Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "james-meredith"

James Meredith was born June 25, 1933, in Kosciusko, Mississippi. He was one of ten children of Roxy Patterson Meredith and Moses Cap, a poor farmer in Kosciusko. As a young child, Meredith became aware of racism. He would refuse the nickels and dimes that a local white man regularly gave to black children, calling the gifts degrading. More painful was the realization he made as a young man on a trip to visit relatives in Detroit, where he saw blacks and whites sharing the same public facilities. He rode the train home from this brush with integration, and when he arrived in Memphis, the conductor told him to leave the whites-only car. "I cried all the way home," Meredith later recalled, "and vowed to devote myself to changing the degrading conditions of black people." He also had other ambitions and goals. Ever since a childhood visit to a white doctor's office, he had harbored a dream of attending the University of Mississippi, the physician's alma mater.

After high school, in 1951, Meredith joined the U.S. Air Force. He rose to the rank of staff sergeant, earned credits toward a college degree, and served in the KOREAN WAR. Following his discharge in 1960, he attended the all-black Jackson State College, but the courses he wanted to take were offered only at the state university. As a 28-year-old, he followed with hopefulness the speeches of President John F. Kennedy, which promised greater enjoyment of opportunity for all U.S. citizens. Change was in the air, and many African Americans were heartened by the portents in Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address. On the same day that Kennedy became president, Meredith applied for admission to the University of Mississippi.

The school turned down his application. Mississippi still practiced SEGREGATION, and that meant that no African Americans could attend the all-white university. Even seven years after BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, southern states resisted complying with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that compulsory segregation was unconstitutional. Knowing that he had a constitutional right that the state refused to recognize, Meredith turned to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. This arm of the civil rights organization, accustomed to fighting segregation cases, extended help to him. Meredith and his attorneys fought some 30 court actions against the state.

At last, a federal court ruled that a qualified student could not be denied admission on the ground of race. Meredith had won, but the court order infuriated segregationists. Playing to popular sentiment, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett promised to stop Meredith. Barnett pressured the state legislature to give him authority over university admissions, a power that usually was exercised by the state college board (James 1-2).

In a TV address to the state, Governor Ross Barnett declares: "There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide. ... We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them never! ... No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor!" The state legislature and local officials across the state (all of them white, of course) echo and intensify his position.

Meredith has no illusions. He later explains: "I was engaged in a war. I considered myself engaged in a war from day one. And my objective was to force the federal government — the Kennedy administration at that time — into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen." (James Integrates 1).

By September of 1962, the situation had escalated to the point where President John F. Kennedy had to get involved. While not overly concerned with civil rights before 1960, JFK had won his election largely thanks to African American support and was quickly taking a greater interest in desegregation. He sent Chief U.S. Marshal J.P. McShane to escort James Meredith into the school. Three times J.P. McShane and a small group of unarmed deputies tried to enroll Meredith at Ole Miss. Three times they were blocked by armed state troopers sent by Ross Barnett (James Enrollment 1).

Cars driven by whites parade through Mississippi towns with confederate flags waving and bumper stickers proclaiming: "The South shall rise again!" Retaliatory violence against Blacks flares across the state as Black men, women, and children are attacked, beaten, and shot at. Armed students are posted at Tougaloo to defend the campus from KKK nightriders. Despite the terror, Blacks are inspired by Meredith's courage and defiance. His struggle to integrate 'Ole Miss becomes a state-wide confrontation between whites intent on maintaining the old order of racial segregation and Blacks determined to be free and equal citizens (James Integrates 2).

In a series of telephone calls in late September 1962 President Kennedy tried to convince Governor Barnett to let James Meredith enter the campus to register for classes. … If Kennedy couldn't sway Barnett with words, he would have to use federal troops, a move that could provoke violence and cost Kennedy precious votes in the South.

The stand-off had a Civil War flavor. An old-style Southern Democrat, Ross Barnett declared that Mississippi segregation laws trumped Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. President Kennedy was also a Democrat, but a young, bred-in-the-bone Yankee from Massachusetts. Having won the presidency by a tiny margin, Kennedy needed the continued loyalty of Southern Democrats. But Barnett's repeated defiance of federal law forced JFK into a risky confrontation.

From September 15 to September 30, Bobby Kennedy and Ross Barnett had more than a dozen phone conversations.

Historian Bill Doyle, author of American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962, says that Ross Barnett knew integration was inevitable, but needed a way to let James Meredith into Ole' Miss without losing face with his white, pro-segregation supporters. "Ross Barnett desperately wanted the Kennedys to flood Mississippi with combat troops because that's the only way Ross Barnett could tell his white segregationist backers, 'Hey I did everything I could, I fought them, but to prevent bloodshed in the end I made a deal,'" Doyle says.

On September 27, 1962 Bobby Kennedy and Ross Barnett agreed on an extraordinary plan: James Meredith would arrive at the Ole' Miss campus in Oxford accompanied by at least 25 armed Federal Marshals (at the time, Marshals were Justice Department agents normally used to transport prisoners, not trained for combat). Ross Barnett would make a show of blocking Meredith, but be forced to step aside when the Marshals drew their guns.

Robert F. Kennedy: I will send the Marshals that I have available up there in Memphis and there will be about 25 or 30 of them and they will come with Mr. Meredith and they will arrive at wherever the gate is and I will have the head Marshal pull a gun and I will have the rest of them have their hands on their guns and their holsters. And then as I understand it, they will go through and get in and you will make sure that law and order is preserved and that no harm will be done to Mr. McShane and Mr. Meredith.

Ross Barnett: Oh, yes.

RFK: And then I think you will see that’s accomplished?

RB: … I was under the impression that they were all going to pull their guns. This could be very embarrassing. We got a big crowd here and if one pulls his gun and we all turn it would be very embarrassing. Isn’t it possible to have them all pull their guns?

RFK: I hate to have them all draw their guns, as I think it could create harsh feelings. Isn't it sufficient if I have one man draw his gun and the others keep their hands on their holsters?

RB: They must all draw their guns. Then they should point their guns at us and then we could step aside. This could be very embarrassing down here for us. It is necessary.

By the end of the day, the Mississippi governor and the attorney general decided to scrap their plan because it was too dangerous. A mob had gotten word of Meredith's imminent arrival and had begun to descend on Oxford. Barnett and Kennedy feared the staged showdown would spark a riot.

When Bobby Kennedy could not get Governor Barnett to comply with the order of the Supreme Court, President Kennedy stepped in. On September 29 and 30, 1962, JFK had a series of conversations with Governor Barnett. He hoped to manage the crisis by telephone. Their first call took place at 2 p.m. on Friday, September 29.

President Kennedy apparently thought Barnett was a pushover. After the call, he turned to his brother and said, "You've been fighting a sofa pillow all week." But JFK was wrong. According to civil rights historian Taylor Branch, Ross Barnett had the president and attorney general wrapped around his finger.

“They're never sure whether he's making a fool of them or they're making a fool of him. But they know as the evenings go on, they feel less and less in control, so the suspicion starts to rise that maybe Barnett's making a fool of them."

While Barnett and Kennedy were secretly negotiating by phone, radio stations across the South were blaring bulletins about the situation. White racists were grabbing their guns and heading for Oxford.

Rather than send army troops to escort Meredith to Ole' Miss, President Kennedy dispatched scores of Federal Marshals to Mississippi - lightly armed men clad awkwardly in suits, ties and gas masks. At the same time, JFK wanted Ross Barnett to assure him that Mississippi patrolmen would help maintain law and order as the threat of a race riot on the university campus in Oxford grew.

Despite Governor Barnett's promise [that highway patrolmen would maintain order], he did not maintain order. Though he'd been privately negotiating with the White House, Barnett made a defiant speech at a Saturday night Ole' Miss football game. He was cheered on by some 40,000 fans.

The next day, September 30, 1962, hundreds of outraged protestors flooded Oxford to block Meredith's expected arrival. At 12:45 p.m., Bobby Kennedy made an angry call to Barnett. The attorney general warned that if Barnett didn't let Meredith register, President Kennedy would expose their secret telephone negotiations in a televised speech scheduled that evening.

