The following piece appeared in the October 5, 1962 issue of The Paladin, and was written by Marshall Frady, ‘63. The article references riots occurring at the University of Mississippi on October 1, 1962, in response to the enrollment of that university’s first black student, James Meredith.

–Tim Baumann, Paladin Opinions editor

For several days there, Gov. Ross Barnett’s States’ Rights bandwagon was lustily barging right along, kicking up all kinds of dust and picking up all kinds of passengers.

Then, in the dawn of Monday morning, it emerged suddenly sprinkled with human blood. So, for that matter, did all those who had leaped aboard and whooped it in on its way.

It is rather bizarre that now those riders, along with the driver, who has brought his charging coach to a slow and appalled crawl, are protesting that the savagery at the University of Mississippi Saturday night must be on the conscience of the United States government.

In short, this is to presume that the law must be blamed for any conflict that arises in an encounter with the lawless.

The law that prevailed in this case was that, where the state will is at odds with the national will, the national will must govern. If the Civil War did not confirm this, it confirmed nothing, and is to be marked up merely as a spectacular and embarrassingly bad start for the cause of state sovereignty.

More immediately, Barnett and his partisans insist that the ‘54 decision of the Supreme Court is no law at all, that they had no liberty to interpret the Constitution as they did. In this case, their quarrel is not so much with this particular verdict but the very powers and concept of the Court—a quarrel that has existed ever since John Marshall established the tradition of interpreting the implied powers in the Constitution.

Not happy with the way the country’s set up in this respect, they also seem congenitally incapable of appreciating that the law is made up not only of cold documents but the decisions of the court—that one is not to be respected above the other.

But at the heart of the berserkness of Oxford, we feel, was the sentiment we heard expressed by one young patriot: “I have no duty to obey any law that I don’t feel is right.” This is a particularly quaint attitude, since it supposes the law is subject to the consent of every variety of individual.

As a matter of fact, whether the ‘54 decision of the Court strikes one as noble or vile, has absolutely nothing to do with the question of obedience. The law, if perverted, is not to be challenged but changed—either by the lawmakers, or changing the lawmakers.

It is when a special clutch of citizens declares, “Any law we do not agree with is not a law,” it is when the governor of a state calls on his people to defy the law instead of warning them to leave the problem to the proper officials, it is when people fancy propagating their own particular causes—be it segregation or sit-ins—is more important than preserving the law, it is then that the disintegration of society, as seen at Oxford, begins to set in.

Gov. Barnett’s initial TV appeal for resistance led, inevitably, to the garish hysteria into which the students at Ole Miss plunged—led by that improbable John Brown of the rightists, Gen. Edwin Walker.

In this tragi-comic figure we have, perhaps, the ultimate dramatization of the right wing, the notions of Welch, Thurmond, Goldwater, and the aspiring Workman in final, stark, uninhibited action. Presuming that, since he had left the Army, he had been freed of any obligation to obey the government, Walker roared for 10,000 volunteers from every state in the Union to meet him at Oxford, then promptly galloped on down.

There, with each hour that passed, his activities and rhetoric waxed more and more deranged. Then, finally, we had that farcical, pathetic scene of a former general of the United States Army, a sixty-year-old man leading a charge of a few-hundred brick-throwing students against federal marshals, a brief and disastrous candidate for governor of Texas standing on a campus statue and yelling to students in the glare and clamor of a nightmare of lawlessness, “Riot! Riot! Riot!”

But it is not people like Edwin Walker who are to blame for the tragedy at Oxford. It is, rather, responsible officials like the governor of Mississippi who first called for defiance, who have given lawlessness the luster of righteousness and lawbreakers the post of patriots.

If any one man bears the full responsibility for the brief and bloody breakdown of civilization at Oxford, it is Ross Barnett.

It is, then, more than curious to hear his mawkish prayer in behalf of the federal government—”May God have mercy on their souls.”