Oxford, Miss. ? Ted Cowsert says when he stood on the University of Mississippi campus 40 years ago to quash a bloody uprising, he feared he would have to take up arms against fellow soldiers and state troopers.

“We thought we were going to have to fight the National Guard, the highway patrol and the rioters,” said Cowsert, who took part Tuesday in ceremonies honoring those who helped end the Sept. 30, 1962, rioting that broke out when James Meredith enrolled as the first black at Ole Miss. Two people died, and more than 200 others were injured.

Cowsert said the Mississippi guardsmen and troopers were acting under orders of then-Gov. Ross Barnett, who had vowed his state would remain a segregated society.

“We had no intelligence. No briefing. No idea of what we were getting into,” Cowsert recalled. He and the rest of Fort Bragg’s Company A 503 MP Battalion later learned the Mississippi National Guard had been federalized to ensure Meredith’s safety.

The soldiers were bombarded with bricks, Molotov cocktails and bottles by a mob of hundreds of whites who had been chanting “two, four, six, eight, we will never integrate.”

The soldiers and marshals who risked their lives that night never received a medal. An Army memo from April 1963 acknowledged the soldiers were deserving, but said the publicity “would not be in the best interests of the U.S. Army or the nation.”

Former U.S. Deputy Marshal Herschel Garner of Rison, Ark., left, and James Meredith discuss the events surrounding Meredith's entrance into the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss. Garner was one of the marshals on duty when Meredith integrated the university in 1962.

On Tuesday, Oxford Mayor Richard Howarth gave dozens of the former soldiers a key to the city. More than 200 people, including Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, were on hand for the downtown presentation.

Meredith, 69, who has battled cancer, was dressed in a gray, pinstripe suit and looked frail when he made his appearance on campus late Tuesday.

“I thought that the fact that the marshals … and the military followed the command of the authority of the United States was what made today possible,” Meredith said. “That to me was what was significant.”