The attorney general's threat worked. Barnett knew that if his segregationist supporters learned he had made a covert deal with the Kennedys, his political career would be over. So, to keep the secret, Barnett agreed to the Kennedy plan: get Meredith safely lodged on campus that evening so he could register for classes Monday morning.

On Sunday, September 30, 1962 at 6 p.m., James Meredith was escorted onto the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford by a convoy of Federal Marshals. While he got settled in one of the school dorms, more than 2,500 angry students and outside agitators swarmed around the main campus building, the Lyceum. President Kennedy was informed of Meredith's arrival and went on national television that night to announce this apparent victory and explain that it had been achieved without the use of federal soldiers. He reminded viewers that, "Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law but not to disobey it." Kennedy continued: "For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob, however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law" (John 1-6).

White students surround Meredith's dorm and the registration office. They chant: "Two-four-one-three, we hate Kennedy! Kill the nigger-loving bastards!" Determined to lynch Meredith, armed Klansmen from around the state and as far away as Selma and Birmingham Alabama swarm into Oxford. The crowd, a volatile mixture of KKK, students, and townsmen, grows to more than 2,000. The mob is led by former Army Major-General Edwin Walker, who had been forced to retire when he refused to stop distributing racist hate literature to his soldiers. They attack the Marshals guarding Meredith with bricks, bottles, guns, and fire bombs. Mississippi state troopers charged with maintaining "law and order" disappear, leaving the Marshals to face the horde alone.

The Marshals desperately try to hold back the lynch mob with tear gas. Half of them are wounded, 30 of them are shot. The crowd lashes out at journalists — they murder French reporter Paul Guihard. A second man [a local jukebox repairman] is also killed under circumstances that remain unclear to this day. With tear gas running low and the raging horde closing in, the Marshals plea for reinforcements. President Kennedy calls up Troop E of the Mississippi National Guard, but only 67 men respond. Led by Captain "Chooky" Falkner (nephew of author William Faulkner) they try to rescue the Marshals and Meredith. They are not enough.

As the battle rages, Kennedy finally — at long last — sends in the United States Army to restore order. An officer later recalled:

“As we were marching up there, they would throw rocks at us and call us nigger lovers. Wanted to know if we were there to put our nigger brother in college. There was a lot of gasoline burning, a lot of automobiles burning on campus. Every concrete bench was broken, being thrown at us. I spent time in Vietnam. I'll take that any time over 'Ole Miss.”

To appease southern whites, Attorney General Robert Kennedy secretly orders that the units assigned to 'Ole Miss be re-segregated so that armed Black GIs won't be patrolling the streets of Oxford. Some 4,000 Black soldiers are humiliated, disarmed, removed from their units, and reassigned to KP and garbage duty. Black soldiers can be sent to fight and die in Vietnam, but they are not allowed to protect Black citizens in Mississippi from mob violence (James Integrates 3-5).

Though President Kennedy and Governor Barnett talked several more times, the rioting in Oxford forced both men to do what they wanted most to avoid: Barnett had to step aside without his valiant last stand, and Kennedy had to storm Mississippi with U.S. Army troops. (John 6-7).

Being for integration meant being on the wrong side of the powerful White Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan and the State Sovereignty Commission, a spy agency.

White professors on campus who supported Meredith's admission faced intimidation. Marleah Kaufman Hobbs' husband, a political science professor, got death threats. She was a fine arts grad student at the time. Now 89 years old, she remembers when the riots broke out.

"That night the cracking of the guns, the planes flying overhead bringing in more National Guard — we didn't sleep at all that night. It was the changing of the world," she says.

Bishop Duncan Gray Jr., then an Episcopal priest in Oxford, tried to squelch a mob that had gathered atop a Confederate monument on campus.

"Of course, they grabbed me and pulled me down. I'd been hit a few times before, but that's when I took the roughest beating," says Gray, who is white.

Gray says the night forever changed the dynamics in Mississippi's struggle to preserve white supremacy.

"It was a horrible thing, and I'm sorry we had to go through that, but it certainly marked a very definite turning point. And maybe a learning experience for some people," he says. "I think even the ardent segregationists didn't want to see violence like that again" (Elliott 1-2).

The French journalist Paul Guihard, on assignment for the London Daily Sketch … was found dead behind the Lyceum building with a gunshot wound to the back. One hundred-sixty US Marshals, one-third of the group, were injured in the melee, and 40 soldiers and National Guardsmen were wounded.

On Monday morning, October 1, 1962, Meredith walked across the battered campus and registered for classes.

The US government fined Barnett $10,000 and sentenced him to jail for contempt, but the charges were later dismissed by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Many students harassed Meredith during his two semesters on campus but others accepted him.

According to first-person accounts chronicled in Nadine Cohodas’ book The Band Played Dixie (1997), students living in Meredith’s dorm bounced basketballs on the floor just above his room through all hours of the night. Other students ostracized him: when Meredith walked into the cafeteria for meals, the students eating would turn their backs. If Meredith sat at a table with other students, all of whom were white, the students would immediately get up and go to another table (Denise 1-2).

Hunter Bear wrote: Meredith had a terrible time up there. Medgar [Evers] was on the phone constantly bolstering him. I was sitting in Medgar's office while he was doing that. Meredith was befriended by a few courageous white people on the campus, — notably Jim Silver of the History Department, who later became a very good friend of ours and wrote the book Mississippi, the Closed Society. (Interview 19).

When Meredith graduated from Ole Miss in August 1963 (with a BA in political science), he wore a segregationist's "Never" button upside down on his black gown.

He later wrote: “I noticed in the hallway a black janitor and I wondered why he was standing there. And he had a mop under his arm. And as I passed him, he turned his body, twisted his body, and touched me with the mop handle. Now this delivered a message, and the message was clear: ‘We are looking after you while you are here’" (James Integrates 6).


Works cited:

Denise, Carletta. “October 1, 1962: James Meredith Enters The University Of Mississippi.” Black Then: Discovering Our History. October 1, 2018. Web. https://blackthen.com/%E2%80%8Boctobe...

Elliott, Debbie. “Integrating Ole Miss: A Transformative, Deadly Riot.” NPR. October 1, 2012. Web. https://www.npr.org/2012/10/01/161573...

“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm

“James Howard Meredith - Further Readings.” University of Mississippi Free Legal Encyclopedia. Web. http://law.jrank.org/pages/8541/Mered...

“James Meredith Integrates 'Ole Miss (Sept-Oct).” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

“James Meredith's Enrollment in Ole Miss: Riot & Reaction.” Study.com. Web. https://study.com/academy/lesson/jame...

“John F. Kennedy: The Mississippi Crisis.” American Public Media. Web. http://americanradioworks.publicradio...

Here is a useful map of Mississippi. https://socketize.com/7124/no7141/

After being released from jail in December of 1961, Bob Moses and the other SNCC organizers analyze the successes and failures of the McComb voter registration campaign. It is clear that racist opposition to Black voting rights in Mississippi is so ferocious, so violent, so widespread, that only by uniting all of the state's civil rights organizations into a coordinated effort is there any hope of success.

Moses and Tom Gaither of CORE circulate a memo proposing formation of a coalition. They are determined not to repeat in Mississippi the unproductive conflicts between national civil rights organizations that have so often occurred elsewhere. Statewide NAACP Chairman Aaron Henry agrees with them. In February [1962], representatives of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP, along with local community leaders, create the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to be a vehicle through which civil rights organizations working in Mississippi can work together. The name is taken from an earlier coalition effort to support the Freedom Riders. A grant request to fund COFO voter registration activities is submitted to the Voter Education Project (VEP).

The national leaders of the three organizations initially oppose the idea out of fear that each will lose visibility within it — with consequent loss of northern funds. But the local activists and leaders on the ground in Mississippi, those who are closest to the suffering of the people and the necessities of the struggle in that state, insist that success — indeed, survival — require organizational cooperation rather than competition.

