By May 1961, the civil rights movement, led by James Farmer of CORE, initiated what would become a wave of non-violent confrontations against discrimination in public transit and other accommodations. The attorney general's office, under the personal supervision of Robert Kennedy, took active measures to protect the protestors in the face of local political and police indifference to or active complicity with violent resisters. Cox was regularly involved in meetings over day-to-day Justice Department activities, while at the same time he prepared to argue cases seeking to overturn state court convictions of civil rights protestors (under various statutes dealing with vagrancy, trespass and even parading without a permit.) Cox came into close contact with Robert Kennedy, and while the two had widely different styles (Kennedy was impulsive and somewhat cavalier of legal principles; Cox was cautious against making missteps that would set the movement back or commit the Court to a position on which it might lose its legitimacy), Cox grew to admire Kennedy. Prior to the Ole Miss riot the subject reluctantly gave counsel to the President. Impatient of a piecemeal approach, Robert Kennedy, but more importantly the civil rights community and particularly Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, sought near elimination of the "state action" doctrine, arguing that restaurants were like "common carriers" subject to the Fourteen Amendment or that the mere act of enforcing a trespass law used to further private discrimination was itself sufficient "state action."