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 221.

This is our last episode on James Meredith and the Oxford Riot.

Some of you may be happier than others with that, but I think these episodes serve their purpose. For most of you, I think this dog did hunt.

Well, no pun intended.

You know, after this whole thing was all over, Time magazine would write that the Oxford riot was the gravest conflict between the state and federal authority

since the Civil War. President Kennedy was forced to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, and it

mobilized over 30,000 troops in total. For a single disturbance, it was the most ever in the history of our country.

It was also the final time that troops were deployed on any scale during the civil rights movement.

In some ways, it was a pivotal point and a point of crescendo when it came to massive public resistance to desegregation and massive public resistance to the civil rights movement.

In general, it's hard for any of us to imagine the existence of the military in our local

neighborhood. They're to peacekeep. Even harder for us to imagine our neighbors all getting together

grabbing their shotguns, their rifles,

and their pistols and their bricks, and all heading up to the campus of our nearby university

in search of a good federalie to take a shot at.

And if you don't think I'm serious about that, General Billingsley's men apprehended a group of

students who were in possession

of a cachet of M1 rifles stolen right there during the entire incident, stolen from the local

ROTC. That tells only part of the story, though, of what those people were doing that day.

They were not only looking for a federality to shoot,

...