In August, a meeting is held in Clarksdale to formalize COFO. Attending are Moses, Jim Forman and a dozen other SNCC workers, Dave Dennis of CORE, James Bevel of SCLC, and others. NAACP leader Aaron Henry is elected President, Rev. R.L.T. Smith is named Treasurer, attorney Carsie Hall becomes Secretary, and Bob Moses is appointed the COFO state-wide Project Director. An agreement is made that CORE will focus its registration efforts in Mississippi's 4th Congressional District centered around Meridian and Canton, SNCC will work the other four districts including the Delta region around Greenwood and the Pearl River area around McComb. For their part, SCLC will continue its Citizenship school program throughout the state, and the NAACP will concentrate on the judicial aspects of the struggle.

In September, VEP funds COFO organizing projects in the Mississippi Delta counties of Bolivar, Coahoma, Leflore, and Sunflower where SNCC field secretaries are already working. Over the following year VEP gives more than $50,000 (equal to $380,000 in 2012) to a number of voter registration projects in Mississippi (Council 1-2).

When the arrested SNCC field secretaries are finally released from jail in Pike County, they join other SNCC organizers — many newly hired with VEP money — in resuming voter registration work. Bob Moses, Paul & Catherine Brooks, James Bevel & Diane Nash (newly married), and Bernard Lafayette in Jackson; Lester McKinnie in Laurel; Charles McLaurin, Dorie Ladner, and Colia Lidell in Ruleville; James Jones in Clarksdale, Mattie Bivens in Cleveland, Frank Smith in Holly Springs; Emma Bell in Greenville; and Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins in Hattiesburg.

Sam Block, a young Mississippi native and SCLC Citizenship School teacher, is assigned to Greenwood, the seat of Leflore County and the unofficial capitol of the Mississippi Delta. Here, cotton is still king, 800,000 bales pass through Greenwood each year. For the most part the work is still hand-labor, plantation-style — but under the urging of the White Citizens Council, land owners are now bringing in machines to replace and displace Black field-hands. With the rise of the Freedom Movement and increased Black assertiveness, "Negro-removal" is now the strategy of Mississippi's white power-structure. Between 1950 and 1960, some 200,000 Blacks are forced to leave the Delta, by 1964 the number of Black sharecroppers is roughly half of what it was six years earlier. Most of those forced off the land migrate to the urban ghettos of the North.

Those who still remain endure grinding poverty and unyielding oppression. According to the 1960 Census, annual median income for rural Blacks in the Delta is just $452 (equal to $3,800 in 2017). On average, white children in the Delta receive 10 years of public schooling, Blacks less than 5 years in schools that are so ill-equipped that few are accredited. Segregation remains absolute and the effects are stark.

For Blacks, segregation, exploitation, and abuse permeate every aspect of life. Though almost two-thirds of the county is Black, 131 of the county's 168 hospital beds are reserved for whites-only. More than 80% of Blacks live in dwellings rated "sub-standard," but their tar-paper shacks with a single light bulb are charged more for electricity than whites living in modern homes.

In Leflore County, almost 100% of whites are registered to vote, compared to just 268 Blacks (2%). In the seven years since the Brown decision, only 40 Blacks have been allowed to register (compared to 1,664 whites (Mississippi Voter – Greenwood 1-2).

In 1961, Mississippi-native Sam Block was stationed at an Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, as Freedom Riders streamed into Mississippi. He watched them excitedly. “I just wanted to be part of it,” recalled Block, “to be part of a movement that was doing something to eradicate the conditions that I was forced to live in all my life but wasn’t able to do anything about.”

After leaving the Air Force, he returned to his hometown of Cleveland, Mississippi and soon ran into an old family acquaintance and movement stalwart, Amzie Moore. “Get involved with the Movement,” Moore urged Block. With Moore’s help, Block, then 23-years-old, quietly set up a group of semi-underground citizenship schools around town.

This work caught the attention of SNCC’s Mississippi project director Bob Moses, who was planning to expand SNCC’s voter registration efforts into the Delta region. He asked Block where he would like to work. “Greenwood, Mississippi,” Block responded, thinking back on the lynching of Emmett Till in nearby Money, Mississippi. Moses asked again if Block was sure that he wanted to work in Greenwood, a bastion of the white supremacist Citizens’ Council. Again, Sam said yes.

He entered the cotton processing city without an established network of contacts. He remembered “hanging out in the pool halls, wherever people were, the Laundromat, run around the grocery stores,” to meet people. He also went from door-to-door “sort of testing the pulse of the people.”

It did not take long for his presence to become known. His landlady received threatening phone calls and asked Block to move. He lived out of an abandoned car for a time and had difficulty finding enough food to eat. But he was committed. “If I got a chance to do anything to help people, especially black people, then I was gonna do it.” (Sam 1-3).

Sam is soon joined by Rust College graduate Willie (Wazir) Peacock, and then Luvaugn Brown, and Lawrence Guyot.

Sam Block: I canvassed every day and every night until I found about seven or eight people to carry up to register ... We went up to register and it was the first time visiting the courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the sheriff came up to me and he asked me, he said, "Nigger, where you from?" I told him, "Well, I'm a native Mississippian." He said, "Yeh, yeh, I know that, but where you from? ... I know you ain't from here, cause I know every nigger and his mammy." I said, "Well, you know all the niggers, do you know any colored people?"

He got angry. He spat in my face and walked. So he came back and turned around and told me, "I don't want to see you in town any more. The best thing you better do is pack your clothes and get out and don't never come back no more." I said, "Well, sheriff, if you don't want to see me here, I think the best thing for you to do is pack your clothes and leave, get out of town, 'cause I'm here to stay, I came here to do a job and this is my intention, I'm going to do this job."

White racists attack the SNCC office, and the SNCC organizers barely escape over the roof tops. The building is trashed, and the frightened landlord evicts them. The fear is so intense that people cross to the other side of the street rather than walk past Sam or Wazir and risk whites observing them in proximity to the "race-mixing agitators." It is months before anyone else in the Black community will rent space intended for voter registration work.

Sam and Wazir dig in deep, and hold on. They continue organizing in Greenwood without an office. Fear is pervasive among Greenwood Blacks. Fear of being fired. Fear of being evicted. Fear of beatings, bombings, and murder. Fear that the SNCC workers will stir up trouble and violence and then leave. But gradually, week by week, month by month, as Sam and Wazir hold on, trust is built and their courage inspires first the young students and then their parents (Mississippi Voter 3-4).

About defying white Greenwood police, “They knew we were Mississippians, and to see us facing up to them and standing up to them, they couldn’t understand what had happened, what had gone wrong,” Peacock remembered (Willie 1).

As Block sunk his roots into Greenwood’s Black community, he recognized that there was a hidden anger and desire for change. Local people “were looking for someone who could give form and expression to ideas and thoughts they had had for years,” reflected Block (Sam 3).

Wazir Peacock: Greenwood was so organized — there was not one block that we couldn't have — it was like guerrilla war, we could stop anywhere and duck out of sight, go into somebody's house. At every block in the Black neighborhood. So that's one thing that kept us alive 'cause they would see us at night and the cops would think it was an opportunity to get us, speed up and try to turn around. When they turned around we'd be watching out a window somewhere, see them come back to try to find us.

A new office is finally rented, a church dares to open its doors for a voter registration meeting, and the community begins coming together. Slowly, one by one, two by two, a few Leflore County Blacks begin to make the dangerous journey down to the courthouse to try to register to vote. But in the first six months, only five Blacks of the dozens who try are actually registered (Mississippi Voter – Greenwood 5).

Jackson is Mississippi's capitol and most significant urban area. In 1960, 40% of its 150,000 residents are Black, and Blacks are a clear majority in the surrounding rural areas of Hinds, Madison, and Rankin counties. Jackson is totally segregated, and Blacks are restricted to the lowest-paid menial jobs in the public and private sectors. Jackson is a White Citizens Council stronghold and the Council dominates the local political scene. Mayor Allen Thompson is a rabid segregationist, as are the Governor and state legislators. A miasma of fear lays heavy over the Black community, ruthless police brutality is common, and Klan terrorists lurk in the shadows ready to strike down anyone who challenges the racial order.

