside public opinion against Mississippi and the university.