A Change in Image : James Meredith, Hero of a Liberal Cause, Stations Himself on the Political Right

To many, the name James Meredith is, in itself, a symbol. This man sitting in a small house on a quiet street in San Diego was the first African-American student enrolled in the University of Mississippi. The year: 1962.

For that reason alone, Meredith, 57, is a civil rights pioneer. Like Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson before him, he is recognized for having been first, in some critical way, in the struggle for racial equality.

“James Meredith is a pioneer in American history and certainly in the civil rights movement,” says Niger Innis, director of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). “In his own way, he was the first. Nothing more needs to be said.”

But what Meredith says, and is said about him, is often surprising, even shocking. His alliances with right-wing politicians, his disdain for the civil rights movement and his bold gestures--he is running for President--have left a residue of skepticism. To those who know only the name and its footnote in history, Meredith’s credentials and public posture often come as a shattering revelation.

From September, 1989, until last February, for example, Meredith worked in Washington as a domestic policy adviser to conservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who nearly a decade ago filibustered against a national holiday in memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But Helms turned out to be “too liberal for me,” says Meredith, who was fired by the senator. He contends that Helms had grown increasingly concerned over a partnership that Meredith has cultivated for years with David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan member who has become a Louisiana legislator and gubernatorial candidate.

“The reason I was given (for the firing) was that I was too far to the right for Helms, which is very true,” says Meredith, speaking at his home in San Diego’s Mission Hills neighborhood. “But the other reason was the David Duke connection. That was the biggest of all the reasons.”

During his tenure with Helms, Meredith says, Duke made him an honorary member of the Louisiana Legislature and “sent the certificate to Helms’ office in Washington. When they saw that, they got terribly upset. Helms had told me that, if it ever became public--my association with Duke--that I would immediately be fired.”

Neither Helms nor his press secretary responded to repeated telephone calls to their office.

In Baton Rouge, La., Glenn Montecino, Duke’s legislative assistant and spokesman, says Meredith and Duke have “no formal relationship at the moment” but hope to form one in the future. He describes their association as an “intimate friendship.”

Montecino adds that if Duke, the founder of the National Assn. for the Advancement of White People, wins the governor’s race this fall, Meredith may end up as a staff member.

Says Meredith: “Duke believes, and I do too, that there are millions of whites in this country who have been denied their opportunity at the American dream.”

At the same time, Meredith says he has Duke’s backing in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

The candidate describes himself as relentlessly “pro black.” But he says he simply disagrees with the “liberal agenda of the elite ruling class,” which “pigeonholes” African Americans, Latinos, women and gays into the same category and weakens--rather then emboldens--each group politically.

But it is African Americans with whom Meredith is concerned, and because he believes African Americans are stronger as a separate political force, he sees Helms and Duke as being more in tune with the needs of his own constituency than George Bush or even Jesse Jackson.

President Bush was right in vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1990, Meredith contends, because its primary goal was to help women, gays and Latinos.

“It did nothing to help blacks,” he declares.

At the same time, he resents newly elected California Gov. Pete Wilson for using the Bush veto to lure white voters. He calls Wilson “one of the most powerful--and dangerous--men in America,” without elaborating.

Since 1989, Meredith’s base has been San Diego, where his family lives for what he calls “educational and medical reasons.”

He has three college-age sons by his first wife, who died in 1979, and a daughter by his wife of 11 years, Judy. All but one live in a rented house in Mission Hills, not far from downtown.

One son, who suffers from lupus, is confined to a local hospital. Another is a graduate student in business at the University of San Diego. The third is an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati. Meredith’s daughter is a third-grader at the elite, private Francis Parker School, where tuition is $6,805 a year.

On a recent morning, Meredith, wearing a crisp, powder-blue business suit, said he had grown disillusioned by “the total lack of structure and organization in San Diego.” He says that, in two years, “no one in my family has made a dime in California.”

As a result, he says, he may soon return to his native Mississippi “so I can make ends meet.”

Civil rights leaders say Meredith once supported himself largely through public speaking. For most of the last three decades, he says, he made enough speaking at colleges in one month alone--February, Black History Month--that he was able to support himself and his family for the rest of the year.

But most of the speeches have ended.

“The liberals have completely blocked that off--totally,” Meredith says. “This year in February--zero. I’ve had to sell off about a third of everything I own . . . houses, land, just to keep things going.”

Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, says listeners at Meredith’s speeches often leave disappointed and confused.

“I’ve had students come to me crying like babies after they had used their limited funds to hire him to speak,” Hooks says from NAACP headquarters in Baltimore. “What they got was a hodgepodge of nothing. They usually want to know if they can get their money back.

“Here’s a man who never had a mission, or if he did, it’s long gone. He’s obviously lost his way--if, in fact, he ever had one.”

If bitterness toward Meredith runs deep in some quarters, Meredith wants people to know the feeling is mutual.

“For 25 years, my biggest obstacle was that everyone thought I was one of the civil rights people, the liberal agenda people, the nonviolent people,” he said. “I have never been any of that, and the so-called leadership knew that--you understand? It was to their advantage to portray me that way . . . because of my history, which coincided in time with much of what they were doing.”

