Princeton University Press: A well-known story about Ross Barnett, the segregationist governor of Mississippi from 1960 to 1964 and one of the iconic figures of the white South’s massive resistance to civil rights, is a good example. In his effort to block James Meredith from entering the University of Mississippi in 1962, Barnett achieved a level of infamy rare in American politics. The confrontation at the federal building in Jackson is one of the more familiar scenes from the southern civil rights struggle. Thousands of white onlookers had gathered outside the building to cheer Barnett on. Hundreds more had packed the hallway inside. Meredith walked up to Barnett surrounded by federal officials and U.S. marshals; he was the only African American among a sea of white faces. With television cameras rolling and the entire assemblage tense with anticipation, Barnett’s opening line brought a roar of laughter from the supportive crowd: “Which one is Meredith?”29 The story has usually been told as an example of Barnett’s comic ineptness.30 This was the same man, after all, who was nearly killed when, after exiting his campaign aircraft, he walked directly into a whirling airplane propeller; a man who once began remarks at a Jewish synagogue in Jackson by saying, “There is nothing finer than a group of people meeting in true Christian fellowship.” But, in fact, Barnett’s seemingly dull-witted comment was intentional, even rehearsed. He had used it two weeks earlier when he had blocked Meredith’s attempt to enroll on the campus of the university.31 Barnett’s apparent flub was really an inside joke, a verbal wink to Mississippi segregationists. There are at least two ways to read the joke. The first hinges on the legal argument Mississippi officials made to block Meredith. In the weeks leading up to the riots at Ole Miss, Barnett had stoked the fires of white racial pride shamelessly. These appeals, however, differed sharply from Mississippi officials’ argument before the federal court. There they did not mention Meredith’s race; state officials claimed that they denied Meredith admission because he did not have the required number of recommendation letters. In other words, it was not because of the color of Meredith’s skin but because of the alleged content of his character. It was a color-blind argument, one that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals easily rejected as being argued “in the eerie atmosphere of never-never land.”32 Ross Barnett, however, did not want a single white voter in Mississippi to mistake his defiance for anything other than a defense of white racial integrity itself. Everyone in the building, the state, and the nation knew that the reason James Meredith was not admitted was because he was black. The joke for Barnett was that he was feigning color blindness; he acted as though he could not pick out the African American Meredith from the other white faces in front of him. In doing so, Barnett not only called attention to his real reasons for blocking Meredith but also mocked the notion of color blindness itself, denouncing it as a fiction that in Barnett’s mind was as outlandish in its presuppositions as the idea that a black man was the moral and intellectual equal of a white man.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 05:31:12 +0000
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