In the fall of 1961 and into early 1962, SNCC organizers try to organize protests and register voters in Jackson, but make little headway against police repression and the grip of fear. SNCC moves its main focus into the Mississippi Delta region around Greenwood where there is more hope of success. This leaves the NAACP as the main civil rights organization with an ongoing presence in Jackson. But the Jackson NAACP is largely moribund, most of its Youth Councils are dormant, and only the heroic efforts of NAACP State Field Director Medgar Evers keeps the organization barely alive.

The NAACP's national leadership shun direct-action protests in favor of lawsuits in federal Court, but unlike Alabama where Federal Judge Frank Johnson often rules in favor of civil rights, Mississippi Federal Judge Harold Cox (appointed by President Kennedy) is an ardent segregationist. He almost always rules against the NAACP, forcing them to appeal each case to the Federal Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans, a process that slows and limits progress.

The national NAACP also emphasizes voter registration, but unlike SNCC who work with the masses of Black sharecroppers, maids, and laborers, the NAACP concentrates their efforts on the small Black elite — ministers, professionals, teachers, business owners. But in Mississippi, the Black elite are vulnerable to the economic terrorism of the White Citizens Council. With some notable exceptions, in 1962 most of them are still unwilling to risk attempting to register.

Back in the fall of 1961, Tougaloo student Colia Lidell (later Colia Lafayette) and Tougaloo teacher Hunter Bear (John Salter) began reactivating and rebuilding the North Jackson NAACP Youth Council (NJYC). By early 1962 it has slowly begun to make headway against the palpable fear (Jackson 1-3).

Hunter Bear was the product of a racially mixed marriage. Adopted by a family named Salter, Hunter’s father was essentially a full-blooded Indian of the Northeast. His mother was an Anglo, mostly Scottish. He had experienced extreme racism while being raised amongst the Navaho in Arizona. Following the Freedom Rides, wanting to immerse himself in civil rights work in the South, possessing a master’s degree in Sociology, he had sought a teaching position at a Black college in the South and had been hired to instruct at Tougaloo College near Jacksonville. Colia Lidell, a student, had heard him give a speech about American government and “how we needed to become involved in the world outside the campus.” Colia invited him to give a speech in North Jackson about the Interstate Commerce Commission and the meaning of its desegregation order.

I went off to that evening and I spoke. And it was a well-prepared speech. The Interstate Commerce Commission had just issued an order desegregating interstate bus traffic as a result of the Freedom Rides. And on the basis of that there was a little chink [in the social walls of segregation] here and there, but there wasn't much. Mississippi's approach, and that of much of the hard core South, was to just ignore things. But anyway, that was my pioneer voyage into the Mississippi civil rights waters, and everybody was very pleased. So pleased that Colia asked if I'd be the adult advisor to the North Jackson Youth Council. And I said I would.

Medgar Evers, — who I had not yet met, — had expressed great pleasure to Colia that I agreed to do it. He'd heard of me, knew something about my labor background, things like that. I hadn't yet met him. So he was all for it. Before long I met him, and we became good friends and remained close colleagues, comrades you would say (Interview 2-4).

When school resumes in the fall of 1962, they are joined by Tougaloo student Betty Anne Poole, expelled Jackson State students Dorie and Joyce Ladner who have transferred to Tougaloo, and white exchange students Karin Kunstler and Joan Trumpauer. The NJYC continues slow but steady growth, moving their meetings from living rooms to the attic of Virden Grove church. Made up mainly of students from Tougaloo and Jackson State and from Lanier, Hill, and Brinkley high schools, along with some school dropouts and young professor Hunter Bear as their "adult" advisor, they begin distributing the North Jackson Action, a mimeographed newsletter [printed in Memphis and smuggled into Jackson] (Jackson 4).

You know, things occurred that certainly gave the measure of Mississippi's intransigence. The shooting of Corporal Roman Duckworth, Jr. at Taylorville, — Black corporal, military police, five children, wife getting ready to give birth to the sixth child in Laurel. He was asleep in the bus when it crossed from Tennessee into Mississippi. And in Tennessee you could sleep fairly safely in the front of the bus. And the only reason he did that, I think, was a space thing, but in Mississippi, — He was sound asleep in the front of the bus, and they went all the way down and pulled into Taylorville, where a marshal named Kelly shot him to death in broad daylight in front of 30 witnesses.

The Free Press, pioneered in that story and many others stories. But these things were happening with a dreary frequency.

At the same time, Meredith, — James Meredith — was making his bid to enter 'Ole Miss. And that was beginning to heat up. I mean, the word was that he just might make it

When we looked at things in late September of '62 we saw that the state was inflamed by the imminent admission of Meredith. People were being knocked off, — Blacks, — in such things as cars hitting them at night when they were walking along the road, — things of that sort. It was a very dangerous time. I mean, these weren't accidents, this was deliberate murder (Interview 4-6).

In early October, Jackson hosts the annual state fair, a major harvest festival. It is completely segregated, the first week is for "whites only," followed by 3 days for "colored." The NJYC calls on Blacks to boycott the "second-hand fair." Any public demonstration, such as picketing, will result in immediate arrest and there is no money for bail. Anyone caught distributing boycott leaflets will also be jailed. Like resistance fighters in occupied territory, the word has to be spread secretly, through clandestine meetings and passing flyers covertly from hand to hand. A telephone tree is organized and sympathizers are asked to call their friends. October 15 is the first day of the "Negro Fair." The boycott is 90% effective, Black fair goers are few and far between to the financial discomfort of white vendors and concessionaires.

Buoyed by the success of the fair boycott, the NJYC and the revived Tougaloo NAACP chapter begin organizing a Christmas boycott of Jackson's downtown merchants (all white, of course). They adopt four key demands:

1. Equality in hiring & promotion

2. End segregation of restrooms, water fountains, lunch counters

3. Courtesy titles such as "Miss," Mrs," "Mister"

4. Service on first-come first-served basis

Medgar Evers tries to negotiate with the merchants but they refuse to meet with him. The boycott targets 150 white stores including all the "downtown" stores. The plan is to start with a small group of pickets whose inevitable arrest will dramatize the boycott, and then follow up with a campus meeting to mobilize support. Despite pleas by Medgar — who is NAACP state Field Director — the national NAACP leadership is unwilling to provide any bail funds. But enough bond money for six protesters is contributed by the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), NY attorney Victor Rabinowitz, and Dr. King's Gandhi Fund.

On Saturday December 12, the first civil rights demonstration in Jackson since the Freedom Rides takes place on Capitol Street, the main drag of the downtown shopping district. Led by Hunter Bear, the six pickets raise their signs and a swarm of 50 cops immediately arrest them (Jackson 5-6).

There seemed to be good sentiment for this if we could actually show that we were serious. And to show that we were serious, we decided we had to do two things. We had to distribute masses of leaflets, which like the sale of the Free Press was a "subversive" activity, punishable by arrests and fines and things of that sort. [Under Mississippi law it was a crime to boycott, or advocate boycotting businesses].

And we also had to put ourselves on the line publically. And so Eldri and myself and four Black students [decide] to picket on December 12th in front of the Woolworth's store on Capitol Street (Interview 8).

The mass meeting is held on the Tougaloo campus that night. The next day the NJYC and Tougaloo and high school students begin clandestinely distributing leaflets through Jackson's Black neighborhoods and to Blacks in Hinds, Madison, Rankin, and Yazoo counties. But the end of December, 15,000 flyers have been passed from hand to hand. The telephone tree is activated, speakers are assigned to address church meetings, and "undercover agents" (Black students posing as shoppers) patrol Capitol Street quietly informing out-of-area Black shoppers about the boycott.

Enough bail money is raised for a second team of pickets — Tougaloo students Dorie Ladner and Charles Bracey — to be busted on Capitol Street on December 21. That night, Klan nightriders fire into Hunter Bear's home narrowly missing his baby daughter. Armed guards are posted on the Tougaloo campus (Jackson 7).

