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| Forgotten
Soldiers of the Integration Fight |
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by
William Doyle
September
28, 2002
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On
Tuesday, Oct. 1, Oxford, Miss., will be
coming to terms with one of the major events
of its past. Forty years ago on that day,
in the early morning, a force of nearly
30,000 American combat troops raced toward
Oxford in a colossal armada of helicopters,
transport planes, Jeeps and Army trucks.
Their mission was to save Oxford, the University
of Mississippi and a small force of federal
marshals from being destroyed by over 2,000
white civilians who were rioting after James
Meredith, a black Air Force veteran, arrived
to integrate the school.
The troops were National Guardsmen from
little towns all over Mississippi, regular
Army men from across the United States and
paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne
Divisions.
They had to capture the city quickly; the
F.B.I. had intelligence that thousands of
Klansmen and segregationists from California
to Georgia may have set off for Oxford,
many of them armed.
The first troops to reach Oxford found over
100 wounded federal marshals at the center
of campus, 27 of them hit by civilian gunfire.
Packs of hundreds of rioters swarmed the
city, some holding war dances around burning
vehicles.
Snipers opened fire on the Army convoys
and bricks struck the heads of American
soldiers. Black G.I.'s in one convoy were
ambushed by white civilians who tried to
decapitate them in their open Jeeps with
metal pipes.
Maj. William Callicott of the Mississippi
National Guard had served in World War II;
he said he "never was as terrified
as I was going onto the campus that night."
"It was the fact that I knew there
had to be some local people from my hometown
probably over there in that mob," Major
Callicott said. "That's what really
worried me. If we killed anybody it could
be my next-door neighbor."
The Army troops restored order to the school
and the city, block by block. A girl watched
a team of infantrymen under attack on the
Oxford town square and, according to a reporter
at the scene, wondered aloud, "When
are they going to shoot back?" Except
for a few warning shots, they never did.
Yet when the soldiers left the city a few
weeks later, they marched into oblivion.
Most were under orders not to talk to the
press. The Cuban missile crisis unfolded
just weeks later, wiping Oxford from the
front pages.
What the troops did in Oxford was so courageous
that their commanders nominated them for
scores of medals. But an internal Army memo
from May 1963 states: "The focus of
additional attention on this incident would
not be in the best interest of the US Army
or the nation. . . . decorations should
not be awarded for actions involving conflict
between US Army units and other Americans."
Memories of what the troops did then faded
away.
On Tuesday, there will be an epilogue to
this dramatic battle. Oxford's mayor, Richard
Howorth, and the city council of Oxford
have tracked down as many of the troops
of 1962 as they could and invited them to
the city to be honored as heroes. They will
march back through Oxford's Courthouse Square
to receive the official thanks of the community
they saved from destruction two generations
ago. |
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