OXFORD, Miss. - Ole Miss is looking for witnesses to the night of Sept. 30, 1962.

It was the night James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi, backed by 300 federal marshals and 30,000 troops, as thousands of white students and outsiders ran riot over the campus.

Two men were left dead and at least 300 people were wounded, yet not one student was expelled, not one attacker convicted.

Now, as it faces up to its infamy more candidly than ever, the university is embarking on a project that is more self-examination than investigation.

Scholars are beginning a yearlong documentary project, videotaping anyone they can find who was in Oxford that night 40 years ago:

• Meredith, his lawyer and the federal officials charged with enforcing the orders they won in court.
• The marshals, National Guardsmen and regular Army soldiers — black and white — who were credited with averting a massacre.
• The town doctor who stitched up gashes and bullet wounds while under fire himself.
• The college chaplain who climbed the Confederate soldiers' monument and begged the protesters to go home.
At the same time, university officials want America to appreciate that this is a very different campus now.

Last spring, after quietly going through a master's program in finance like any other student, Meredith's son graduated at the top of his class. Black students make up nearly 13 percent of enrollment and have held every major leadership position on campus.

The school's chancellor, Robert Khayat, argues that Ole Miss has earned emancipation from its historical burden.
"Forty years ago, the nation wanted us to treat everyone the same way," said Khayat, who has struggled since 1995 to make the university more hospitable to minorities. "Now we just want to be treated the same way everyone else is treated."

While some protesters from 1962 remain insistent that the campus should have remained segregated, many others will be celebrating, officials say, for there are many people to honor, and time is running short.

The generation of civil rights activists is now about the same age Civil War veterans were when monuments to the Confederacy started appearing across the South at the turn of the 20th century.

Ole Miss has observed the anniversary every year, but never like this, Khayat said. "It's an opportunity to bring together the participants in that event, probably for the last time," he said, "but also to let them know that what they did was not in vain."

Some university officials said they were surprised to find that many current students were only dimly aware of the rioting at Ole Miss or the constitutional crisis that precipitated it.

That crisis happened when Gov. Ross Barnett repeatedly defied federal court orders to admit Meredith, an Air Force veteran and a Mississippi native, and physically blocked him from registering.

The military suppression of the riots crushed the prevailing Southern strategy of "massive resistance" to integration, wrote William Doyle, author of "An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962" (Doubleday, 2001).
In Doyle's view, it was as crucial a moment as the collapse of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, which turned the course of the Civil War.

The 14-hour protest

came "within an eyelash" of turning into a bloodbath, said Melvin Brown, a black master sergeant in an elite military police unit that marched through a wall of flames and a hailstorm of brickbats to rescue the beleaguered marshals.
"All night long, those people threw rocks and bottles and Molotov cocktails and jars of chemicals that exploded on us," said Brown.

Now a deputy marshal himself, Brown plans to travel from his home in Augusta, Ga., to be honored by the town of Oxford.

Doyle's book, devoted to the fight over integrating Ole Miss, revealed a 1963 Army memorandum rejecting recommendations for battlefield decorations because the publicity "would not be in the best interest of the U.S. Army or the nation."

Doyle called it tragic that the marshals and soldiers, who he said had saved the university and the town, had been ignored for so long.

"Forty years of denial has robbed Mississippi of some of its greatest heroes," he said.