The individualism and isolation that Meredith cherishes began at an early age. Born in Kosciusko, Miss., in steamy Attala County, Meredith was taught by his father, Moses (Cap) Meredith, that “death was to be preferred” over suffering indignities at the hands of whites.

There are those who argue that Meredith’s stubborn pride has served to detach him not only from white people but also from people in general.

For years now, Meredith, who sees himself as a warrior, has been at war with the very movement he helped spawn. In 1989 he told the Washington Post that 60% of black leaders were involved in the drug culture and that 80% were into some form of corruption.

He suggested he would blow the whistle on them. It did not endear him to one-time colleagues.

“That was complete irresponsibility!” Hooks exclaims now. “Baldfaced lies! Meredith has no philosophy or approach. In conversation, he never goes from A to B, or even A to C. He goes from A to I and then back to F in this meandering mishmash.”

Hooks says Meredith has “betrayed” any alliances he might have had by “cozying up to the likes of Helms and Duke.” As a result, he says, leaders in the civil rights movement have come to regard Meredith as a maverick eccentric at best--and at worst, a nut.

“I don’t know how any articulate, intelligent, self-respecting black person could ever work for Jesse Helms or David Duke,” he says. “Unless he’s trying to convert them--you know, redemption for the sinner--but with Meredith, I don’t get that feeling.”

Meredith responds that he knows “they think I’m crazy, but it don’t bother me, ‘cause I think they’re crazy.”

In his 1964 book, “Three Years in Mississippi,” Meredith acknowledged that he was once diagnosed by an Air Force psychiatrist as having an “obsessive-compulsive neurosis” because of consistent anxieties about race.

But it’s “the liberal agenda . . . the biggest trick being pulled on people in modern time” that causes him sleepless nights now, Meredith says.

Suddenly, he flashes back to the era and the valiant gesture that stamped him in the public’s consciousness forever.

“I never understood the emotionalism that people were experiencing by watching the activities taking place (in Mississippi in 1962),” he says. “I was never really involved with that. I was at war . I saw myself as a general. I was commanding, against my enemy. And at that time, my enemy was the white supremacists.

“But even then, I knew who my true enemy was. It was the liberal elite, without a doubt. The white supremacists had a narrower goal. The liberal thing was more permanent--to make the black a second-class citizen forever, and to me, that was sinister.”

Moments later, Meredith rails against the furor over the Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King.

“It wasn’t David Duke who beat Rodney King, it was the liberal black mayor Tom Bradley’s police who beat Rodney King,” he says. “But liberals all over America have created a perception that the Klan did that.

“You can’t find me a black in America who, in the last 15 years, can give an account of men in hoods riding down the street scaring them, abusing them in any way. But there’s not a black family in America that can’t point to the police abusing them. We’ve got perceptions that don’t fit reality.”

Innis, the director of the Washington chapter of CORE and the son of civil rights leader Roy Innis, says he can appreciate Meredith’s motivation and that he has tried to understand him.

“I see no problem with a black man making sure that every facet of the American political spectrum is integrated and has a black perspective, whether it be conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat . . . “ Innis says. “The media often give the perception that the black political point of view is a monolith, when, in fact, we’re not.

“We’re as diverse and varied a people as any ethnic group in the country. For that reason, it does not bother me that James worked for Jesse Helms. But David Duke is a different story. For David Duke, I have no comment. You’ll have to ask James about that one.”

Innis says it may be that after years of fighting the predator--or people who symbolize the predator--Meredith has taken on their viewpoint as a way of defending himself against them.

One prominent civil rights leader, who asked not to be quoted by name, says he has studied Meredith for years, fearing that he posed a problem for those wishing to “protect the reputation” of the movement.

“Was it a case of Meredith being one way and changing? No, I don’t think so,” the man says. “Many of us had misgivings about James Meredith from the very beginning. We were concerned about him even before he entered the University of Mississippi.”

Hooks says his concerns were magnified in 1966 when Meredith decided to walk from Memphis, Tenn., to Jackson, Miss., in the March Against Fear. The march ended for Meredith when a white man sprayed him with birdshot on a hot dusty road.

“There was no rhyme or reason for that (march) at all,” Hooks said. “It was just something he decided to do.”

“Everyone thought he would be killed,” James Farmer, the former head of CORE, agrees. “It was complete egomania.”

Meredith says the walk was intended to demonstrate that African Americans in the South should overcome their fear and register to vote, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Meredith, who sees himself sometimes as a biblical character, says that surviving a gunshot wound proved that, in God’s eyes, he was more like Moses than Jesus.

He once told an interviewer that “God’s role for me is similar to his role for Moses and Christ” and referred to himself as “the most important black leader in America and in the world.”

Ask Meredith about other African-American leaders, and again his comments are tinged with contempt. Jesse Jackson is “a Democrat. . . . Enough said?” South Africa’s Nelson Mandela is the harbinger of “nothing good, because it’s all about elitism.”

But ask him about Martin Luther King Jr., who championed his efforts as a Mississippi student, and suddenly a new Meredith is talking, a man who seems to have gone back to a simpler, more idealistic time.

“Dr. King articulated the hopes and the sorrows and the wishes of the black race better than anyone ever did,” Meredith says. “King was the only one in the movement that I ever had any relationship with at all. The others I had zero respect for.

“So what can I say about Dr. King? Well . . . I miss him. I really miss him. He was a great man.”