James Meredith was in the news again last week, hosting a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Jackson for a museum dedicated to his life and also to religious studies.
According to an article in the Clarion-Ledger, the James Meredith Museum and Bible Society Headquarters will be in a building Meredith owns. The article quotes Meredith as saying he hopes the nonprofit center will allow people to learn about what he’s been through and uplift the moral character of the community.
Meredith is a civil rights icon because he became the first Black student at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962 after lengthy court battles and rioting on campus.
Although he was the first Black to successfully enroll at Ole Miss, where his statue now stands, he wasn’t the first one to try.
Four years earlier, in 1958, Clennon Washington King Jr. attempted to enroll as a graduate student at the university. The effort resulted in King being involuntarily admitted to Whitfield, the state’s mental institution, instead of the university.
J.P. Coleman was governor. Later to become a federal judge, he wasn’t a firebrand like Ross Barnett, the governor who unsuccessfully fought to keep Meredith out of Ole Miss. But Coleman at the time was a segregationist, as were all of Mississippi’s political leaders, and he was effective at it.
When King showed up to register at Ole Miss, Coleman had him put in a Highway Patrol vehicle and whisked to Jackson for a lunacy hearing in Chancery Court and then on to Whitfield.
Unlike Meredith, King didn’t have the backing of civil rights groups like the NAACP or the ACLU.
A professor at what is now Alcorn State University — then it was Alcorn A&M — King had angered civil rights groups by writing pro-segregation articles for newspapers, including the one I worked for, the Jackson State-Times.
As a relative rookie, I was the only reporter in our office the afternoon King arrived as a prisoner at the Hinds County Courthouse in Jackson.
The more senior reporters from the three Jackson daily newspapers and the wire services, having been sent to Oxford to cover King’s attempt, were probably en route south, trying to figure out where the state officers were taking King.
Paul Tiblier, a veteran newsman who was executive editor of the State-Times, had an amazing number of contacts. Someone — I never knew who — told him where King was headed.
I, being the only reporter available, was told by George Harmon, the city editor, to go to the courthouse with a camera and await King’s arrival.
I stationed myself at a strategic point, and as the officers ushered King into the courthouse he saw me with the camera and started screaming for me to help him. There was nothing I could do for him except cover the story.
I followed the entourage into the courtroom and took a seat.
Chancery Judge Stokes Robertson, with whom I had a good relationship up to that point, recognized me, and announced it was a closed hearing, excluding me.
So I rushed to a telephone and called my city editor who was the most skilled person I ever knew at typing a story while talking to someone on the telephone.
He wrote a sensationalized first person article, published under my byline, for that afternoon’s final edition, focusing on King, surrounded by state officers, screaming and begging me for help.
The article made me unwelcomed in Robertson’s courtroom from then on. The governor called the publisher of the newspaper asking where I was from, suspecting, perhaps, I was one of those “outside agitators,” not the native Mississippian I was.
The judge sent King to Whitfield for mental evaluation. He was released and left the state a couple of weeks later for his native Georgia.
Some accounts credit King’s brother, an attorney, with securing his release. He may have helped, but at the newspaper we suspected Dr. W.L. Jaquith, head of Whitfield at the time, judged him mentally competent. There were pending charges of disturbing the peace and resisting arrest against King, but they were never pursued.
A couple of years later, in 1960, King became the first Black man to run for president of the United States. Born in 1920, he died in 2000. His life was filled with bizarre behavior that would cause one to speculate that maybe he was a little crazy.
Nearly four years after Meredith accomplished what King didn’t, J.P. Coleman was nominated by his friend, President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He was confirmed by the Senate and eventually served as chief judge.
Judge Robertson who kicked me out of the hearing, later became a Supreme Court Judge.
Charlie Dunagin is editor and publisher emeritus of the McComb Enterprise-Journal. He lives in Oxford.
