PROFESSOR: MARTIN LUTHER KING WAS HERO FOR ALL

Editor's note: See related stories about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on page 1-C.

Robert Hamblin grew up surrounded by of racism in segregated Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s. Racism was a tradition.

He attended all-white schools and worshiped at a Baptist Church where blacks weren't welcome.

Today, Hamblin teaches English at Southeast Missouri State University and is a leading scholar on the life and works of novelist William Faulkner.

But he has never forgotten the ugly, bloody side of segregation.

Hamblin was a first-year graduate student at the University of Mississippi in September 1962 when the school, under federal court order, admitted its first black student, James Meredith.

Meredith was a 29-year-old Air Force veteran who had completed three years of college before seeking to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

Hamblin was a member of the Mississippi National Guard, which was federalized by President Kennedy to help keep the peace on the Ole Miss campus.

But integration didn't come without bloodshed at the University of Mississippi.

A crowed of about 2,000 segregationists, many from as far away as Texas and Georgia, descended on the Oxford campus.

Rioting broke out on the evening of Sept. 30 as the racist mob pelted federal marshals with bricks, lead pipes, bottles and Molotov cocktails, and even fired shots at them. They overturned vehicles and set them ablaze, Hamblin said.

The rioting lasted most of the night. Two people were killed. A French newspaper reporter was murdered and an innocent bystander died from a stray bullet.

Hamblin and his fellow Guardsmen, who had been stationed some 60 miles from Oxford, arrived on campus the morning after the riot.

Smoke and tear gas filled the air, sporadic gunfire could be heard in all directions. Rioters cursed and threw objects at the troops and the federal marshals.

Hamblin later wrote down his observations of what was called "The Battle of Ole Miss:"

"In retrospect, I realized that the moment in which I climbed down from that military vehicle, strapped on my gas mask, adjusted by steel helmet and walked with fixed bayonet toward that angry mob, I had crossed the boundary of the Mississippi that had nurtured me and entered a strange, new world.

"In that new world, of course, the James Merediths would have, must have, a considerable voice and role," Hamblin wrote.

To Hamblin, slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is a hero for all Americans.

"Dr. King was not just a black hero when he stood in Washington and said, `free at last, free at last,'" said Hamblin.

"The civil rights movement freed white southerners as well as black southerners from prejudice," he said.

White southerners were freed from the tradition of racism, Hamblin said.

King led a civil rights movement that involved blacks, whites, students and ministers, said Hamblin. "It always was a rainbow coalition."

Hamblin said, "I think we need to get back and see the civil rights movement as one of those great moments in our history when people of all colors worked to achieve the common good, working together, respecting people's differences."

Hamblin pointed out the civil rights movement's strong religious ties.

"It wasn't just a political movement. It always was a religious phenomenon," said Hamblin.

Rev. King was a Baptist minister and many of the other civil rights leaders were also preachers.

The integration of the University of Mississippi was one of many struggles for civil rights in the 1960s.

"I think Dr. King realized this would be a long journey," said Hamblin. "You don't change more than 100 years of tradition overnight."

Hamblin said many of his students, both black and white, have little understanding of the past struggles for civil rights.

"Real history as lived is often different than the history as interpreted to us," he said.

"We don't realize the people who have gone before and the sacrifices that they made," said Hamblin. "We have to study it and understand it."