Friday, Jan. 4, 1963 University Daily Kansan
Page 5
EDITORIAL-FEATURE SECTION
Scars of Riots Remain at Oxford
Bv Don Warner
James Meredith talks with newsmen following his enrollment at the University of Mississippi last October.
I arrived in Oxford, Miss., about ten o'clock on a Monday morning. I had an appointment with Rev. Duncan Gray of St. Peter's Episcopal Church, who had courageously walked among students during the riots at Ole Miss, asking for bricks and weapons and encouraging them to go home. When Gen. Edwin Walker had the crowd in a fervor pitch, Rev. Gray had shouted to him asking that he stop the rioting.
In speaking about the rioting, Rev. Gray pointed out that if only students had been involved, the crisis wouldn't have been nearly so great. Certainly some students consciously desired a riot, but many were dumbfounded to find a brick or bottle in their hands when Rev. Gray approached them.
BY ELEVEN o'clock on the night of the rioting, most of the students had left and many of the riotsers were high school age hoodlums from nearby towns. Rev. Gray had no success disarming these people. He even received some shoving around and cursing from some of them.
I asked Rev. Gray what he thought about me trying to visit with Mr. Meredith. He approved of the idea, but he thought I should talk with Rev. Wofford Smith, the Episcopalian chaplain on campus who has been seeing Mr. Meredith regularly and who Rev. Gray thought would have a better idea about student sentiment.
Rev. Smith met me with negative feelings about my idea. He was tired of curious people on campus and wanted to know exactly what I was doing there. He assured me that Mr. Meredith was not lonely. He said if I wanted to do what was best for Mr. Meredith, I'd just let him study that evening. If I were
a student in Oxford, he declared, he'd give me an immediate personal escort to Mr. Meredith's room because there are few willing to visit him.
I DECIDED I wouldn't attempt to visit Mr. Meredith, although I still wanted to stop by the Ole Miss campus and talk with some students. Rev. Smith drove me to the campus and pointed out the
Editor's note: Don Warner, chairman of the KU Civil Rights Council, recently went to Montgomery, Ala., to attend the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change. The MIA, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other Negro leaders, was the group which staged the 1955 protest against segregated buses in Montgomery.
Returning to Lawrence following the meetings, Warner stopped at Oxford, Miss., scene of riots in October when James Meredith became the first Negro to enter the previously all-white University of Mississippi. In this article, Warner tells of the attitudes on the Old Miss campus three months after the crisis.
statue from which Gen. Walker addressed the mobs, canister burns on the flag pole, bulldozer tracks on the sidewalk, and bullet holes in the Lyceum.
I made my first visit to the journalism school to see Sidna Brower, the editor of the Daily Mississippian. Miss Brower thought that much of the resentment toward Mr. Meredith now stems from the troops stationed in Oxford and the damage to the university resulting from the entire incident. She felt
that perhaps half of the students before September would have said they didn't care if a Negro entered their school.
Both Miss Brower and Rev, Smith recommended a trip to the "Grill" (comparable to the Hawk's Nest) if I desired to talk with some stuarch segregationists. I decided to eat supper there and get into a conversation before leaving to catch the bus.
TWO FELLOWS came in with newspapers and coffee. They seemed to be in no hurry, so I finished eating and went over to talk with them. They introduced themselves as Jim Defibaugh and Bill Temple.
We proceeded rather cautiously until it became evident we shared similar convictions. I had been asking what happened to students who visited Mr. Meredith and in particular seven students who caused a commotion several weeks ago when they ate supper with him. Two of the students had their room ransacked and one of these two withdrew from school the next morning.
Finally, Jim informed me that I was talking to two of the students who had eaten with Mr. Meredith and that Bill was the remaining student whose room had been overhauled.
They asked me if I'd like to see "Jimmy" that evening. Mentioning what Rev. Smith had said, we decided to look for Mr. Meredith in the cafeteria. Mr. Meredith was eating at a table by himself when we entered the building but he had gone by the time we got through the line.
AFTER EATING, we hurried up the hill to Mr. Meredith's dorm to catch him before studies got underway. A guard stopped us when we entered the dormitory and marshals in the room adjoining Meredith's checked our credentials before one marshal escorted us back into the room.
Meredith expressed resentment towards Northerners who pity Southerners and "wish there were something they could do." He
guarded by U.S. marshals and FBI agents after the riots. Three months later, resentment of Meredith and the U.S. troops remains high at Ole Miss.
Newspapers throughout the world last October carried pictures from the University of Mississippi, such as this United Press International photo showing students and "outsiders"
stated that getting better opportunities for Negroes in the North will make it easier to integrate the South. He mentioned a Negro friend in Topeka who couldn't buy a house in a white district several years ago. Mr. Meredith always spoke with a twinkle in his eye, ready to make a clever remark. When we were talking about whether or not he was lonely, he commented, "People are always concerned because I usually eat by myself. When I attended Jackson State (a Negro college), I always selected an empty table and would eat by myself unless a good friend just happened through the line at the same time I was there."
AFTER LEAVING the dorm, Jim Defibaugh, Bill, and I eventually ended in the Grill again for a cup of coffee. Several students greeted Bill and Jim with profanity when they passed on the sidewalk. The two explained that much of the reason for Bill's roommate withdrawing was pressure put on his family. The same evening that the student ate with Mr. Meredith there was a police guard placed around the student's home and his father's job was in jeopardy. Since Bill is from Washington, D.C., and Jim's father is in the Air Force, pressure cannot be so easily applied to their families.
We also talked with a liberal faculty member who is a good friend of Jim Defibaugh. There we looked at pictures taken during the riots and talked about the crisis. Most of the faculty members, according to this professor, are upset by the attitude of the student body and its unwillingness to accept Mr. Meredith.
We left the office about 11:30 and headed toward Bill's room where I had been invited to stay in an extra bed that night. The next morning Bill opened the door to see a pop bottle falling down before him. Someone had tied one end of a string to the doorknob and the other end to a pop bottle which was placed on a nearby fire extinguisher so that the bottle would fall and break in front of the room.
Bill had mentioned numerous pranks such as this. It seemed to me that the pranks were similar to those one might find in any dormitory, except there is a quite unequal distribution of them in Bill's dorm.