"History - like any person's story - is messy. It doesn't fit into neat boxes"

EIGHTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD JAMES MEREDITH walks into Bully’s Soul Food Restaurant, a traditional eaterie in Jackson, Mississippi

- KAVITA PURI

He is wearing a snappy white suit and cap, and is greeted like a hero. Everyone knows who he is. Black Americans stop him: they want to take a selfie, shake his hand, thank him for what he has done, tell him how his actions changed their life.

BBC radio producer Conor Garrett recounted this anecdote to me shortly after that telling episode. He had recently gone to Jackson to interview Meredith about a key moment in the civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, Meredith applied and fought all the way up to the US Supreme Court for the right to be the first black American to be accepted into the all-white state University of Mississippi. At the time Mississippi was the most racially segregated state in the US.

Meredith’s epic fight is an extraordinary story. It culminated in President John F Kennedy calling the state governor, Ross Barnett, demanding that he apply the Supreme Court ruling and allow Meredith to enrol. The court was enforcing the landmark 1954 judgment of Brown v Board of Education, which ruled that segregation in education was unconstitutional.