A 28-year-old married veteran of the Air Force, Meredith had studied for two years at Jackson State University. But Meredith wanted a better legal education than the historically black university could offer, and he wanted to get it at Ole Miss.
Even though the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown v. the Board of Education had come more than eight years earlier, forbidding "separate but equal" public schools, no university in the South--the great bastion of segregation--had yet integrated.
After twice being denied admission, with advice from the NAACP, Meredith took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where he was finally granted the right to attend the all-white university.
"Nobody handpicked me," Meredith would later recall, crediting President John Kennedy's inaugural address as inspiring him to attempt what had never before been achieved. "I believed, and I believe now, that I have a divine responsibility to break white supremacy in Mississippi, and getting in Ole Miss was only the start."
