History

Meridian’s federal postal history begins in 1853, when town founder John T. Ball secured government rental space in his log store on 26th Avenue and 7th Street. Over the following decades the post office relocated five times as the city grew into a significant railroad junction and commercial center in east-central Mississippi — by the late nineteenth century Meridian was one of the largest cities in the state, positioned at the crossing of two major rail lines. The first dedicated Federal Building opened in 1898, designed by architect William Martin Aiken at a cost of $80,000, housing both the post office and the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. That building required an eastern addition as early as 1911 and was ultimately demolished in the 1950s.

The present building was funded during the Great Depression under the federal program that commissioned new public buildings for cities of regional significance. The architects P.J. Krouse & Fort designed a three-story limestone building in the mode that dominated federal architecture in the early 1930s: Stripped Classicism, which retained the axial symmetry and material quality of Beaux Arts federal buildings while eliminating their elaborate applied ornament in favor of simplified geometric enrichment. The agricultural iconography on the parapet — eagles, steers, and corn — was a standard device for federal buildings in Mississippi, rooting the national institution in the local agricultural economy. The postal motto inscribed above the entrance, derived from Herodotus’s description of the Persian postal couriers (and adopted by the US Postal Service as its unofficial motto), gave the building a literary gravitas unusual for a Depression-era civic project.

The courthouse’s significance in American legal history derives from two landmark cases. In 1961, James Meredith filed his initial lawsuit against the University of Mississippi in the Meridian court — Meredith v. University of Mississippi — seeking admission as the first Black student. The case reached the US Supreme Court, which in 1962 ordered the university to admit Meredith; the enrollment on September 30, 1962, was accompanied by riots that killed two people and required federal marshals and military intervention. Six years later, in 1967, the Meridian courthouse hosted United States v. Price, the federal prosecution of nineteen men — including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price of Neshoba County — for the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. Seven were convicted; it was the first time in Mississippi that an all-white jury convicted a white person of a civil rights crime.