Sansing, who has written a history of Ole Miss, notes that the late Mississippi author Willie Morris referred to the events of September and October 1962 as "the last battle of the Civil War."

Ross Barnett, then Mississippi's stridently segregationist governor, declared to thousands of Confederate flag-waving Ole Miss fans at a football game in Jackson on Sept. 29, 1962, that integration would never take place on his watch.

Privately, though, Barnett negotiated with President John F. Kennedy. While they spoke by telephone, violence escalated as angry whites streamed into Oxford, some from hundreds of miles away, to defend what they considered the southern way of life.

Kennedy ordered the National Guard and U.S. marshals to escort Meredith onto campus. Two people — a French journalist and a worker from Oxford — were killed and about 200 were injured.

Meredith himself was unharmed. He graduated in August 1963 with a degree in political science.

William D. Scott III is a chemistry professor nearing retirement at Ole Miss. In autumn 1962, he was a student at historically black Rust College in nearby Holly Springs. He still remembers standing with other Rust students and cheering the federal vehicles escorting Meredith to campus.

Scott gives the university credit for its efforts to recruit and retain minority students.

"It's hard to live that history down," he said.

George Monroe, an attorney and youth court judge in east central Mississippi, was a student living on campus in 1962.

He remembers the sound of tear gas canisters popping, one of them lobbed into his dorm.

"I didn't want him in there," Monroe said of Meredith. "I was like most Mississippians. But we were wrong."

Monroe said his change his feelings came through a gradual process of maturing.

"We all change," Monroe said. "That's the good thing about it."