Welcome to JFK in The Enduring Secret.

I'm your host, Jeff Crudell.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.

Today's episode is episode 217, and it's the story of James Meredith and the Oxford riots.

Most people know this story as the very famous and forced entry of the first black man to attend the University of Mississippi, the story of James Meredith.

It's an epic event in civil rights history, one of the most important events in the advancement of the civil rights cause.

Nowhere in this country was their deep-rooted racism that was more widespread than in Mississippi in those days.

Nowhere in this country was it more normal to live in segregation as the cultural norm.

For those of you who have stuck with me on this long wander related to the JFK assassination,

you may ask why I am covering this material.

And some of you will bring up and recall the series of episodes that I presented on Cuba,

something that some of you found interesting and others perhaps not so much.

But my connection and fascination with that topic was somewhat homegrown,

because I grew up in South Florida, and I personally experienced the earlier years of that migration and immigration and then transformation. There was a special connection for me,

then, to the Cuban element element and maybe that resulted in a

bigger wander on my part than was necessary when it came to the origins of the Cuban matter

just about anyone can argue that you don't need to study Columbus in his debut on the island of

Cuba to understand the Kennedy assassination I get get that. But what I am trying to

preserve here in the overall context of this podcast is that the events that occurred in 1963,

and in that era generally, were all a product of their time, all a product of their cumulative history up to that point,

all a product of the social norms that then persisted.

And finally, the true visceral reality of that time.

...