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The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States ' Rights, by Frank Lambert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, 208 pp., $22.95, paperback.
Reviewed by Aaron N. Taylor, Saint Louis University School of Law.
In The Battle of Ole Miss, Frank Lambert provides a truly compelling narration of James Meredith's fight to gain admission to the University of Mississippi. Lambert, a professor of history at Purdue, was a student at Ole Miss during Meredith's quest. Thus, as the foreword asserts, he is "perfectly positioned" to write about the events upon which the book focuses.
One of the principal strengths of The Battle of Ole Miss is Lambert's diligent attention to context. He begins the book with a discussion of the main characters. On one side, there is James Meredith and on the other, there is segregationist governor, Ross Barnett. Both men had interests at stake, but Lambert rightly pointed out that they were proxies in a much larger battle. Meredith represented the fight for equality and civil rights. His pursuit of admission to Ole Miss threatened not only the "purity" of that institution, but also the very foundations of white supremacy. Barnett represented Mississippi's segregationist, racist, and isolated way of life. Ole Miss was the state's most cherished space, and segregation was the state's most prevalent social construct. Therefore, Barnett was protecting the Mississippi Way from the threat of inclusivity and federal interference.
Lambert characterizes The Battle of Ole Miss as "a multilayered narrative about an individual's struggle, a university's survival, a state's continuation of a century-old war, and a federal administration's reluctant but resolute protection of one man's civil rights" (p. 4). The book is organized into two parts: The Mississippi Way (Chapters 1-4) and Confrontation at Ole Miss (Chapters 5-8).
The first...