BOOK/MEDIA REVIEWS

Abstract

The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States ' Rights, by Frank Lambert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, 208 pp., $22.95, paperback.Reviewed by Aaron N. Taylor, Saint Louis University School of Law.In The Battle of Ole Miss, Frank Lambert provides truly compelling narration of James Meredith's fight to gain admission to the University of Mississippi. Lambert, professor of history at Purdue, was student at Ole Miss during Meredith's quest. Thus, as the foreword asserts, he is perfectly positioned to write about the events upon which the book focuses.One of the principal strengths of The Battle of Ole Miss is Lambert's diligent attention to context. He begins the book with discussion of the main characters. On one side, there is James Meredith and on the other, there is segregationist governor, Ross Barnett. Both men had interests at stake, but Lambert rightly pointed out that they were proxies in much larger battle. Meredith represented the fight for equality and civil rights. His pursuit of admission to Ole Miss threatened not only the purity of that institution, but also the very foundations of white supremacy. Barnett represented Mississippi's segregationist, racist, and isolated way of life. Ole Miss was the state's most cherished space, and segregation was the state's most prevalent social construct. Therefore, Barnett was protecting the Mississippi Way from the threat of inclusivity and federal interference.Lambert characterizes The Battle of Ole Miss as a multilayered narrative about an individual's struggle, university's survival, state's continuation of century-old war, and federal administration's reluctant but resolute protection of one man's civil (p. 4). The book is organized into two parts: The Mississippi Way (Chapters 1-4) and Confrontation at Ole Miss (Chapters 5-8).The first part provides context about life in Mississippi during Meredith's formative years. Chapter 1 describes life from the Black perspective and introduces the reader to Cap Meredith, James's father and heroic figure in his own right. Cap instills in James the sense of self-worth that would allow James to dare think he was worthy of admission to Ole Miss. In contrast, Chapter 2 describes life from the White perspective. It goes into great detail about the role of socialization-textbooks, newspapers, and churches-in promoting discredited assumptions (p. 37) that presented White superiority, Black inferiority, and segregation as natural, even divine, facts-of-life.Chapter 3 discusses the confluence of various factors that prompted more aggressive tack by Blacks pursuing civil rights in Mississippi. The return of more than 80,000 Black GIs, including Meredith, from World War II service, along with President Truman's executive order (1948) desegregating the armed forces and the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown (1954) empowered Blacks to mobilize behind efforts to increase voter registration and to pursue admission into the state's ail-White universities. Chapter 4 serves contrasting role in discussing the manners in which Whites mobilized to forestall what they saw as the Second Reconstruction. Lambert illustrates in detail how cultural resistance to integration inspired state-directed and grassroots resistance. Most interestingly, he explains how segregationist groups such as the Citizens Council (recently lionized by Mississippi governor Haley Barbour) and the Ku Klux Klan used different methods to promote the same end: preservation of segregation (See article at http://www.examiner.com/article/haley-barbour-praises-the-prosegregation-citizens-council-from-mississippi).Chapter 5 is dedicated to the litigation Meredith faced in seeking to gain admission to Ole Miss. Lambert manages to discuss every significant development and judicial decision without getting bogged down in the details. …