FORTY YEARS ago today, 30,000 U.S. troops assembled in Oxford, Miss., to quell a riot that erupted when James Meredith became the first African-American to enroll at the University of Mississippi, under federal court order. The melee left two people dead and hundreds of others wounded.

Forty years later, 12.9 percent of the Ole Miss student body is African-American, as is 5.6 percent of the faculty and 21 percent of the staff. Meredith's son graduated from the university with top honors last spring, earning a doctorate in business administration.

Ole Miss officials understandably assert it's time to release the university from the stigma that remains attached to the campus, encapsulated in the title of William Doyle's book An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962.

Before that can happen, though, it's appropriate that the university this week is commemorating the anniversary of its integration, eight years after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling on public school desegregation.

The observance frankly acknowledges the racial violence and official defiance by state officials - including then-Gov. Ross Barnett - that accompanied Meredith's enrollment. That exercise is likely to be instructive both to current Ole Miss students and to those who remember the turmoil of the time.

Many of the principals from the incident will assemble on campus this week. A scholarly project aimed at recording the oral histories of witnesses to the events in Oxford four decades ago promises to make a major contribution to the study of American history.

The university also will unveil a civil rights memorial. It stands next to the Lyceum, the heart of the Ole Miss campus that was at the center of the riot.

It's proper that Oxford municipal officials have invited federal marshals and soldiers, black and white, who came to the town under very different circumstances in 1962 to parade today through Courthouse Square. That distinction should cause the Army to reconsider its long-ago decision not to honor those troops for their heroism.

More than 100 marshals were wounded on the Oxford campus, 27 of them by civilian gunfire. Hundreds of Ole Miss students took part in the riot, yet no one was ever expelled. Thousands of outsiders descended on the campus and town to participate in attacks, yet no one was convicted.

"Packs of hundreds of rioters swarmed the city, some holding war dances around burning vehicles," Doyle reported in an essay in The New York Times last week. "Snipers opened fire on the Army convoys and bricks struck the heads of American soldiers."

Today, Ole Miss has worked hard and successfully to be an agent of economic and social progress and racial reconciliation throughout Mississippi. African-American students are campus leaders; black administrators hold many of the university's most prominent jobs.

"Out of the ashes and pain of fear, resistance and intimidation, Ole Miss has risen to champion the values of love, respect, tolerance and civility," University Chancellor Robert Khayat says. "We believe the time has come for the nation to see us as we are today, not as we were 40 years ago."

But some wounds remain raw, four decades later. The display of the Confederate battle flag, on campus and throughout the state, remains a divisive issue.

Meredith, who operates a used car rental business in Jackson, Miss., says he will boycott the dedication of the civil rights memorial at Ole Miss. Rather cryptically, he now calls "the concept of civil rights" an insult to Americans.
And the federal government has yet to confer battlefield decorations on troops who prevented the riot from becoming a massacre. Doyle cites an internal Army memo from 1963 that said: "The focus of additional attention on this incident would not be in the best interest of the U.S. Army or the nation decorations should not be awarded for actions involving conflict between U.S. Army units and other Americans."

This week's events on the Oxford campus will help Ole Miss - and Mississippi - acknowledge and seek to understand a painful, burdensome history. Such hard-won knowledge is the best basis for moving on to a brighter future.