At night somebody shot up our house. A bullet missed my daughter Maria, went through her crib, just barely missed her. There was no point depending on the Madison County Sheriff's office for anything other than trouble, and so a number of us stood armed guard on the Tougaloo campus, something which we were to do on a number of occasions. There were points where we even fired a shot or two, — in fact, we fired more than a few shots. But we didn't publicize that part of it Interview 9).

NY attorney William Kunstler (father of Tougaloo exchange student Karin Kunstler), Gandhi Fund lawyer Clarence Jones, and local Jackson attorney Jess Brown devise a new legal strategy. Pointing out the obvious fact that civil rights demonstrators cannot possibly receive a fair trial in segregated state courts that only allow whites to serve on juries, they petition to have the picket cases transferred to federal court under an old Reconstruction Era statute. The racist Federal Judge Harold Cox denies their petition and they appeal his ruling to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. While the case is working its way through the judicial system, the pickets are free on bail and their trials are postponed. The removal petition eventually succeeds, setting a precedent for transferring civil rights cases from all over the South to federal court where they enter a legal limbo and are never brought to trial.

The Christmas boycott is surprisingly effective, honored by roughly 60% of the Black population. And once the pressure of providing Christmas gifts to children is past, the boycott gains strength as it continues into 1963. In tacit admission of the economic hardship being suffered by the white merchants, the City waives the annual property taxes for businesses being boycotted. But despite their economic losses, the white business owners refuse to negotiate with Blacks or make any changes in segregation. And the White Citizens Council stands ready to foreclose mortgages, stop supplies, and mobilize a white boycott against any merchant who wavers in steadfast support of segregation (Jackson 8-9).


Works cited:

“Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Formed in Mississippi.” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.htm

“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm

“Jackson MS Boycotts.” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

“Mississippi Voter Registration – Greenwood.” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

“Sam Block.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/sam-bl...

“Willie Peacock.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/willie...

James Meredith -- Ever since I was fifteen years old I have been consciously aware that I am a Negro... but until I was fifteen I did not know that my group was supposed to be the inferior one. Since then I have felt a personal responsibility to change the status of my group (Who 1).

As the June 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights in Washington DC draws to a close, James Meredith holds a press conference to announce that he intends to march from Memphis to Jackson through the heart of Mississippi. He tells the few reporters in attendance that his march has two goals: first to "...challenge all-pervasive fear that dominates the day to day life of the Negro United States, especially in the South, and particularly in Mississippi;" and second to "...encourage the 450,000 unregistered Negroes in Mississippi to go to the polls and register."

Meredith is a loner who sets himself apart from the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement — "a man who marches to the beat of his own drum, as some activists characterize him. He hopes to run for political office in Mississippi and the march he plans for law school's summer break is a step on that path, both by raising his public profile and increasing the number of Black voters. Meredith sends notice to Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson and the county sheriffs along his planned route informing them of what he intends to do.

He does not view his effort as a mass protest march, but rather as a statement by a few courageous men, "Absolutely no women or children should be allowed. I am sick and tired of Negro men hiding behind their women and children," he says. Meredith informs SCLC and CORE of his intentions but neither invites their participation nor seeks assistance from them.

Departing from the storied Peabody Hotel on the edge of the Memphis Blues district, Meredith begins his march on Sunday afternoon, June 5, with a Bible in his hand. He is accompanied by six others, four Black and two white — record producer Claude Sterrett, businessman and occasional activist Joseph Crittenden, NAACP officers Maxine and Vasco Smith, and Sherwood Ross who is the march press liaison and Rev. Robert Weeks an Episcopalian minister.

Soon they are walking south through rural Tennessee on the two-lane highway blacktop of US-51. Hostile whites, some waving Confederate battle flags, heckle and harass them, zipping past in speeding cars just barely missing vehicular mayhem. The Tennessee Highway Patrol clears a small crowd of segregationists from their path. A couple of hours before sunset, the marchers halt just short of the Mississippi line and return to Memphis for the night.

The next morning Meredith resumes his march with a prayer at the big "Welcome to Mississippi" sign just across the state line. The handful of marchers are accompanied by county sheriffs deputies, Mississippi State Troopers, and FBI agents. The first town they come to is Hernando MS the county seat of DeSoto County with a population around 2000, Defying tradition and white-supremacy, some 150 Afro-Americans bravely gather on the town square to welcome Meredith and his tiny band of freedom marchers (Meredith Begins 1-3).


Interviewed by Time Magazine in 2018, Meredith recalled:“What I had set out to do happened in the first place I came to…. When I walked up to the square in Hernando, [Miss.,] not a black could be seen, only whites. But on the backside of the courthouse, there was just about every black in that county of Mississippi, ready for change in their lives” (Waxman 1).

Through stifling afternoon heat, the marchers continue down Highway-51 south of Hernando. Just past four o'clock and 14 miles below the Mississippi line, Aubrey Norvell, a white man with a shotgun, steps out of the brush shouting "I only want James Meredith" (Meredith Begins 3).


Aubrey James Norvel … had lived a relatively unremarkable life. Born in Forrest City, Arkansas, to a middle-class family, he had worked in his father’s hardware store until it closed and remained unemployed thereafter. He had no affiliation with any white supremacy groups, had no history of mental health issues, and didn’t drink. His neighbors described him as a quiet and soft-spoken man. So it came as a surprise when, on the second day of Meredith’s march, Norvel emerged from the roadside scrabble with a shotgun in his hands (Glaser 1).


Before he started shooting, Mr. Norvell warned bystanders to disperse and twice shouted out Mr. Meredith's name from the woods, but law enforcement did nothing to protect Mr. Meredith (James 1).


He closes the distance to Meredith at a calm walking pace. The State Troopers, DeSoto County sheriffs, and FBI agents accompanying Meredith do nothing to stop him. He opens fire, shooting three times. Meredith is hit and knocked down. Norvell then amiably surrenders himself to the local Sheriff. The wounded Meredith is rushed by ambulance to a Memphis hospital (Meredith Begins 3).


Sherwood Ross — a former Chicago journalist handling publicity for the march — tended to the civil rights leader’s wounds. He rode with him to the hospital, telling the ambulance driver to speed things up, or he’d have blood on his hands.

“You will lose your job if you don’t!’’ he warned.


The driver turned on the siren and pushed the speedometer to 90.

…

“He was sold on me before I knew who he was,” said Meredith …


After Meredith announced his solo March Against Fear, Mr. Ross, who had left journalism to work in politics and for the National Urban League, offered to be the press coordinator, according to Aram Goudsouzian’s 2014 book “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power and the Meredith March Against Fear.”


According to the book, Mr. Ross, worried about Meredith’s safety, figured, “If he raised the march’s profile, he could surround Meredith with reporters, and then no one would attack him.”

…

Once Meredith, Mr. Ross and three others stepped off on the 1966 march, Mr. Ross saw the hostility that greeted them. He called National Urban League chief Whitney Young to ask for protection. Goudsouzian wrote that Mr. Ross told Young, “We’re going to get shot tomorrow” (O’Donnell 1, 3).


Word flashes around the world — "Meredith Shot!" President Johnson and members of his cabinet condemn the attack as do many other national political, community, and religious leaders in the North.


For some Black freedom activists in communities across the nation the striking failure of law enforcement to protect a Black man from a violent white racist is the final straw. They declare that for them "turn-the-other-cheek" nonviolence is over — from now on they will defend themselves against terrorist attacks. And for some, gone too is their last shred of hope in interracial brotherhood belief in the American dream. Other Afro-American leaders equally condemn the attack but remain committed to both nonviolence as a strategy and tactic and integration as a goal (March 1).


Far away from the Mississippi backroad where James Meredith’s life slowly seeped into the roadside dust, the Civil Rights movement was also fading fast. Out of what had once been a united front, a number of increasingly disparate sects had emerged: those who preferred a political path, those who rode the rising tide of black nationalism, and those who held strong to the promise of nonviolent protest. Each group was convinced that their approach was the key to reaching equal rights for black America, but their opposing viewpoints had split their efforts, weakened their impact, and left them vulnerable to criticism. When James Meredith, a fiercely independent and vocal proponent of his own ambiguous ideologies, had refused to take up the banner of any presiding groups, he had been all but abandoned. The NAACP, CORE, SCLC , and SNCC had all left him to pursue his anomic whims—like a 225-mile march across Mississippi—alone.


