Civil rights icon James Meredith is honored in his Mississippi hometown

KOSCIUSKO, Miss. (AP) — A new historical marker has been unveiled in the hometown of James Meredith, honoring the Black man who fought white supremacy by integrating the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Meredith, 91, wore a red Ole Miss baseball hat as he watched Friday's ceremony from the front seat of a pickup truck owned by Kosciusko, a town of 6,800 that is also the birthplace of media mogul Oprah Winfrey. About 85 people attended, and many snapped selfies with Meredith and his wife, Judy Alsobrooks Meredith.

"Most important day of my life," Meredith said in a brief interview.

“Over half the people here are my relatives," he said. "And for relatives to stand out in the cold like they did — that’s something special.”

Meredith, who resists being called a civil rights leader, now lives in Mississippi's capital city of Jackson. He was born in Kosciusko and grew up on a nearby farm. He graduated from high school in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1951, and served for nine years in the Air Force before returning to Mississippi.

He attended Jackson State College — the historically Black school that is now Jackson State University — for two years before suing to gain admission as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi.

A white mob erupted in violence when Meredith registered at Ole Miss, and U.S. marshals protected him on and off the Oxford campus. The university has honored him several times in the decades since then. Today, about 10% of students at the university are Black.

“He’s a man whose courage profoundly altered the course of history,” Kosciusko Mayor Tim Kyle said Friday.

While Meredith was enrolled at Ole Miss, his parents and some of his siblings lived in a small brick home in Kosciusko. The new historical marker is a short walk from that house, roughly where marshals would park when Meredith visited family in 1962 and 1963.

Florida State University professor Davis Houck and his students collaborated with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History on the new marker, which also notes that Meredith was shot during a 1966 "March Against Fear" — a planned walk from Memphis, Tennessee; to Jackson, Mississippi; to encourage Black voter registration.

Meredith's oldest son, John Meredith, is currently the city council president in Huntsville, Alabama. He said he was unable to attend the unveiling of other historical markers honoring his father at Ole Miss, at the site of the 1966 shooting in Hernando, Mississippi, and outside the state Capitol.

John Meredith said he has fond memories of visiting his grandmother, known as Ms. Roxie, in the brick home in Kosciusko.

“So all of this is quite the homecoming for me personally, and obviously my father is ecstatic about being honored this way in his hometown,” John Meredith said. "It’s a great day for the Meredith family.”