The Edge of Violence

It was recognized as the gravest conflict between federal and state authority since the Civil War. It hovered at the edge of violence and was filled with the potential of tragedy. Yet at times it seemed that the whole story was a farce being played out by sad-faced puppets.

The great gold eagle atop the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., glistened nobly in the afternoon sun. Down below, a green automobile pulled up at a sidewalk packed with a rumbling crowd. Out stepped a dapper Negro, James H. Meredith, 29, native son of Mississippi, veteran of nine years in the U.S. Air Force, and would-be student at the University of Mississippi. A feeble smile flitted across his face as the crowd started booing.

Accompanied by two white men, Meredith entered an office building and boarded an elevator. As the three disappeared from sight, the crowd fell silent and broke into smaller groups, clustering about portable radios to listen to broadcasts of what was going on inside the building.

At the Doorway. Escorted by state troopers, the three visitors got off at the tenth floor, stepped into a smoky corridor jammed with newsmen, TV cameramen, and cops. "Get back!" the troopers shouted. "Get back! Everyone out of the way!" They pushed through the crowd, clearing a path to the door of Room 1007, the office of the state college board. Just as the newcomers reached the door, it swung open with theatrical timing. In the doorway stood Mississippi's greying, frosty-eyed Governor Ross R. Barnett.

"Governor Barnett," said one of the two men accompanying Meredith. "I'm John Doar of the Justice Department, sir. These papers. Governor, I'd like to present you with these papers." The other man, James McShane, Chief U.S. Marshal, fumblingly tried to hand Barnett a sheaf of court orders. In a sonorous drawl, Barnett said that as a matter of "policy" he could not accept any court orders. Doar, the No. 2 man in the Justice Department's civil rights division, persisted. "I want to remind you," he said, "that the Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit entered a temporary restraining order at 8:30 this morning enjoining you from interfering in any way with the registration of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. We'd like to get on now, Governor, to the business of registering Mr. Meredith."

Barnett's reply was to draw a typewritten sheet of paper from a pocket and read off a "proclamation" addressed to Meredith. To "preserve the peace, dignity and tranquillity" of the state, rumbled Barnett, "I hereby finally deny you admission to the University of Mississippi." The palaver went on for a while longer, with Doar getting more and more plaintive. Finally, he made one last, limp try. "Do you refuse to permit us to come in the door?" he asked.

Barnett: Yes, sir.

Doar: All right. Thank you.

Barnett: I do that politely.

Doar: Thank you. We leave politely.

As the three men left the building and walked back to the car, the waiting crowd erupted in gleeful yells. "Goddam dirty nigger bastard," a teen-age boy shouted, "get out of here and stay out!"

Outnumbered 20 to 1. The confrontation at the door of Room 1007 was the second face-to-face encounter between Barnett and Meredith. A few days earlier, Barnett had blocked Meredith's path when he attempted to register at the University of Mississippi campus at Oxford (TIME, Sept. 28). In the interval between the two confrontations, impor tant events took place in the New Orleans courtroom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Faced with contempt charges, the state college board capitulated and promised to register Meredith. To keep Barnett from interfering again, the court issued a sweeping order enjoining him, plus a list of lesser state officials, from arresting, prosecuting, injuring, harassing, threatening, obstructing or interfering with Meredith.

The day after the second Barnett-Meredith encounter, another episode was enacted at Oxford. Once again, Meredith, accompanied by McShane and Doar, attempted to register. Barnett had planned to be there, but his plane was grounded by bad weather; he raced to the scene by car but did not arrive until after Mere dith had departed. In Barnett's absence, the man blocking the way was Lieut. Governor Paul B. Johnson. He stood in the middle of the roadway at the main entrance of the campus, with about 20 state highway patrolmen backing him up. About 100 ft. behind, a dozen sheriffs from various Mississippi counties stood in a single rank across the roadway. Behind them, forming a third line of defense, three police cars were parked end to end athwart the road.

