Jamesmeredith V. Ole Miss

Riding a new wave of U.S. history, African American student James Meredith applied for acceptance to Ole Miss in 1962 and was accepted in September of the same year. Meredith was just one of many students who took advantage of the landmark 1994 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education that declared that racial segregation in educational and other facilities violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which granted equal protection of the law to any person within its jurisdiction. This verdict effectively overturned the “separate but equal” mandate set by an earlier court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which determined that equal protection was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups. Though it applied specifically to public schools, the Brown verdict implied that other segregated facilities, such as colleges, were also unconstitutional, dealing a heavy blow to white supremacist policies in the Jim Crow South. In the years leading up to the incident at Ole Miss, African Americans had begun to be admitted in small numbers to other white colleges and universities in the South without too much of a problem. Before attending the University of Mississippi, James Meredith was studying at the historically black college Jackson State College from 1960 to 1962; during this time he applied repeatedly to Ole Miss without success. A native Mississippian, Meredith attended elementary and secondary in the state and later served in the U.S. Air Force from 1951-1960. In 1961, Meredith, with the help of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), filed a lawsuit against the university, alleging racial discrimination. The case was eventually settled on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Meredith’s favor in September 1962.

Governor Ross Barnett,