Then-governor Ross Barnett called it “the moment of our greatest crisis since the War Between the States”: During this week in 1962, James Meredith became the first black student at the University of Mississippi.

Barnett’s words sound exaggerated to our ears, but make no mistake: The civil rights movement was, in fact, civil war. Our public schools were freed from all-white control through military intervention. Our universities were liberated by force.
When news spread through the streets of Oxford Town that desegregation had finally arrived at Ole Miss, the white residents rioted. Federal troops were called in to quiet the violent mob, and by night’s end, two were dead, including a French journalist, and several hundred more were injured.
This would not be the last time President John F. Kennedy mobilized federal soldiers to liberate an American university. Less than one year later, two black students were attempting to register for classes at the University of Alabama when then-governor George C. Wallace blocked their way. His infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door” ultimately failed after the feds forced him to step aside.
Later that day, Kennedy delivered a speech that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would laud as “one of the most eloquent, profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and freedom of all men ever made by any President.”
“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free,” Kennedy said. “They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”
Kennedy’s speech was the birth moment of the Civil Rights Act. He would not live to see it become law. He would not live to see the Southern Democrats and their months-long filibuster defeated. He would not live to see Clair Engle on the U.S. Senate floor, mortally ill and unable to speak, cast his historic vote by raising a crippled arm and pointing to his eye.
My mother was a member of the first black freshman class at her high school in North Carolina. Like Jones, Hood and Meredith; like Holmes and Hunter; like the Little Rock Nine and many others, she was a soldier on the front lines of the Second Civil War, the War Against Segregation, the War Against Separate but Equal.
A generation later, as I pass through the schoolhouse door here at the University, I can see the positive results of my mother’s struggles. Back then she was greeted by white students brandishing tire irons yelling “Nigger go home!” Today I am greeted by silence. The white mobs are gone. Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski did not block my way into the EMU.
And yet, to be perfectly honest, I still feel uneasy in this place. I feel like a foreigner. The public university has always been, and remains, hostile ground for minority students.
I know white students will have trouble relating to this feeling — this historical feeling. Year after year public educators teach us to deny or minimize our racial memories. We are taught to think of slavery and the civil rights movement as belonging outside of our bodies, to an externalized past. We know better. We know this history is in our blood.
We also know that the schoolhouse door remains blocked for the majority of African Americans and other persons of color. Today, more young black men are in prison than are in college, due to a racist criminal justice system and continued economic discrimination that leaves nearly one-third of black children in poverty.
As evidence grows about institutional racism, so grows attacks on affirmative action programs seeking to remedy its ill influence. The Supreme Court temporarily defeated a major challenge to affirmative action this summer, but damage has already been done in places like Texas and California.
Like Engle on the senate floor, civil rights in this country are barely clinging to life. Our legislation “with teeth,” as Meredith put it, is slowly losing its bite, sabotaged from within by the very Justice Department that fought to preserve it four decades ago. John Ashcroft is no Robert Kennedy.
This summer I was studying in the University library when I noticed a tiny swastika carved onto the back of my chair. That is today’s racism: It creeps up on you; it is subtle and silent.
But we won’t let the silence fool us. We know every school in America is a racial battlefield, and the war is only beginning. It is up to us; the minority students who have passed through the schoolhouse door, to reinvigorate the civil rights movement before the white mobs return.
On this our first week of classes, we should pause to honor those before us who fought and died so that we could stand on this campus as students.