The Night Table: The War for Integration, and Two Departed Grandes Dames

“James Meredith: Breaking the Barrier,” edited by Kathleen Wickham. Yoknapatawpha Press, 162 pages; “We Believed We Were Immortal: Twelve Reporters Who Covered the 1962 Integration Crisis at Ole Miss,” by Kathleen Wickham, Yoknapatawpha Press, 246 pages; “Riot: Witness to Anger and Change,” by Edwin E. Meek, Edited by Lawrence Wells, Yoknapatawpha Press, 160 pages. As James Meredith was on his way to becoming the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi, a riot broke out on campus September 30, 1962. Schools had remained segregated in spite of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, and as William Faulkner had forecast, violence arrived when the federal government enforced integration. The plan was to murder Mr. Meredith, as Kathleen Wickham recounts in “We Believed We Were Immortal.”