In 1962, James Meredith became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi, breaking segregation in the state's higher education after federal courts ordered his admission despite defiant opposition from Governor Ross Barnett and other state leaders. Other African Americans had challenged the university before him: Medgar Evers applied to its law school in 1954 but was rejected on technical grounds, and in 1958 Clennon King was turned away, forcibly taken into custody, jailed under a warrant for lunacy, and committed to the Mississippi State Hospital before walking out 12 days later declared not mentally ill. Meredith, a Kosciusko native and Jackson State student, applied in early 1962, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund fought Mississippi officials' efforts to deny him admission; on September 13 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals demanded his immediate enrollment. Barnett answered with racist public rhetoric and won near-unanimous support from elected officials, then further inflamed an all-white football crowd in Jackson on September 29 while secretly negotiating with President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. On September 30, with Meredith under heavy guard in a dormitory, riots erupted as crowds hurled bricks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails at federal forces assembled at the Lyceum; professors Jim Silver and Evans Harrington and the Reverend Duncan Gray tried to calm students while armed outsiders took over the campus. President John F. Kennedy had deployed the U.S. Army and federalized the National Guard, and by dawn 23,000 soldiers had restored order, but two men were dead and 160 marshals were injured, 28 by gunfire. Agents of the U.S. Department of Justice escorted Meredith to the Lyceum Building on October 1, where he registered, attended classes under great pressure, and graduated in August 1963. The aftermath left morale low at the university and led at least 37 professors to resign in protest. In 2002, Meredith's son Joseph received a doctorate from the University of Mississippi.