WASHINGTON: The President of the United States went on television to announce that the ruler of one rogue state would not be allowed to defy the will of the world. He hoped for peace, but if necessary US forces would go in with overwhelming power. He talked about his “obligation under the constitution and the statutes of the United States”.

It was not George W Bush, it was John F Kennedy 40 years ago on September 30, 1962. The state was one of the not very united ones, Mississippi, then engaged in one of the last major spasms of overt resistance to the principles that were supposed to have been established by the Civil War a century earlier.

This was a crucial moment in the struggle to end segregation in the US. It was sparked by James Meredith’s attempt to become the first black student to enrol at the University of Mississippi - “Ole Miss”. The state governor himself, Ross Barnett, stood in the doorway to prevent him registering.

Kennedy sent in 750 federal marshals to the university town of Oxford to escort Meredith inside, but they were overwhelmed by furious whites. Two people were killed and dozens injured in the ensuing riot: the modern US may never have been so close to a full-scale public uprising. It made Mississippi a worldwide byword for intolerance and racism, an image the state has not entirely eradicated.

This week some of the principals will return to Oxford to consider whether the war was also won. These days 13 per cent of the students at Ole Miss are black, and James Meredith’s own son has just quietly obtained a doctorate in business administration. But Mary Margaret Miller of the university paper, the Daily Mississippian, says the problems have not entirely gone away.

Meredith will be among those taking part in the anniversary conference, though his contribution may be unpredictable. He is 69 now, rather unwell. He lives in the state capital, Jackson, where he runs a car rental business aimed at poor families, but he has never become a poster boy for the civil rights movement. Four years after the riots, he even endorsed Governor Barnett’s campaign for re-election.

The role of President Kennedy was not conventionally heroic either: he tried to persuade black activists to rein back their demands, and badly underestimated the gravity of the Oxford crisis. Once it was over, though, the segregationists’ power was weakened, and the path clearer for the civil rights legislation passed under Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.