"Governor," McShane began, "we want to take Mr. Meredith into the university under the direction of the Federal Government and have him registered."

"I am going to have to refuse Mr. Meredith," Johnson said softly.

As before, McShane and Doar tried pleading, urging, arguing, demanding and waving court orders--all in vain.* Now McShane tried using his muscles. Several times he pushed a meaty shoulder against highway patrolmen, trying to force his way past. Ruddy-faced Marshal McShane, 53, is a formidable man. He won the Golden Gloves welterweight championship of New York City back in 1930, and he has since added many pounds of solid flesh. He is also a brave man who won several citations for heroism during his years as a New York cop. But he was outnumbered 20 to 1 by the troopers, some of them pretty husky too, and his scufflings with them were utterly futile, merely adding a dash of absurdity to the proceedings.

Beyond Satire. Absurdity kept cropping out all during the prolonged wrangle between unbending Governor Barnett and the U.S. Government, as if the participants were following a script by that Mississippian master of grim comedy, William Faulkner, who until his death last July was Oxford's most famous resident. After turning Meredith away at Jackson, Barnett got stalled in the elevator for ten minutes while the crowd out side the building yelled "We want Ross!" A gifted satirist could hardly have invented the dialogue between Barnett and Doar. And there was something sadly comic about James Meredith's desire to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

Ole Miss has its attractions--a green and pleasant campus, a perennially powerful football team, and very pretty coeds, two of whom won the Miss America contest in successive years, 1958 and 1959. But it is a cheerfully unintellectual institution with nothing special to offer the mind of an earnest man of 29. As a symbol of the Negroes' struggle for justice, Meredith's cause was worth all the trouble it stirred up, but as an individual's aspiration for intellectual fulfillment, it was hardly persuasive.

Footless Argument. Lawyer Barnett did indeed claim legality. His actions, he insisted, were solidly based on the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Those reserved powers, the argument ran, include the authority to preserve order and protect public safety, and the interests of order and safety required him to "interpose and invoke the police powers of the state."

But this was a constitutionally footless line of argument. The old states' rights doctrine that a state can interpose its authority so as to void a federal law within its own borders was struck down long ago --pragmatically by the Civil War and legally by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1932 Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, speaking for a unanimous court, declared it to be "manifest" that a state Governor could not invoke his powers to infringe anyone's rights under the Federal Constitution. In the Little Rock decision in 1958, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous opinion that the school desegregation decision "can neither be nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executive or judicial officers, nor nullified indirectly by them through evasive schemes."

The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states only powers that the Constitution does not prohibit; the 14th Amendment prohibits any state from depriving any person of "life, liberty or property without due process of law," and from denying any person "the equal protection of the laws." In 1954 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment. In keeping with that decision, James Meredith's right to attend Ole Miss was affirmed by a federal district court, confirmed by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and upheld by Justice Hugo Black, speaking with the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Collision Course. After that, there was only one way for Governor Barnett to prevent Meredith's admission to the university without coming into head-on conflict with the Federal Government: he could shut down the university. But the students at Ole Miss, with their futures at stake, wanted it to stay open. So did their parents. So did the townsmen of Oxford, dependent on the university for economic survival. So did many Mississippians who have never seen the university's campus but follow the fortunes of its football team with impassioned pride. And as long as the university remained open to other Mississippians, it remained open, by orders of the federal courts, to James Meredith.

By blocking Meredith's entry in open defiance of a court order expressly enjoining him from interfering, Barnett chose a collision course. Such conflicts are rare, if only because it is so obvious that in a showdown of force the Federal Government will prevail. Except for three Confederate Governors arrested after the Civil War, only one incumbent state Governor--Warren Terry McCray of Indiana, in 1924--has ever been sentenced to imprisonment under federal law, and he was convicted of misuse of the mails, a felony that had nothing to do with a conflict of federal and state powers. No state Governor has ever been sentenced for contempt of a federal court. Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus made an ugly mess in Little Rock in 1957, but he did not defy any specific federal court order directed at him, and as soon as the Federal Government intervened with force he scuttled off to the sidelines.

