They have been some of the first people to recruit me, and they were still kind of on board.

And I had still been in conversation with the coaches at Alabama A&M. About six months into my time at Lon Morris, I wasn’t, I wasn’t getting acclimated to the campus, it wasn’t the right environment for me. And those coaches never really came calling. I ended up at Lon Morris junior college after an injury my senior year to show the scouts that I could still play. And, of course, dreams sometimes get derailed. When I was in high school, though, my thought was that I was going to go to a high major D1 program and play basketball. Adam Harris, thanks for coming on The Reckon Interview. We’ll also talk about the birth of land grant universities and HBCUs and some landmark Supreme Court cases related to the history of education, as well as how to address current inequities, and what the purpose of higher education should be in today’s America. So let’s go ahead and get started with this week’s episode of The Reckon Interview. Today on The Reckon Interview, we’ll talk with Adam Harris, who also writes for the Atlantic and is a New America Fellow, about the history of American colleges before and after that moment memorialized in Oxford, Mississippi. Black people also shoulder a disproportionate share of the American burden of student loan debt. And the state of Mississippi has always underfunded its historically Black colleges and universities. Even decades later, the University of Mississippi’s campus remains much whiter than the state that it serves, which is true for all the schools in the SEC, and also all across the country for that matter.

Why did he want to go to the University of Mississippi? What did he study? How was he treated when the cameras went away? This monument may reveal Meredith’s fortitude, but it also obscures the reality about educational opportunity in America. And as I read through Adam Harris’s new book “The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal, and How to Set Them Right,” I realized that I’ve never really learned much more about Meredith’s story beyond that scene. It’s a stunning and sobering memorial, capturing a true moment of heroism.

Unveiled in 2006, the memorial depicts a resolute Meredith as he walks toward a portal with the words courage, knowledge, perseverance, and opportunity emblazoned across the top. In 1962, Meredith faced insults, threats, torment and violence as he became the first Black student to attend Ole Miss. John Hammontree: There’s a statue honoring James Meredith on the campus of the University of Mississippi.

The State Must Provide by Adam Harris