Despair In Mississippi; Hope In Texas

I have been wondering recently why it was that the full barbarism of the University of Mississippi crisis did not strike me until almost three months after Meredith had been enrolled. I bought a newspaper one afternoon in San Francisco and read the wire service account of how a hundred or more students had surrounded Meredith’s table in the school cafeteria. Shaking their fists, quivering like young mammals in heat, they had chanted: “Go home nigger. We don’t want you here.” Up to then I had read most of the reports on the demonstrations, and as editor of a small Texas journal had published a number of stories on the riots and the killing. That afternoon, I think, my final awareness of the indescribable shame had ...