Originally published in 1966, this memoir describes James Meredith's struggle to attend the main all-white university in his home state of Mississippi at a time when white segregationist resistance was so virulent that Thurgood Marshall greeted his letter announcing his intentions to apply with the words, “This guy has got to be crazy” (xii). Published with a new introduction by Aram Goudsouzian, the work remains, much as historian James Silver described it on first publication, a reflection of the uneven and singular character of the man: “at times passionately eloquent, at others impossible to comprehend” (xviii). Whether its reissue will enable this maverick to secure a fully integrated place in the story of the civil rights movement is uncertain.

In most accounts, Meredith enters the historical record on two distinct occasions. On the evening of 30 September 1962, federal marshals, dispatched by a Kennedy administration that had tried multiple ways to ensure Meredith's quiet, court-ordered admission to the University of Mississippi at Oxford (“Ole Miss”), were besieged by a mob. While the marshals fired tear gas, the mob retaliated with makeshift missiles and shotguns that claimed the life of one innocent bystander and wounded a foreign journalist. When Meredith, himself an air force veteran, awoke blithely the next morning, the campus looked like a war zone. Alongside legal documents and personal correspondence, Meredith's book details the harassment he endured during his subsequent time on campus as interest in the Battle of Ole Miss subsided.

In conventional histories, Meredith comes back onstage in the summer of 1966 with his March against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi down Highway 51. The march was also intended to encourage black Mississippians to register to vote following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and by placing Meredith back in the public eye, to render his goal of a political career viable. On the second day, 6 June, just inside the Mississippi state line, a white man, Aubrey Norvell, hit Meredith with a shotgun blast from behind and transformed his one-man crusade into a mass spectacle, renowned more for publicizing Stokely Carmichael and black power than for fulfilling Meredith's own aspirations.

It is never easy to mesh eccentric individual stories into complex social history. Meredith himself saw his life as profoundly a matter of personal choices and of what he termed his “Divine Responsibility” to break the system of white supremacy (307). The battle of Ole Miss was one moment when that system was challenged by a different set of geopolitical considerations, but for most scholars the movement in Mississippi is more accurately centered on the slow task of organizing local people to challenge that system, undertaken by the Council of Federated Organizations, primarily SNCC, CORE and the state NAACP. Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses and the Freedom Democratic Party are more resonant symbols of that movement than Meredith can be, partly due to his maverick comments at the time and even more because of his later aberrant behavior. Nevertheless, complexity is the essence of good history and when Meredith issued a statement following the 12 June murder of his friend and NAACP colleague Medgar Evers in which he called for a general strike as part of a nationwide passive-resistance movement, while simultaneously taking a swipe at Martin Luther King's use of women and children in the Birmingham protests a month earlier, he captured a masculinist philosophy that was far from eccentric, and which still associates the ideal of freedom with suspect assumptions about what it is to be a real man (292). He urged women and children to be withdrawn whenever there was a threat of violence to ensure that men could protect them. Thus his memoir captures not just his story, but larger themes, and its reissue may enrich our understanding.