OXFORD — Forty years ago, armed soldiers marched through the streets of this town, dodging bricks, pipes and insults as they sought to quell a riot.

On Tuesday, about 100 of them returned, some in wheelchairs, some with stooped backs, all of them happy to return to the place that once cursed them.

"American history doesn't get any more magnificent than this day," said author William Doyle, whose 2001 book, An American Insurrection, recounts what happened during that national crisis when federal troops were called in to protect the first known black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

As Gov. Ronnie Musgrove called them heroes, and as Oxford city officials gave them keys to the city, tears flowed freely.

"I never thought I'd receive this," said Oscar Spence, one of the members of the Army's elite SWAT team, the 503rd Military Police Battalion.

Clutching the copper key he was given, the 63-year-old former soldier from Albemarle, N.C., said, "This is something I'll pass on to my children and grandchildren."

Forty years ago when James Meredith broke the color barrier at all-white Ole Miss, a riot ensued, leading to two deaths and hundreds of people being injured.

On Tuesday, Meredith, who participated in ceremonies at the university later in the evening, posed for photos with the same soldiers who had protected him.

"I thought that the fact that the marshals particularly and the military followed the command of the authority of the United States was what made today possible," Meredith said. "That to me was what was significant. There was nothing that happened that history didn't predict. There's nothing happening now that really surprises me."

Mayor Richard Howorth thanked the soldiers for their courage. "Surely there would have been worse human casualties had it not been for the intervention of the armed forces," he said.

Musgrove said their fight helped build Mississippi.
"The state now leads the nation in African-American officials," he said. "We are not a symbol of the past but a beacon for the future."

Just 10 yards from Musgrove, the bronze statue of author William Faulkner in a sitting pose and holding his pipe seemed to be paying rapt attention.

"To live anywhere in America and be against equality, Faulkner said, is like living in Alaska and being against snow," Musgrove said.

While the city honored those who protected Meredith, Ole Miss honored the man who helped pave his way, Medgar Evers, field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, who was assassinated in 1963.

A permanent exhibit honoring Evers was unveiled Tuesday afternoon at the law school, which denied his admission in 1954.

His widow, Myrlie Evers- Williams, read a news article about the 1954 event in which he was asked where he would stay if he attended: "On the campus, sir. I'm very hygienic, and I assure you this brown won't rub off."

The crowd laughed.

She recounted her husband's words that Mississippi would be the best place in the nation to live once it dealt with its race problems.

"If he were here, he would say, 'Let this be a new beginning,'" she told those gathered, including many of the distinguished black graduates of the law school.

As dusk fell on Sept. 30, 1962, after Meredith was officially enrolled at Ole Miss following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, angry students gathered on campus, and people such as Bishop Duncan Gray confronted them.

"We were trying to get the rioters to give up their weapons and go back to the dormitories," he said. "We were successful early on, but as the night wore on, there were fewer and fewer students and more and more people from other places."

The mob soon included rioters from as far away as California.

Marshals first defended the campus and Meredith from the onslaught of bricks and bullets. Outmanned and outgunned, they defended the lyceum from attack, using tear gas.
"They fought with their backs to the wall," Doyle said. "One official compared it to the Alamo."

Don Forsht, 75, of Miami, one of those marshals that night, said, "We had a group of guys who had their act together. They had true grit. They were going to do their job, come hell or high water."

Next came the Mississippi National Guard, which President Kennedy had federalized.

Bruce McElroy, who was with the Mississippi National Guard, pointed two blocks south of the town square. "They were shelling our vehicles with bricks," said McElroy, now 81, of Baldwyn.

When one soldier was nearly hit with a pipe, he accidentally fired his pistol, causing the other soldiers to instinctively fire their M-14s into the air, he said. "(The rioters) all stopped and put their bricks down."

Further help came from soldiers ordered to this town by President Kennedy, Doyle said. "This was a combat rescue of a town, and it had to avoid killing civilians. The first troops that entered experienced a scene that was like it was from Dante's Inferno."

Melvin Brown, a native of West, was with the 503rd unit, which went through a wall of fire to get onto the Ole Miss campus.

"We didn't have time to think," said the 63-year-old Brown, who now lives in Augusta, Ga. "There were bricks thrown at us, cars rolled at us on fire, Molotov cocktails thrown at us."

Brown was among the nine black soldiers in the 503rd. "That night, the rioters could care less about your color," he said. "All they cared about was your uniform."

The tear gas saved the lives not only of the soldiers but of the mob, he said. "If it hadn't been for that, we would have had to fire back, and there would have been a lot of bloodshed."

Doyle said the amazing restraint and professionalism of the soldiers show they deserve medals — something their superiors believed they deserved but never gave them.
"They say the mark of a hero is that he doesn't talk about his deeds of courage," he said. "When I talked to the sons and daughters, they never knew what their fathers had done. Heroes don't get any more genuine than that."
On that Tuesday morning 40 years ago, as dawn broke and the tear gas cleared, he said, a storekeeper emerged to see scores of armed troops.

"Thank God," the storekeeper said, "you saved our town."