There were riots, there were army troops in the streets, there
was death. The state defied the president; the president defied
the state. Old wounds were opened, new ones were made. To
watchers on television, it seemed as though Mississippi had
become another country, and to people in Mississippi on both
sides of the line about integration, it sometimes seemed that
way, too. It was 1962. In Oxford, Mississippi, James Meredith
was enrolling as the first African American undergraduate
student at the University of Mississippi. Things were quieter a
few hundred miles away, in the Florida panhandle. In
Tallahassee, Florida’s capital city, Maxwell Courtney was
accepted to Florida State University. With an interest in math
and high grades, he could have chosen to go elsewhere. He could
have done that and chosen to stay in his hometown of
Tallahassee: historically black Florida A&M University is just
across town from the FSU campus. Courtney made another choice.
He became the first African American undergraduate stud