Home / Mississippi / Oxford & the North Hills / The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi
The red-brick Lyceum with its white Ionic portico and clock pediment, seen across a brick plaza edged with yellow chrysanthemums.Carol M. Highsmith / public domain via Library of Congress
🏛️Historical

The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi

Part ofOxford & the North Hills

The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.

⏱
Duration
Thirty minutes to an hour.
🎟
Admission
No admission to walk the Circle; the Lyceum itself holds the university's administrative offices.
📅
Best Season
Year round; the Circle is quietest on weekends and in summer.

The Story

The legislature chose Oxford for the state university in 1841, on country the Chickasaw had ceded nine years earlier. The Lyceum, a Greek Revival building designed by William Nichols, was finished in 1848 in time for the first class and for years held the whole university. Wings added in 1903 made it the five-part building it is now.

On 30 September 1962 it became the headquarters of the federal effort to enroll James Meredith, a Black military veteran, after Governor Ross Barnett had tried to block him. Marshals ringed the Lyceum while a crowd that passed 2,500, made up of white students and outside segregationists, threw rocks, acid-filled bottles and Molotov cocktails. Paul Guihard, a French reporter, and Ray Gunter, a 23-year-old jukebox repairman from Oxford, were shot dead. One hundred sixty marshals were hurt, 28 of them by gunfire. President Kennedy sent in troops, and Meredith registered on the morning of 1 October in the registrar's office inside the Lyceum.

The portico still bears bullet scars from snipers that night. The Lyceum and the Circle became a National Historic Landmark district in 2008. Meredith graduated on 18 August 1963.

Visitor Info

⏱
Time Needed
Thirty minutes to an hour.
🎟
Admission
No admission to walk the Circle; the Lyceum itself holds the university's administrative offices.
📅
Best Season
Year round; the Circle is quietest on weekends and in summer.
🛣️
Highway
University Avenue

On the Map

Nearby

The closest stops worth working into your route

historical0.8 mi away
Rowan Oak
William Faulkner's Greek Revival house in Oxford, bought in 1930 and kept by the University of Mississippi, with the outline of A Fable still written on his study wall.
cultural1 mi away
Oxford Square
The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.
recreational15 mi away
Sardis Lake and Dam
A flood-control lake on the Little Tallahatchie, built from 1930s labor and a dredge named Pontotoc, with a dam that for years was the largest earth-filled dam in the world.
historical16 mi away
Casey Jones Railroad Museum
The old Illinois Central depot in Water Valley, where Casey Jones worked in the 1890s, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker for the songs written about his death in 1900.
recreational26 mi away
Enid Lake
A Corps of Engineers lake on the Yocona River, finished in 1952 after farm families were moved off the valley floor, and the home water of a world-record white crappie.
historical29 mi away
Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum
The house in Holly Springs where Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in 1862, now a museum of African American history, art and culture.