In Hosting Debate, Ole Miss

The Wall Street Journal, 9/22/8

For the University of Mississippi, hosting the first presidential debate involving an African-American nominee this Friday will cap a long effort to redeem a school linked with the most violent era of segregation.

Ole Miss, as the school is known, gained infamy in 1962, when U.S. soldiers were called in to put down a riot resisting the enrollment of the school’s first African-American student, James Meredith. It was a crucible in the battle over integration in Mississippi, where the 1955 murder of a 14-year-old black boy had helped start the civil-rights movement and the murders of three civil-rights activists in 1964 spurred congressional passage 11 days later of the Civil Rights Act.