Walking Through the Tear Gas

On the evening of September 30, 1962, James Meredith sat in a dormitory room at the University of Mississippi while a mob of over two thousand raged outside. Tear gas drifted through the Oxford night. Bricks shattered windows. Gunshots echoed across the Grove. By morning, two men lay dead, and hundreds were injured. Yet when the sun rose on October 1, the thirty-year-old Air Force veteran walked to the registrar's office, signed his name, and became the first Black student enrolled at Ole Miss.…