FORGOTTEN SOLDIERS OF THE INTEGRATION FIGHT:

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.

I sent this out to my National Security Law seminar earlier, but thought it was worth blogging, too.

UPDATE: Reader Deborah Durkee writes:

Thanks for posting the excerpt of the NY Times article, Prof. Reynolds.

My (caucasian) daughter has been working on her Ph.D. at Ole Miss in Oxford (she’s now interning in CO). One of her best friends is a lovely young black woman from the Chicago area. Her folks want her to move back home, but she loves the South. Loves Mississippi and Memphis just an hour north.

Mississippi (I’m sure) still has remnants of the old Mississippi, but my daughter never saw it, and this generation of young adults believe in everyone is a person…period. It’s great to honor those who helped in that “integration fight” that I watched (all scary) on television as a child. It’s even a greater honor to those who fought that fight that the old South has changed so much that blacks from Chicago want to come home to live.

Yes, there’s been quite the reverse-diaspora going on over the past decade or so. Meanwhile, this story is news to a lot of people. There’s great footage in Eyes On The Prize, where it looks like something out of Apocalypse Now.