“Whether is was true or not, I had always felt that I could stop a mob with the uplift of a hand.”
– James Meredith

“James Meredith is very gentle. He’s also one of the noblest people I have met. It’s no picnic he’s gone through, but he takes it well. He has no rancor. He can laugh at these people and that can’t be easy. I wasn’t surprised he decided to stick it out at Mississippi.”
– James Baldwin, Life Magazine, May 24, 1963

“One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose, facing jeering and hostile mobs with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer…”
– Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963