An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962

By William Doyle

When James Meredith became the first black man to enter the University of Mississippi, he forced America to face the contradiction of second-class citizenship for multitudes of its black citizens, not with speeches, boycotts, or sit-ins, but on a battlefield. Doyle takes teens to two of those battlefields: a cerebral one where Meredith, President John Kennedy, and Governor Barnett grapple over politics; and a physical one, where federal troops and local mobs converge on the university campus.


More in realistic fiction

More from Alex Awards