"The South is armed for revolt," reported William Faulkner in 1956. "These white people will accept another civil war knowing they're going to lose." When it came to his own state, the great novelist proved a most reliable prophet.

Throughout the 1960s, probably more violence and noxious rhetoric were visited on the black freedom movement in Mississippi than anywhere else in the South. With the tacit consent of the white majority, local police murdered some civil rights workers and beat up others before carting the wounded off to places like Parchman Farm, which quickly became a synonym for "brutal Southern prison." Leading businessmen and politicians from local sheriff up to governor proudly joined the Citizens Council, explicitly established to preserve white supremacy, even if it meant open revolt against the federal government. Elsewhere, even in the upper South, white Mississippians seemed a bunch of throwbacks, greeting the tiniest step toward racial equality with a sneer, a billy club and a hunting rifle. Yet early in the decade, the admission of black Air Force veteran James Meredith to the previously segregated state university had demonstrated how futile the white resistance, for all its ferocity, really was. But its foot soldiers, as William Doyle fully and dramatically recounts, still put up quite a battle.

During the final days of September 1962, thousands of white Southerners, most of whom had never seen the inside of an Ole Miss classroom, flocked to the Oxford campus eager to take on whatever forces President Kennedy could muster on Meredith's behalf. Gov. Ross Barnett threatened defiance, while privately cutting a deal with the White House. The armed defenders of racial decency and the law included U.S. marshals and federalized National Guardsmen, later supplemented by regular Army troops. On the night of Sept. 30, a massive crowd assembled in the center of the campus and threw itself time after time against the men in uniform. The latter responded with countless volleys of tear gas and swings of their truncheons (they were ordered to use bullets only if Meredith's life was in danger).

By the time the mob retreated at daybreak, two civilians -- one journalist and a spectator -- had been shot to death by unknown assailants, and close to 400 people on both sides were injured. That same morning, Meredith registered for school and attended his first class, a lecture on Colonial America. About 23,000 troops occupied the small college town for several weeks to discourage any whites still bent on riot.

There's a grand irony in these events, one Doyle doesn't mention: For all the censure heaped on uncivil student leftists in the 1960s, the most violent campus upheaval of the era by far occurred in the Deep South and was instigated by white racists.

The battle of Oxford is hardly a hidden piece of history. Scholars of the civil rights movement have plowed through the essentials, and every survey of the 1960s recognizes the bloody confrontation as a big step along the path to legal integration. But Doyle places the episode in the context of both Mississippi history and the history of the far right and conveys scenes of the combat at Ole Miss with a thoroughness of detail comparable to popular accounts of the bloodletting at Antietam or Gettysburg a century earlier. Tales abound of acts on the campus battlefield by individuals -- crazed, foolish and courageous. And Doyle, author of a previous book on presidential tapes, skillfully uses recorded conversations between JFK, his brother Robert, and Gov. Barnett to make clear that political face-saving came first for all three men, despite their ideological differences.

The tight focus on one night of fury and the author's interviews with everyone from James Meredith to a former imperial wizard of the KKK yield a number of surprises. Doyle documents that, in an effort to assuage the rioters, few black soldiers were sent to Oxford, and those who did go were banished to kitchen duties and the like -- liberal officials temporarily resegregated the Army to speed the integration of Ole Miss. Doyle also reveals how close a large band of state highway patrolmen came to mounting their own attack on federal marshals they falsely believed had arrested both their commanding officer and the lieutenant governor. The first combat between federal and state forces since 1865 was averted only when the officials in question dashed back to head off their loyal troopers. All this makes for a book that takes its place as one of the best narratives to chronicle the epic contest between African Americans bent on freedom and their most fanatic opponents.

Unfortunately, Doyle is better at storytelling than at crafting historical judgments. He concludes the book with the claim that the battle of Oxford was "a turning point" where "the ultimate outcome of the civil rights struggle was symbolically settled." Doyle doesn't really try to flesh out this grand, fuzzy statement, and perhaps he made a wise decision.

There's a simple reason why the drama at Ole Miss has, as the author laments, been largely forgotten by Americans four decades later: Other civil rights battles had greater import. The savage repression of mass protests in the streets of Birmingham in the spring of 1963 goaded JFK to propose a civil rights law he had long delayed. The violence meted against marchers in Selma two years later helped President Johnson push the Voting Rights Act through Congress. And the patient, if dangerous, work of organizers like Bob Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer in Southern towns emboldened ordinary black citizens to run for office and to demand better jobs and schools.

The major significance of Meredith's victory probably lay in Mississippi itself, where whites slowly learned that piecemeal integration did not threaten their racial dominance and might even persuade the rest of the country to think more kindly of the Magnolia State. "Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of," insisted protest singer Phil Ochs during the heyday of the civil rights movement. Instead, the state became a cornerstone of the emerging Republican juggernaut that ended up placing the ever-smiling Trent Lott, who kept his frat brothers out of harm's way at Ole Miss during the 1962 crisis, at the helm of the U.S. Senate.