As a result, Meredith’s crusade had begun with limited fanfare. He departed with only a group of four companions: a minister, a record company executive, a shopkeeper, and a volunteer publicist. The Memphis daily paper hadn’t even bothered to send a representative to cover the event. The shots that rang out against the Mississippi morning, however, changed everything. Whereas the disparate sects of the Civil Rights movement found little common ground when it came to tactical ideology, they could all agree that Meredith’s fate was untenable, and one by one, they arrived in Mississippi to complete Meredith’s stalled mission (Glaser 2).


Almost immediately, civil rights leaders from different organizations rushed to Meredith’s bedside at a Memphis hospital with plans to continue the “March Against Fear” while he recuperated. Martin Luther King and CORE national director, Floyd McKissick, met with SNCC’s Cleveland Sellers, Stanley Wise, and newly-elected SNCC chairman, Stokely Carmichael, who stressed that the march was an opportunity “to organize in communities along the march route.” SNCC wanted the march to focus attention on local voter registration efforts by bringing marchers and reporters to Mississippi towns where most Black people were still unregistered as voters. They also insisted that marchers use civil disobedience in communities where they encountered resistance (Meredith March 1).


Led by former SNCC Chairman Marion Barry, 50 protesters from the Free DC Movement picket the White House. Arriving in Memphis in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday June 7, comedian/activist Dick Gregory declares he will resume Meredith's march from the point where he was gunned down. "How much longer will America stand for [this]?" he asks. "I am one American who intends to find out for myself or die standing up for it."

It has long been an established principle of the Freedom Movement that racist violence must not be allowed to halt protests. If violence succeeds in suppressing nonviolent action in one place it will put all Movement activity everywhere at risk of similar attack. So leaders of the major civil rights organizations converge on Memphis to plan a united response.

In previous years, the direct action wing of the Movement — CORE, SCLC, SNCC — responded to terrorist violence by mobilizing their maximum resources at the point of attack. But now they are all struggling financially.


In '64 and '65 during Freedom Summer, Selma, and the March to Montgomery donations poured in and they rapidly expanded staff and projects. But by the summer of '66 fundraising has fallen off drastically for a number of reasons — the violent urban uprisings in northern cities frightened off many white liberals, the MFDP's [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s] rejection of the phony "compromise" at the Atlantic City convention alienated significant segments of the Democratic Party establishment, and the Movement's turn towards addressing northern racism and economic issues has proven unpalatable to some of the institutions who had in the past contributed to campaigns against southern segregation and for voting rights. At the same time, campus support groups and college activists have begun to shift their energy and money towards opposing the Vietnam War.


With funds dwindling, all three groups are now faced with laying off organizers and downsizing or closing projects. They have scant resources for a new large scale march through Mississippi.


Dr. King and SCLC are spread thin, deeply committed to an anti-slumlord, open-housing campaign in Chicago.


In the months after Freedom Summer in 1964, they [SNCC] had more than 300 paid staff concentrated in four southern states — Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, but by the summer of 1966 that number has fallen to barely over 100. And SNCC is also — as usual — in the process of redefining itself. It's become an organization of organizers, many of whom distrust and oppose large-scale protests that appeal to "the conscience of the nation" with little tangible result. And they believe that high-profile marches, mass arrests, and big-foot, famous-name leaders hinder and derail the deep community organizing that is now their primary concern.

Relations between SNCC and SCLC remain badly frayed after the conflicts in Selma the previous year. … In a close vote, long-time SNCC Chairman John Lewis has recently been replaced by Stokely Carmichael. When he, Cleveland Sellers, and Stanley Wise arrive in Memphis they tell King and McKissick that SNCC as an organization cannot immediately commit to supporting a continuation of Meredith's march.

Later that afternoon, King, McKissick, Stokely, and about 20 others drive to the spot on Highway-51 where Meredith had been shot. From there they try to symbolically continue the march. They are blocked by a line of Mississippi State Troopers who order them off the blacktop. The cops shove the marchers onto the sloping dirt shoulder and down into a soggy drainage ditch, knocking Cleve Sellers into the mud and striking Dr. King. Stokely tries to protect King and an enraged Trooper grips his pistol, ready to draw and shoot. The moment trembles on a knife-edge of incipient violence before King manages to calm the situation.


Forced to slog through mud, wiregrass, and tangled shrubbery the marchers continue to the edge of Coldwater MS, a small hamlet 21 miles south of the Tennessee line. After driving back to Memphis, King issues a national call for people to join and continue Meredith's march.

Stokely and his SNCC compañeros debate what their organization response should be.

At first we were unanimous. Have nothing to do with the madness. ... what exactly was a "march against fear" anyway? I mean in political terms? A symbolic act, a media event, a fund-raising operation? It was all of those and nothing. ... But after a while that wasn't so clear. The march would be going through the Mississippi Delta. ... Our turf. Our people were bound to be on the line. How could SNCC let the other organizations march through and we be absent? No way we could explain that to the local people we'd worked with. No way.


The more we talked, something else slowly began to emerge ... None of us had had much sleep, maybe that was it. ... [But] what if we could give [the march] some serious political meaning? ... Our folk would be doing the marching. SNCC projects would be doing the organizing. We could turn it into a moving Freedom Day. Doing voter registration at every courthouse we passed. Have a rally every night. We could involve the local communities. Address their needs. A very different proposition from the previous promenades of the prominent. ...


I wanted this march to demonstrate the new SNCC approach in action. ... In everything the local communities and leadership would have to be centrally involved. Everything. That way we could showcase our approach. We wouldn't just talk about empowerment, about black communities controlling their political destiny, and overcoming fear. We would demonstrate it. The march would register voters by the hundreds. Local people would organize it, would help decide on objectives, and, to the extent they could, provide resources and generally take responsibility. — Stokely Carmichael, SNCC (March 1-4)

Into the post-midnight hours of June 8 national, Mississippi, and Memphis freedom movement leaders gather in Dr. King's crowded room at the Lorraine Motel — NAACP, CORE, SCLC, SNCC, MFDP, MCHR, Delta Ministry, Deacons for Defense, Urban League, Dick Gregory, and other notables. The meeting is long, contentious. Strongly held beliefs are debated.


Should whites be excluded from the planned continuation of the march? Andrew Young of SCLC later observed: There was a decision on the part of some of the blacks in SNCC that we don't just want to get people free, we want to develop indigenous black leadership. And one of the ways to force the development of indigenous black leadership is to get rid of all this paternalism.


Dr. King clearly opposes any hint that white supporters are unwelcome. Though some SNCC members are now ardent Black nationalists and some are separatists, Stokely accepts King's position — with one proviso: — whites can march but not tell SNCC what to do or say. "We were very strong about this because of the inferiority imposed upon our people through exploitation that makes it appear as if we are not capable of leading ourselves."


Nonviolence was the most intense area of disagreement. SNCC and CORE insisted that the Deacons for Defense & Justice be permitted to provide security for the march. As has just been proven by the unwillingness of Mississippi law-enforcement to protect James Meredith, the Freedom Movement has to protect its own from white terrorism and Klan assassins. The Deacons have worked successfully with nonviolent CORE protesters in Louisiana. They do not picket or march themselves; they do not engage in suicidal gun battles with the police. Their purpose is to protect nonviolent demonstrators and the Black community from KKK terrorism — with guns if necessary.

King, Deacons, CORE, SNCC, MFDP, and most of the others in the room come to a consensus that for strategic and tactical reasons the actual marchers on the road will be unarmed and nonviolent in the face of police harassment or attack — but the Deacons will guard them from white terrorists like Aubrey Norvell, Byron de la Beckwith, and other Klan killers (March 5-7).


A Manifesto, written largely by SNCC and adopted over the objections of Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, will be released to the press.


The Manifesto called on President Johnson to “actively enforce existing federal laws to protect the rights of all Americans.” The crafters also requested that he send the federal registrars to all 600 counties in the Deep South and propose “an adequate budget” to deal with Black rural and urban poverty. They went on to urge Johnson to strengthen the 1966 Civil Rights Bill [being considered] by accelerating the integration of Southern juries and law enforcement agencies (Meredith March 3).


