September 30 · This Day in America
On September 30, 1962, James Meredith — Air Force veteran, Mississippi native, Black — is escorted onto the campus of the University of Mississippi by hundreds of federal marshals, there because a court said he had the right to enroll and his state would not allow it. By nightfall a mob of thousands besieges the campus with rocks, bottles, gunfire. Tear gas hangs in the live oaks. Two men are killed; scores of marshals are wounded; President Kennedy federalizes the Guard and sends in the Army. Through the whole long night Meredith waits in a dormitory while the country fights over whether he may go to school. In the morning, October 1, he walks to the registrar's office and signs his name. One man, one signature, an entire system of segregation cracking behind him. He had said he only wanted an education. He got one, and so did the nation.
Source: www.usmarshals.gov
Also on this day · 1935
On September 30, 1935, in 102-degree desert heat, President Franklin Roosevelt stands before ten thousand people and dedicates the great concrete arch wedged into Black Canyon — Hoover Dam, taming the Colorado River, finished two years early at the cost of over a hundred lives. Built in the depths of the Depression, it would water the Southwest and light millions of homes. "I came, I saw, and I was conquered," Roosevelt said, looking up at it.
Source: www.nps.gov
“Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law but not to disobey it.”John F. Kennedy, address on the University of Mississippi, 1962