JUDSON WOMACK

On September 25th, 1962, on the University of Mississippi's campus, James Meredith approached the building where class registrations were being held - a lone black figure escorted by Federal Marshals through throngs of angry white Southerners. Waiting for him on the steps of that building was a large group of suited white men, first and foremost among them Governor Ross Barnett. Barnett had by this point sworn on state television that Mississippi would not integrate. "There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide. ... We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them never! ... No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor," he declared. No black students would be admitted to any white schools. "Now," he said, looking down at this figure, "which one of you is James Meredith?"

Barnett and his party physically blocked Meredith from registering that day and for 3 days following until, on the 30th, in accordance with a secret agreement reached between Barnett and President Kennedy to allow Barnett to save face, Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and ordered them to campus to protect Meredith moving into his dorm. That night and into the morning, 3,000 white students and protesters rioted on Ole Miss's campus, searching for Meredith, burning cars, injuring a third of the national guardsmen, and executing 2 civilians with single gunshots to the back and forehead. James Meredith would enroll in and attend his first classes the next day and in a year's time graduate with a degree in political science.

This story does not end there. A statue was erected on Ole Miss's campus in his honor in 2006. In the early hours of February 16th, 2014, a noose was placed around that statue's neck accompanied by an outdated Georgia state flag containing the Confederate "stars and bars" draped around the statue's shoulders.

I think one of the greatest yet least acknowledged issues with the current state of American education is that students are taught that we live in a post-racial America, and that without any external forces to challenge that idea they would grow up none the wiser. Talk of civil rights ends promptly with the death of King in 1968, his dream having been realized through the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. If you attended a school in the South, a paragraph might have informed you that total integration was not achieved until 1970. Imagining that is all you know, how much more accessible is it to believe that this generation of black men and women finally having the space to demand their rights be respected is just more evidence of this generation's supposed deep entitlement? How much more believable is it that the n-word is just a word or that the confederate flags and statues are just that? They haven't held power in 50 years. How much easier is it to buy into the idea that people of color are just lazy when you believe that the socioeconomic playing field has been equal for half a century? And in turn, that those that have more money have just worked harder for it? And what about Barack Obama? How drastically did his election and re-election combined with this country's already growing social divide influence that mindset? "This.. No, THIS must be the final nail in the coffin that proves America is a post-racial society," feels the white Southerner. "Now I can finally indulge in my culture the way I've wanted to. Now I don't have to filter any of my opinions or ideas because a black person can have the same opinions and ideas about me and the repercussions will be equal." And what about the three young men who vandalized Meredith's statue early that Sunday morning? To them their act of terror was just a prank, a joke to inflame the caricatures they had drawn in their minds of liberal, easily offended peers when in reality they were reviving in their classmates a dark, long dormant fear that our vandals could never understand.

I have the pleasure of watching Fox News for half an hour three days a week as part of my gym's selection of entertainment. An anchor said these words as part of a segment titled "Op-Ed: Young Black Conservatives on the Rise": "Black kids today are starting to get it. They know that racism is no longer a problem in America. They can say to themselves 'I am not being oppressed. I am not being suppressed,' which is what the media and the Democrats have been pushing."

Every time I hear this sort of rhetoric, I think about James Meredith. His story did not end with his attendance or his graduation. It did not end with the highest legal affirmation, once and for all, that divisions of race exist below our highest moral capabilities. It didn't end with the death of his colleague in Memphis, nor did it end in 1970 when my father returned from Christmas Break to find most of the white students in his high school had transferred out after stripping the school of its equipment and textbooks and emptying the coffers. His story didn't end in 2006 or 2014, or in 2016 when those three boys plead guilty to federal civil rights charges.

I think about James Meredith every day.

Meredith is pictured here speaking with Dr. William Ferris, Professor Emeritus of Folklore at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.