The subsequent march would “be a massive public indictment and protest of the failure of the American society, the government of the United States, and the state of Mississippi 'to fulfill these rights.'" The phrase "to fulfill these rights" is a mocking rebuke to LBJ and his just concluded White House Conference on Civil Rights — an event that SNCC boycotted, CORE walked out of, and Dr. King was isolated at, disrespected, and dismissed by Washington's elite — both white and Black.


Speaking for the National NAACP and Urban League, [Roy] Wilkins and [Whitney] Young balk. They disassociate themselves and their organizations from the march.


… the withdrawal of the National NAACP leaves tactical and strategic leadership of a resource-starved march in the hands of the Freedom Movement's direct-action & community organizing wing — SNCC, CORE, SCLC — Carmichael, McKissick, and King. Now it's now up to them to organize and lead a march 177 miles from Coldwater to Jackson through the heart of Klan country, register voters, and encourage local organizations who can fight for Black political power (March 6. 8).


Works cited:


Glaser, Sarah. “The Power of One: James Meredith and the March against Fear.” PorterBriggs.com. Web. http://porterbriggs.com/the-power-of-...


“James Meredith Shot during ‘March Against Fear’ in Mississippi.” Eji: A History of Racial Injustice. Web. https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injus...


“The March Coalition, June 7-8.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


“Meredith Begins His March, June 5-6.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


“Meredith March.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/meredi...


O’Donnell, Maureen. “Sherwood Ross, Ex-Chicago Reporter Who Marched with James Meredith, Dead at 85.” Chicago Sun*Times. June 29, 2018. Web. https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/she...


Waxman, Olivia B. “James Meredith on What Today's Activism Is Missing.” Time. June 6, 2016. Web. http://time.com/4356404/james-meredit...

“Who Was James Meredith?” Integrating Ol Miss: A Civil Rights Milestone. Web. https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/ole...

Access this map to follow the direction of the Meredith March. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mmm_map.htm


First, let us consider a few general observations about the March by historian Aram Goudsouzian, author of Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear, made in a 2016 interview.


It was a great, nonviolent mass demonstration in the vein of Birmingham or Selma, but it also showcased the radicalism that had lain under the movement’s surface.


It featured famous figures and national leaders, but it also highlighted the importance of a wide cast of characters, from the courageous grassroots activists who redefined American democracy, to the white segregationists who employed a variety of strategies to preserve their power, to the black Mississippians who supported the march by walking a few miles, feeding the marchers, or registering to vote. Finally, it is an extraordinary story, full of dramatic moments, both uplifting and chilling—including the shooting of James Meredith, the voter registration of a 106-year-old man who had been born a slave, Stokely Carmichael’s unveiling of the slogan “Black Power,” a mob attack in the town of Philadelphia, soaring oratory from Martin Luther King, a brutal tear gassing in Canton, and a climactic 15,000-person march through the streets of Jackson, the largest civil-rights demonstration in Mississippi history.


James Meredith wanted a “walk” to Jackson, not a “march.” A march involved lots of people, including women and children, engaged in a mass protest. Meredith’s walk was for him and other independent men. He did not wish to endanger or inconvenience black Mississippians. After he was shot, the demonstration grew huge. It also imposed on local communities, veered from his planned route down Highway 51, and featured public debates about black politics. Meredith was furious! From his hospital bed in Memphis, and then while he recuperated in New York, he kept registering his distaste. He returned to Mississippi for the march’s final days, but even then he followed his own course: he abandoned a meeting of march leaders and led his own walk down Highway 51 from Canton to Tougaloo College, following his original plan.

…

Centenary Methodist Church, the Memphis pastorate of James Lawson, served as a hub for all the volunteers flooding in from across the country. Black communities in small Mississippi towns served them food and lent them land, while local leaders helped coordinate voter registration rallies. The improvised response showed the flexibility of the march’s leaders, who worked together despite their ideological differences. More important, it illustrated that the foundation of the civil-rights movement was the “ordinary” black people—men, women, and children—who sacrificed to serve a greater cause (Risen 2-4).


By mid-morning on Wednesday the 8th, marchers are gathering at Centenary Church in Memphis and boarding cars and busses to Coldwater where the trek is to resume. Before departing, King and McKissick visit Meredith in the hospital to inform him of what is underway. He refuses to endorse the new manifesto — not out of opposition to it but rather because he is no longer in day-to-day command of the operation and he doesn't want to take responsibility for something he has no control over.

Though Meredith's attending physician believes he needs to remain hospitalized for at least one more day, hospital administrators are under pressure from hostile whites to discharge Meredith immediately — which they do over the doctor's objection. King, McKissick, and local Memphis leaders decry this as a violation of the wounded man's constitutional rights. Still suffering the effects of his injuries, when Meredith tries to speak to the press from his wheelchair he collapses. He is flown back to New York to recuperate.


It's mid-afternoon by the time the leaders and marchers from Memphis arrive at the Coldwater bridge to join a group of local Black folk who have been waiting for hours in the sweltering heat. McKissick reads the manifesto aloud for benefit of the 120 or so marchers and the press.


McKissick, King and Carmichael lead the march south through Coldwater and on down Highway-51. Roughly 90% of the marchers are Afro-American, the remainder mostly white. In the late afternoon they halt just outside of Senatobia about 5 miles down the road. March organizers have not had time to arrange for a campsite or tents, so the local marchers disperse to their homes and the outsiders are ferried back to Memphis. On the following day, June 9, some 200 march the 11 miles from Senatobia to Como, another small town.


Still without tents for camping, the 75 non-local marchers are driven south to Batesville where they are fed and housed by local Afro-American families. Advance scouts are by now ranging ahead to locate campsites down the road and arrange for local churches to provide meals to hungry marchers, while in Memphis, Jackson, and elsewhere, others attend to the logistic work of renting tents, equipment, trucks and vans.


Meanwhile, SNCC, CORE, and SCLC organizers have begun traveling the side roads, going door-to-door on the dirt lanes, encouraging local Blacks to attend nightly mass meetings, join the march, and assemble at the Panola County courthouse in Batesville to register.


The three groups — SNCC, CORE, and the SCLC — began to pool our legal resources and contact the people for setting up mass meetings and rallies along the highway. We began to get people involved. The idea of Martin Luther King marching against fear in Mississippi was an idea whose time had come, and many people responded from throughout the state. So we were successful in generating the interest and the crowds that we would not have generated if we had gone the other way and made the calls for a number of people to come in from the North. — Cleve Sellers, SNCC (Marching Through 1-2).


Rev. Martin Luther King was the march’s most visible figure. Black people in Mississippi and throughout the South idolized King and trusted his leadership. King, for his part, was aware of a new anger among young Black people in SNCC and elsewhere, and one could detect in his speeches during the march, attempts to reflect the new racial mood without abandoning the ideals of nonviolence and brotherhood.

Though respecting King, SNCC participants sought opportunities to convey the idea that beyond getting more Black people registered to vote, a more radical approach to change was now necessary (Meredith March 2).


Marchers, organizers, and aspiring voters are all under the quiet — and largely unseen — protection of the Deacons for Defense. Equipped with two-way radios, pistols and shotguns ready to hand, they patrol up and down the march line and along the rural roads that the door-to-door canvassers are trekking. They escort the cars ferrying out-of-town marchers from bus depots and airports, and guard campsites, churches, and homes at night. They don't flaunt their presence or engage in macho posturing, nor do they reveal their numbers or allow strangers to attend their meetings.

…

To marchers and media alike, the courageous men and women who publicly defy white-supremacy are self-evident. But remaining in shadow are many others — the Afro-American farmer who refuses to share a sip of water with marchers and tells them, "Please go away, we don't want no trouble!" The Black woman who refuses to let Dr. King use her phone, "If anyone sees you come into my house, my family will have trouble with the Klan once you have gone. We just can't afford to take chances."


