Oct. 8, 1962 - At the University of Mississippi at Oxford this evening, a stone was hurled through the window of the campus cafeteria while James H. Meredith, the university’s only Negro student, was eating supper. The rock, about the size of a man’s fist, landed within three feet of the 29-year-old Meredith. The U.S. marshals dining with him immediately escorted him from the building by a back door and returned with him to his apartment in Baxter Hall, which is heavily guarded by troops of the 101st Airborne Division. While the marshals were gone, the two front tires of their car were slashed. The crowd of students from whose midst the rock had been thrown began to grow and, before the demonstration ended, reached 400. The throng was kept in check by about 15 men of the 716th Military Police Battalion of Fort Dix, N.J., while others tried to repair the car, which was finally towed away. Other students in a dormitory across the street threw toilet paper from the window and chanted, “two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate.”
