James Meredith: Shot for Telling Blacks to Vote In 1962, James Meredith became the first Black student at the University of Mississippi—but it took 31,000 federal troops to get him to class. Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett physically blocked his enrollment. When U.S. Marshals escorted Meredith onto the Ole Miss campus on September 30, 1962, white mobs rioted with guns and Molotov cocktails, killing two people and wounding 160 marshals—28 by gunfire—in what historians call the last battle of th