Reading Room Document

Expense of Enforcing the Desegregation Order at the University of Mississippi

This memo, which appears to have never been formally sent to its recipient, advised the deputy attorney general that the federal government must bear the cost of federal troops and marshals used to support desegregation. The opinion’s conclusion rested on a prior attorney general opinion concluding that the federal government’s costs in enforcing the fugitive slave law could not be charged to a slaveowner.

June 6, 1963