The Civil War was over nearly 100 years, but some residents of the former Confederacy simply could not face that. So when James Meredith, a former Air Force staff sergeant and student at all-black Jackson State College attempted to transfer to the then all-white University of Mississippi, in the fall of 1962, these Dixie die-hards determined to make the campus of "Ole Miss" their last stand against what they saw as the evil of integration. With the help of their segregationist governor and a sympathetic Mississippi Highway Patrol to back him up, Meredith’s brave effort to kill Jim Crow caused President Kennedy and his brother, the Attorney General, to deploy some 30,000 U.S. troops – the largest mobilization of American fighters on native soil since the Civil War. Although we all know that Meredith won one of the many important battles of the Civil Rights movement, William Doyle’s book brings this key moment in history alive in a way that is so riveting, and so filled with astounding detail that even knowing the ending does not spoil the reader’s journey. Speaker: WILLIAM DOYLE Author, Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton (1999)