Jim Clotfelter, Ole Miss 1962 – Recollections of a Daily Tar Heel editor

Introduction.

Sept 30/Oct 1, 1962, my most memorable day and night as editor of the University of North Carolina student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel, were spent in Oxford, Mississippi. This was when the federal government forced the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith as a student, precipitating a riot that left two dead, 300 injured, and the campus occupied by U.S. troops. On Sept 30, 1962, there was much I didn’t yet know about Mississippi, which I was to cover two years later (during Mississippi Freedom Summer) as a reporter for Time magazine. And the secret telephone negotiations between Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were not yet known. But, what we did know in 1962 was that the state’s leaders had refused four times to admit Mr. Meredith, who would become the first African-American known to have attended a Mississippi public educational institution since the imposition of Jim Crow laws. We knew that segregationists were coming to Oxford from across the South, in hopes of forcibly preventing the integration that the federal courts had ordered.

The DTH and civil rights.

In 1960, I went to Chapel Hill, as a 17-year-old freshman from Atlanta, in hopes of becoming editor of the Daily Tar Heel, an illustrious student newspaper with a history of outstanding editors. (I didn’t yet know that, to become editor, you had to win a campus-wide election.) From my high school days, I was committed to racial integration as necessary to fulfillment of American goals and basic human decency. UNC itself had desegregated in the 1950’s, but the town was still largely segregated. Picketing at the two movie theaters led to integration in the early 1960’s, but protests directed at restaurants took longer, with more conflict. The Daily Tar Heel published six times a week (and was then the only daily in Orange County) and closely covered protests against segregation. But, we didn’t normally cover desegregation news outside Chapel Hill.

Some of us associated with the newspaper were at a party the night of September 29, and we came to a decision that was probably not an entirely sober one: We need to cover the Ole Miss story ourselves! So, we got in a couple of cars and drove through the night from Chapel Hill to Oxford, Mississippi. Once there, I became separated from the rest of the UNC group, so I can only report my actions from midday Sept 30 to the morning of Oct 1.

Ole Miss.

When we arrived, the town and the campus looked unremarkable for a Sunday, except for some people who I guessed were not from Oxford – a truck had a number of armed men in the back. The campus was quiet, signs were up for social events. I saw two men I assumed were Africans, in African garb, walking across campus without drawing attention.

This mood of normality began to change in early afternoon, as more people who did not appear to be students came onto campus. Around 2 p.m. (all times are my recollection), a Mississippi highway patrol car stopped me, determined I was not an Ole Miss student, asked me to get in the car, and drove me to a spot off campus, where other non-students were being kept. As the afternoon progressed, the crowd being kept at the edge of campus grew. I saw a couple of Atlanta newspapermen I knew, and I joked that they were old men and would have a harder time passing for students than I would.

Around 7 p.m., the highway patrolmen began letting the non-students onto the campus, and what we saw was quite different than how it had been when we were ejected from campus. The Lyceum, a central building on campus, was partially encircled by hundreds of U.S. marshals and troops. Within a short period, there were hundreds of Ole Miss students and non-students shouting abuse at the marshals. Hearing what the coeds were shouting in the marshals’ faces, I recall thinking of the cliche of “language that would make a sailor blush.”

I had essentially become part of a mob that was growing steadily over the next half hour – this was reporting at ground level, literally and figuratively. Mississippi highway patrol officers were withdrawn, giving the protesters a freer hand. Rocks and other objects were thrown at the marshals. When a military truck pulled up (driven by an African-American soldier), something that appeared to be on fire was thrown onto the canvas top of the truck. Verbal taunting became, if possible, even worse. I didn’t know what kinds of weapons the marshals had or were prepared to use.

A word about danger: as a 19-year-old male, I suppose I felt immortal, that I could be embedded in violence and not be hurt. (This immortality of youth stayed with me in 1963-65, as I covered civil rights stories in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina.) That night at Ole Miss, I must have felt I could be in a mob without being at risk from either the mob or the marshals/soldiers. I carried no camera or notepad that would have identified me as a reporter.

The riot.

President Kennedy was scheduled to make a television/radio statement at 8 p.m. local time. A few people in the mob had portable radios, and the President’s words were heard by the few around them, but certainly had no effect. Around 8 p.m., the marshals fired the first tear gas, to try to push back the increasingly violent mob. Within a few minutes, a riot was underway across the central part of the campus. It was difficult to guess the size of the mob – later accounts said about three thousand.

Until later in the evening, most of the mob seemed to believe James Meredith was inside the Lyceum, since that was where most of the marshals were. So, the mob attacks – to the extent anything was coordinated – were against the federal forces around the Lyceum. Violence spread elsewhere on campus, eventually to the dorm where Meredith was housed. Cars were set on fire. Wherever cameras were seen, they were destroyed. (I learned later that my Atlanta friends had been beaten and their cameras destroyed.) A building had been under renovation nearby, and bricks were taken, to throw at the marshals. Every time the mob charged the marshals, they were met with a round of tear gas.

As the evening progressed, the tear gas haze became thicker. Luckily, as my mother would have wanted, I had a handkerchief and, somewhere, I found water to wet it. I spent most of the evening walking in a crouch as low as I could, with the handkerchief over my face. Someone would call out another “charge,” some in the mob would move toward the marshals, who would fire more tear gas, the mob would back away. Some in the mob seemed like characters out of a dream – or a comic strip (one stocky man was dressed in formal long tails, like “Marryin’ Sam” from the “Lil Abner” comic strip). Occasionally, I would hear weapons firing. (The evening’s two dead, a French reporter and an Oxford man, died from weapons fired by someone in the mob. Later, we would learn that a third of the marshals were injured, as well as a number of soldiers and National Guardsmen.)

Later, we also would learn why it look so long for the federal government to bring in reinforcements, how close the marshals came to running out of tear gas, and the much higher casualties that would have ensued if they had. At the time, I kept looking at the main road and the sky, wondering where those reinforcements were. Once, I heard helicopters overhead, but then they went away and the riot went on. (Apparently, they couldn’t find a place to land.)

Finally (my recollection is that it was around 1 a.m.), trucks with troops arrived on campus, and the riot was suppressed.

The next day.

Late that night, I encountered another UNC student, who told me they had rented a place to sleep downtown so, at some point after that, I found my way there. When I awakened the next morning, the town and campus were occupied by U.S. Army troops, with bayoneted rifles in hand. The campus had been heavily damaged. I called in my story to the Daily Tar Heel, and we got back in our cars and returned to Chapel Hill, before Mr. Meredith attended his first class.

Before and after the Ole Miss riot, I had seen conflict and hatred across the South, but Ole Miss was the largest-scale example of an Us-Vs-Them war, in which “Them” was the United States government. The Kennedy administration had done everything it could to avoid using troops in the way the Eisenhower administration had done in Little Rock but, when every cautious step had been met with defiance, and order had broken down entirely, it was forced to bring in troops. The cautious steps had just given more time and hope for the “No, Never” people to gather in an effort to overturn Appomattox. Game theory suggests that, in negotiations, the weaker side (Barnett) can sometimes win against a stronger side (the Kennedys); in this case, the stronger side had right as well as strength on its side, but was reluctant to use them. In retrospect, what is most chilling about the Ole Miss riot is how close we came to a much worse catastrophe.

January 2018