Melvin Brown still can't comprehend why fellow Americans erupted with such ugliness and so much violence just because one man, a U.S. citizen, an Air Force veteran, wanted an education.

Mr. Brown was among the first wave of U.S. military men President Kennedy sent to Oxford, Miss., in 1962. He arrived shortly after midnight Oct. 1, when thousands of people were rioting over James Meredith's arrival at the University of Mississippi.

On Tuesday, Mr. Brown and fellow Augusta veteran William Mayes will be among thousands expected to attend Oxford's 40th anniversary reunion and remembrance of Mr. Meredith's enrollment, the first by a black at the institution.

"It was quiet at first," Mr. Brown said of that night when the A Company of the 503rd Military Police Battalion landed in helicopters near the campus. They were about half a mile from where a mob had an outnumbered group of U.S. marshals and Mississippi National Guardsmen under siege.

"We stepped around the corner, and all hell broke loose," Mr. Brown said. The 117-man company came up behind the rioters, who were attacking the men protecting Mr. Meredith.

"I've never been so scared in my life," said Mr. Brown, who was a 23-year-old soldier. They were outnumbered 5-to-1, he estimated.

"Here I am, an American soldier defending my country, and here are these people acting like this. We were called such names, oh boy. Such names you never heard," Mr. Brown said, shaking his head at the memory.

Unlike the National Guard, federalized by President Kennedy that night, the MPs carried weapons loaded with live ammunition. The 503rd MP Battalion was the military's riot-specialty unit, and it had spent months at Fort Bragg, N.C., training in preparation for what was happening in Oxford that night.

"You can't imagine the noise, the cars on fire," Mr. Brown said of the scene the soldiers found. On campus, rioters lighted rivers of gasoline, which the soldiers had to march through, he said.

A journalist and an Oxford resident already had been killed by gunfire, according to An American Insurrection, The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962, by William Doyle. Thirty marshals were shot, and 166 marshals and 48 soldiers were wounded, Mr. Doyle wrote.

The soldiers never fired on the rioters, however.

"I was praying it didn't come to that. But if it did, it would have been because it was them or me," Mr. Brown said. "If we hadn't had the tear gas, we would have had to use our weapons. It would have been a massacre."

Because the soldiers showed the upmost peaceful resolve and bravery, the city of Oxford wanted to do something special for them, said Katie Snodgrass, the assistant to the mayor. No one, not even the military, has ever honored the soldiers who put down the riot, saving Mr. Meredith and, many say, the university and the city.

For Mr. Mayes, the memories remain fresh.

"When we first pulled into the town, all of the police had the road blocked," he said. When police refused to move their cruisers, the soldiers plowed through them, said Mr. Mayes, who was in a second wave in the C Company of the 503rd MP Battalion.

He would encounter more violent harassment before reaching the campus. As he drove his jeep under a bridge, a section of a truck crashed on the hood, Mr. Mayes said. He and another soldier ran up onto the bridge, where a man faced Mr. Mayes with a raised stick.

He could have shot the man, Mr. Mayes said, but he hesitated, and the man turned and ran.

"I wanted to shoot someone real bad," Mr. Mayes said.
If it hadn't been for their training as military police, Mr. Brown and Mr. Mayes say, the night would have ended with many dead civilians.

"We were trained, and we dealt with idiots all the time (as MPs)," Mr. Mayes said.

Mr. Brown and Mr. Mayes, both black soldiers, didn't know that before their battalion left Fort Bragg, commanders had received orders to pull all black soldiers out. In his book, Mr. Doyle wrote that Maj. Ray Le Van tore up the written order eight times.

Their mission would have failed if that order had been followed, Mr. Brown said. By then, the Army was desegregated, and the black soldiers couldn't have been replaced.

"(The rioters) hated everybody. They didn't care what color you were if you were in uniform," Mr. Brown said.
Mr. Mayes grew up in New Jersey and never knew of a segregated school until he moved South as a soldier.

Mr. Brown grew up in Mississippi. He attended segregated schools, passing the white high school to attend a black school 10 miles away. He had to walk two miles to catch a bus that left at 6 a.m. and didn't return until 6 p.m., he said.

It was a dangerous time in Mississippi, said Mark Potok, the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report magazine.

"At that time, Mississippi was an absolute terrifying place for anyone who objected to a system of apartheid," Mr. Potok said. "It was a society based on fear and violence."
Mr. Potok has heard it argued that the South would have ended slavery without the Civil War and would have desegregated without President Kennedy's call for federal troops 40 years ago, but, he said, "It seems ... a useless academic question."

On Tuesday, the University of Mississippi will join in the city's ceremony and erect a civil rights memorial on campus, Ms. Snodgrass said. The veterans who attend will receive keys to the city.

"Since Doyle's book, more individuals - and not just locally, but nationally - have recognized the sacrifices made by these brave men, and how much could have been lost had they not reacted as they did. It is long overdue that we as Oxonians and Mississippians properly say thank you," Oxford Mayor Richard Howorth wrote.

"I was surprised, big time," Mr. Mayes said of the city's decision to honor the troops. It will be the first time either he or Mr. Brown has been back to Oxford.