Barnett's overt defiance confronted President Kennedy with a grim dilemma. He could not let Barnett get away with persisting in his defiance; that would invite defiance all over the South, subverting not only the Negroes' progress toward justice but the entire federal system. But the use of federal force against a state also damages the federal system. And as practical Democrats, John and Robert Kennedy had to reflect upon the prospect that military intervention in Mississippi might be politically disastrous for the Democratic Party in the South.

The Pullback. In straining to avoid violence, the Administration appeared weak and hesitant. It had tried three times to get Meredith registered; it had failed three times. Now it set out on a fourth attempt, and Attorney General Kennedy upped the escorting force level to two dozen marshals. Late in the week they set out in a motor caravan from the U.S. naval air station at Memphis, Tenn., 80 miles from Oxford. But Barnett, meanwhile, had also mustered stronger forces.

Some 200 state policemen with steel helmets, gas masks and clubs were deployed around the university campus. A hefty force of sheriffs, deputies and policemen waited at the railroad bridge separating the campus from the town. Even more dangerous-looking were the uninvited strangers who had swarmed in from the backlands, eager to join in a fight. After looking over all those swinging clubs and restless fists, a Justice Department observer in Oxford telephoned Bobby Kennedy in Washington and warned him that the oncoming force of marshals was obviously insufficient to force its way without a fierce battle. "I'll call it off," said Bobby. He signaled an aide, who telephoned the Justice Department's Oxford command post, which in turn radioed instructions to the oncoming caravan: go back to Memphis. The cars were then 20 miles from Oxford.

The decision to pull back was sensible, but it looked embarrassingly like a retreat. Attorney General Kennedy tried to make it clear that the retreat was only temporary. The Justice Department announced that the marshals had been recalled to avert "major violence and bloodshed." Bobby himself issued a statement declaring that "the orders of the federal courts can and will be enforced."

The Lull. The following morning, Governor Barnett was scheduled to appear before the Court of Appeals in New Orleans to answer to charges of contempt. As was expected, he stayed in Mississippi. The court tried him in absentia, found him guilty, gave him four days to "purge himself" of the contempt, and set a stern penalty if he failed to comply: $10,000-a-day fine, and confinement in the custody of the U.S. Attorney General.

There the conflict rested, in a brief and precarious lull. President Kennedy decided to go on TV with a speech reporting to the nation on the Mississippi crisis. Then he ordered 1,500 U.S. Army troops to stand by in Memphis, and put the Mississippi National Guard into federal service--for use if needed. A threat of serious violence still lurked ahead, but Barnett had reason to try to avoid it. He had already made himself a hero to his fellow Mississippians, and except for the fanatics, they could hardly expect or want him to carry on any further in a struggle that he and Mississippi were bound to lose. In terms of practical politics, Barnett could quit well ahead. From across the Tennessee border, the Memphis Commercial Appeal offered him some advice: "Mississippi's government has been independent and forthright in a regrettable situation. But is it worth it if it puts a headstone over you?"

Whatever Barnett did, federal power was sure to prevail sooner or later. Attorney General Kennedy said flatly at week's end that Meredith was "going to be enrolled at the University of Mississippi." That was undoubtedly true. It was far less certain that, after he is enrolled, his stay at the university will be at all enjoyable, or that he will soon be followed there by any other Negro.

* The troubles of James McShane have made news before. In 1954, as a New York police detective, he was temporarily demoted for getting his picture in the papers holding an umbrella over the head of Heavyweight Champion Rocky Marciano (McShane was off duty at the time and Marciano was an old pal). McShane also had the misfortune, as chief marshal, of being assigned to bring the late spy Robert Soblen back to the U.S. from Israel; as the plane approached London, Soblen took advantage of McShane's momentary absence to stab himself (TIME, July 13 et seq.).

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