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Meredith, James Howard
2 articles on Meredith, James Howard
Meredith, James H.
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 5661933–
First black student at the University of Mississippi whose enrollment and “walk against fear” were central events of the Civil Rights Movement. James Meredith was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi. While attending the all-black Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, he applied to the all-white University of Mississippi. Rejected because he was black, Meredith sued for admission, and after a series of appeals, the university was ordered to admit him. Governor Ross Barnett, with support of the state legislature, vowed to block Meredith. On September 30, 1962, federal marshals escorted Meredith to the “Ole Miss” campus in Oxford, Mississippi. Approximately 3,000 whites rioted in protest. More than 23,000 U.S. troops restored order by the next morning. But two people had been killed and several hundred injured. Meredith attended classes and graduated the ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 1668 Includes: Further Reading(25 June 1933– ), civil rights activist, was born J. H. Meredith near Kosciusko, Mississippi, the son of Moses “Cap” Meredith, a farmer, and Roxie Smith Meredith, a school cafeteria worker. J.H. adopted the names James Howard when he entered the U.S. Air Force in 1951; until then he went by the initials given to him by a father who did not want neighboring whites to call his son by his first name only. Indeed, the stubborn—some might say, reckless—courage that James Meredith displayed in integrating the University of Mississippi owed much to the example of his father, who refused to display the deference expected of blacks in Jim Crow Mississippi. Cap Meredith viewed his eighty-five-acre homestead as a sovereign state and ruled it like a patriarch. He restricted his children's contacts with outsiders, black or white, and prohibited them from ever entering a white family's home by the back door or ...
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