His Own Man

...his amazing speech to the NAACP National Youth Work Committee, critical and condescending, with a lecture on the middle-class art of money-handling (in part a justification for having bought his wife a new Thunderbird) ; a variety of small and touching memories, including the poor Negro family who had him to dinner in Oxford and the campus beauty queen who sat beside him at a public meeting when no one else would...

...One can point to many ways the book might have been improved, made more professional, less tedious, more saleable...

...one feels, as often with the Negro middle class of the South, transported in mood and tone to the Nineteenth Century...

...The situation had indeed become serious...

...The characteristic that dominates the self-portrait is independence...

...His "most stabilizing belief," he says (and who among us would dare say such a thing even if one could summon such a belief...

...But what is most compelling is the portrait of James Meredith that emerges...

...Tinkered with, the account would not have been as fascinating as it most compellingly is, and Meredith would not have emerged as the fully-drawn, amazing, exasperating, and likeable individual that he does...

...is that I have never made a mistake in my life because I never make arbitrary or pre-determined decisions...

...It was a fair plot, but one could easily determine from the mood of the crowd, the governor, and the members of the legislature that the 'playing' part was over...

...The third was to become "de-adjectived"—not "the Negro, James Meredith," but James Meredith, the individual...

...Other aspects of the adventure emerge with similar clarity—Meredith's involvement in student protest at all-Negro Jackson State College prior to seeking admission to the all-white university...

...Meredith's book makes startlingly real how stylized and cagily-shaped and squeezed-dry most contemporary writing is...

...James Meredith was his own man, thinking for himself, acting on his own, hearing but often not taking well-meant advice from well-placed people...

...Justice Department and then-Governor Ross Barnett for the ritual staging of a final showdown in the conflict of Federal and state power emerges in his prose as the rather shoddy and deadly dangerous political happening that it was: "The governor was to block the representatives of the Federal government and me from meeting with the board and university officials, theoretically ready and waiting to register me...

...His "master plan" includes three immediate goals...

...It is no more like anybody else's book than Mr...

...There are few if any tidbits of new fact about the main events of his adventure—the court suits, the remarkable state and Federal duel over his admission under court order to the university, the ensuing riot with its two deaths and everlasting disgrace to American education...

...There is, too, his deeper, "mystical" quality...

...One can also imagine Meredith saying no to any such suggested changes...

...What is new is to see these events as Meredith saw them...

...It is impossible to read this book without being struck by the extent to which he succeeds in this third purpose...

...Some of the most valuable material is informal sociological data about Mississippi, knowledgeable descriptions of Negro society, and Meredith's fierce insights into white society...

...Hard-headed, fearless, almost humorless (he laughs at himself twice in the book), he also shows himself generous, loyal to friends, highly sensitive to pain and injustice around him, and touchingly (perhaps romantically) devoted to the plain Negro people of Mississippi, their folkways and folk greatness, and to the land and beauty of that tragic state...

...finally, a full rendering, in detail, of the sad state of the university while he was there...

...However it happened, Indiana University Press is to be congratulated for such a book...

...Perhaps the people at the top might have been able to agree to further deals, but it was obvious that holding back the worked-up racial hatred of the Mississippi whites would be difficult...

...it reveals its author as fully as any of us would .be revealed if we sat down and wrote with apparent lack of regard for its effect exactly all that we did and felt in a year of life...

...For example, the famous-behind-the-scenes arrangements between the U.S...

...his indignation at efforts to tutor him at Yale during the Christmas holidays...

...His self-assurance can only be called old-fashioned...

...Another was to become governor of Mississippi, an unlikely prospect even for so determined a man as Meredith...

...Meredith tells everything that happened, in his own way, with his own unshakable sureness in himself...

...Out of such distinctiveness comes truth, as regards writing, and such an adventure in the impossible as the desegregation of the University of Mississippi...

...For this is a book that is completely honest...

...Meredith himself fits anybody's standardized patterns...

...One is technically completed, the desegregation of the University of Mississippi...

...He tells earnestly of his "Divine Responsibility" to "break the system of white supremacy," a life's mission, with its "master plan...

...his announcement after the first semester that he might not return to the university...