James Meredith first applied for admission to the University of Mississippi in January of 1961. At that time, the University had never admitted a black student despite the 1954 United States Supreme Court ruling Brown versus Board of Education, which established racial segregation in public schools as unconstitutional. Meredith’s application was initially denied but, with legal assistance from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund, the United States Court of Appeals ruled that Meredith should be admitted. This decision was upheld on September 10, 1962 by the United States Supreme Court after the state of Mississippi appealed the decision.
After the Supreme Court ruling, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett assumed the role of Registrar at the University in order to block Meredith’s admission. This unprecedented action forced the involvement of the federal government, and on September 30 a deal was reached to allow Meredith to be admitted. Later that evening, violence erupted on campus as segregationist protested the decision in what became known as the Ole Miss Riot of 1962 where two people were killed and many more were injured. The following day, October 1, 1062, James Meredith registered for courses, the first black student to ever do so at the University of Mississippi.
This long and arduous process captured the world’s attention. As news traveled about what was happening at the University of Mississippi, James Meredith received hundreds of letters from all over the world. Some letters were sympathetic to his cause while others were unsympathetic, often containing racist undertones and threatening language. Today, many of the letters Meredith received are housed in the University of Mississippi’s Archives and Special Collections and digitally accessible on eGrove , the University’s institutional repository. In total, there are 1,418 letters, 1,156 of which have been marked as “sympathetic” and the remaining 262 as “unsympathetic.”
Recognizing the value of this unique and underutilized collection, the authors of this project elected to map all of the letters based on location and sentiment. The project was inspired by geospatial humanities projects in the fields of both African-American and correspondence histories. These include “Visualizing Emancipation,” which uses data to reveal an “increasingly sophisticated understanding of the geography of slavery’s end” in the United States (Nesbit 2018, p.434), “Mapping the Republic of Letters,” a collaborative series of visualizations built from correspondence metadata from well-known intellectuals of the Enlightenment (Findlen et al. 2024), and “Visual Correspondence,” which seeks to “unveil a rich narrative about people and our past through” mapping the correspondence of 56 historical figures (O’Leary 2024). Letters provide a rich look into peoples’ lives, and examining their metadata – from and to whom they were sent, where they were written, and how far a correspondence network reaches – introduces new perspectives on historical and cultural questions “that previously have been studied outside of an explicitly spatial framework” (Bodenhamer et al. 2010). By focusing on the spatiality of this essential piece of Civil Rights history, “Dear Mr. Meredith” builds off of these seminal digital humanities projects by creating a geospatial snapshot of general public attitudes toward segregation during a turbulent period in American history.
This methodological approach also allowed for innovative analysis of a complex and complicated historical collection. For instance, one of the project’s guiding questions was whether the geographic distribution of positive and negative letters aligned with – or pushed back against – common notions of race relations in the United States. Binary rhetoric highlights the southern United States (“the South”) as “a place that is backward and particularly racist and violent” when compared to the rest of the country ( Race in the U.S.: Is the South More Racist Than the North? 2022). There is a “palpability to the history of race and racial violence and slavery in the South” ( Race in the U.S.: Is the South More Racist Than the North? 2022) that causes it to be labeled as the root of racism within the United States. However, the authors wanted to see whether it revealed surprising – or expected – information about where and from whom pro- and anti-integration letters came from. Would there be a higher concentration of anti-integration correspondence sent from the southern United States or was anti-integration sentiment more evenly distributed across the United States? Similarly, is it possible to predict an individual’s attitudes about integration based on their race, political leanings, or other indicators?
In order to answer these questions, the letters were first analyzed based on the region from which they were sent. The United States can be divided into four US regions: the Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. Analyzing sentiment by region reveals that letter writers from the South were the most likely to oppose Meredith’s actions, with 31.56% of the region’s letters categorized as anti-integration. However, on the whole, the letters expressed conflicting opinions, and their contents begin to reveal that one’s sentiments towards Meredith cannot be predicted by region alone. For example, one telegram assures Meredith “that no decent citizen of the South … blames you for this” (Newton n.d.) while another admonishes him, stating “the negro has … the north part of the United States ... so why don’t the negro that don’t like the ways of the South, go there and let us alone here in the South” (Mrs. Joyce 1962). The South had the second-largest percentage of letters sent, and the most conflicting opinions, which exemplifies the diversity and complexity of those closest to the situation.
Given these complexities, the authors also investigated other possible indicators that might reveal predictable patterns about letter sentiment such as the urban-rural political divide. This divide is based on evidence that suggests that urban areas trend more liberal and rural areas trend more conservative, which led the authors to question whether or not the population density of an area could be used to predict support for Meredith’s actions (Gimpel et al. 2020). 615 (64.5%) of the letters came from urbanized areas, defined as cities with a population of over 50,000 in 1960 (U.S. Census Bureau 1960). Of these letters, 493 (80%) were pro-integration and 122 (20%) were anti-integration. Similarly, of the 339 (35.5%) letters that came from smaller cities or rural areas, 269 (80%) were pro-integration and 70 (20%) were anti-integration. Given that the pro/anti divide is also 80%/20%, an individual’s urban or rural setting had little influence on whether they were pro- or anti-integration.
Analyzing the letters based on individual letter writers’ demographic variables proved equally complex. Demographic information about a letter writer is voluntary and self-identified, and not every letter contains explicit identifying information. Analysis of the letters that do contain identifying information shows that an individual’s race or political leanings do not automatically predict their letter’s sentiment. For instance, one telegram from a couple in Nashville, Tennessee reads:
“We wish to applaud your atitude [sic] courage and restraint and we hope that you will find it possible to stick this difficult situation out we ourselves are concervative [sic] white southerners and we wish to assure you that no decent citizen of the south or the nation blames you for this.” (Newton n.d.)
Conversely, a letter from Minneapolis, Minnesota states:
“I have always believed myself to be a ‘Yankee liberal’ but now I’m beginning to wonder! Even a liberal can be revolted by the sight of one person whose ego permits his cause to become a national emergency!” (Cartur[jlt] 1962)
In short, mapping the letters revealed that American attitudes toward Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi were unpredictable based on location and other demographic information.
The mapping project also revealed that letter sentiment was more wide-ranging than a simple pro- and anti-integration binary. In order to accurately represent the nuanced attitudes reflected in the letters, the project’s next step is to transcribe the digital scans of the letters to machine readable text. This will allow for the application of more advanced digital scholarship methodologies, including performing algorithmic sentiment analysis to assist in identifying the range of opinions presented in the letters. The authors will seek to complete the transcriptions through a combination of crowdsourcing and the use of AI-powered transcribing software such as Transkribus .
In closing, the “Dear Mr. Meredith” project offers a new perspective on a pivotal moment in American history and contributes to the critical digital scholarship that challenges false narratives, thereby illuminating the continued importance of the Civil Rights Movement and its relationship to modern historical understanding.