Yet some are willing to take a stand. The summer sun beats down on Highway-51 and the muggy heat is stifling and oppressive. Armistead Phipps, 58, gray-haired and rail-thin, sits with friends beneath the shade of a tree as they wait for the march to resume. He's the son of a Black sharecropper, and a sharecropper himself for all his life, but now heart disease and high blood pressure have forced him to retire from the fields. He lives in a three room shack in the tiny hamlet of West Marks on $110 month (equal to $840 in 2018) from Social Security and state welfare. He no longer has the strength to work cotton but he's a stalwart member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Beatrice, his wife, begs him not to march under the blazing sun. "I've got to go," he tells her. "This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to our people in Mississippi. Now they won't be afraid to vote any more. I'll only march for a little. But I've got to be part of it."

With Alex Shimkin, a white COFO [Council of Federated Organizations was a coalition of the major Civil Rights Movement organizations operating in Mississippi] worker from Illinois, he and others from Marks drive 40 miles to join the march — now 250 strong — as it forms up and heads down Highway-51 towards distant Jackson. He ignores the angry whites waving their Confederate battle flags and yelling, "Niggers, go home!" He is home. But just south of Senatobia he stumbles out of line, falling to the grassy shoulder. Dr. Alvin Poussaint of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) rushes to his side. To no avail, Phipps breathes his last on the side of the road (Marching Through 3-4).

As usual, most of the white-owned, southern mass media is implacably hostile to the march and the Freedom Movement in general, but reaction in the northern media is more complex. In the Movement's early years they responded to bus boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and school integration with cautious approval mixed with ominous fear of Communism, red-subversion, and negative consequences to American foreign policy. After Birmingham in 1963, northern coverage of the Movement became more clearly favorable as young Afro-Americans defied dogs, firehouses, and Klan mobs for their freedom. During 1964's Freedom Summer media interest shifted almost entirely to the northern white students from affluent families coming to South to aid oppressed Blacks, and during 1965's Selma campaign and March to Montgomery their narrative extolled both Afro-Americans struggling for basic American values and President Johnson's "magnanimous" efforts to bestow upon them a Voting Rights Act.


But in times of intense social struggle the political floods run swift and capricious. By the summer of 1966, it is urban uprisings, "Black militancy," and the surging power of a "white backlash" that chiefly concern northern pundits and editors. …


Stokely Carmichael leveled this indictment against the mainstream press after the March had concluded.


I mean it's passing strange how just about everything I've read about the march completely miss the point. ... It's more what they didn't report, what they couldn't see, didn't see, or more likely, didn't want to see. Or equally what they were looking for and what they wanted to see. Hey, we read that the Deacons were there with (oh, horrors) guns. But after Meredith, no one else got shot and nobody was killed on our march. We read that whites were excluded. Not true. The [white] "leaders" weren't invited but quite a few white supporters did march. We read that the numbers were down, meaning that support had "waned," but not that thousands of black folk turned out along the way, and that almost five thousand of them registered to vote in Mississippi for the first time. ...


What we miss in nearly all historical accounts is the most important aspect. The incredible spirit of self-reliance, of taking responsibility, of taking courage, which local people demonstrated. That it really had become for all those local people their real march against fear. Somehow that got missed ... What the press saw, or thought it saw and reported stridently, and what has subsequently been recycled in second and third drafts of history, is that young militants turned on a beleaguered Dr. King. That an ideological struggle took place between SCLC and SNCC, between Dr. King and the "young firebrand" Carmichael. Gimme a break. That's not how it went. No way (March 1-2).


Away from the March, because of the March, one black man was in fact killed.


… down in Adams County 250 miles to the south, Ku Klux Klansmen Ernest Avants, Claude Fuller, and James Jones have a plan. They want to lure Martin Luther King to Natchez where they intend to assassinate him. On June 19th, the three white men go to the home of Ben Chester White, an elderly Afro-American man who has never participated in Freedom Movement activities. They say they want to hire him to help look for a missing dog. They drive him out to the low bridge over Pretty Creek and force him out of the car at gunpoint.


As the three Klansmen fire 17 bullets into him, White cries out, "Oh, Lord. What have I done to deserve this!" They toss his lifeless body into the water.

Their scheme quickly goes awry. It's three days before White's corpse is discovered, and Dr. King is up in Chicago unable to leave the intensifying open housing campaign. And in their orgy of gunfire, the Klansmen had carelessly peppered their own car with bullet holes. To hide the evidence they set the vehicle on fire in a remote spot, but it's soon found and linked to James Jones the registered owner. He's picked up by the police, fails a lie-detector test and then confesses his role, "His brains, his brains. When we shot him, his brains went all over. Fuller shot him with a machine gun, and Avants blowed his head off."


When Jones is put on trial in 1967, his confession and repentance is read to the jury of 9 whites and 3 Blacks. The jury deadlocks, the white jurors vote for acquittal, the Black jurors vote for conviction. Though Avants had told the FBI, "Yeah, I shot that nigger. I blew his head off with a shotgun," he is acquitted outright in his trial because his lawyer argues that it was Fuller who fired the fatal shot. State authorities decide not to try Fuller because he has arthritis and ulcers and trying a sick man would be quite unkind (Murder 1).


150 marchers continue south from Como on the 10th. Five miles down the road is the tiny town of Sardis where 100 local Blacks join the trek towards Batesville 10 miles further on.
…
The stores and businesses around the Batesville town square are owned by whites and all of them are closed, locked, and guarded by helmeted police as some 500 marchers turn off Highway-51 to proudly defy the hostile glares of more than a thousand antagonistic whites. They cross the broad square and continue on to Coleman Chapel AME Zion Church. There a feast of barbecue sandwiches, fried chicken, vegetables, cornbread, and cake await them, cooked up by Black women working in hot kitchens as their community's contribution to the Freedom Movement. A large tent has finally been acquired for the marchers, and after a spirited mass meeting they bed down for the night, curtains discreetly dividing the tent into separate men's and women's sections.


On Saturday morning June 11, the Meredith marchers form up at Coleman Chapel and then march down Panola Ave to the old Illinois Central railroad depot near the courthouse on the square. There they join hundreds of local Blacks for a voter registration rally — old men and women, working adults, and enthusiastic teenagers. For days SNCC & CORE organizers have been canvassing door-to-door and up and down the dusty dirt roads in rural areas encouraging unregistered Blacks to use the presence of the marchers to defy intimidation by registering. The rally is large, enthusiastic, and filled with spirited singing.


Saturday is shopping day in the South, and hostile whites in the town square observe the protesting Blacks with grim faces. The KKK distributes hate literature, teenagers heckle and wave Confederate battle flags, and riot equipped State Troopers glower.


With the attention of the national press and Justice Department observers now focused on Panola County, the power-structure refrains from halting either the march or the rally — though normally Black protests are quickly and brutally suppressed with clubs, arrests and police dogs. Nor do they impede or harass the Afro-Americans lining up to register. Their strategy is to ease the marchers out of town without publicity or drawing federal scrutiny — and then return immediately to business as usual (Batesville 1-2).


That Saturday afternoon, the march continues down Highway-51, covering seven miles from Batesville to Pope, then on Sunday 10 miles from Pope to Enid Dam. By now, the basic pattern has been set — protesters marching down Highway-51 from town to town, organizers working the surrounding area, evening mass meetings wherever the march halts for the night, and voter registration rallies in the courthouse towns.


MCHR [Medical Committee for Human Rights, a group of American health care professionals that initially organized in June 1964 to provide medical care for civil rights workers, community activists, and summer volunteers working in Mississippi during the "Freedom Summer" project] nurses and health workers accompany the marchers — some in vehicles, others walking the line with tan first-aid satchels slung over their shoulders. They urge marchers to stay hydrated and distribute salt tablets, tend to blisters, heat rash and insect bites, wrap sprains, and respond to the multi-varied psychosomatic symptoms of intense and pervasive fear. They also watch for sunstroke and try to dissuade ailing and infirm marchers from hiking in the hot sun — usually with little success. MCHR is a sponsoring organization of the march and from its New York headquarters it mobilizes donations, supplies and volunteer medical professional from its dozen or more chapters. Former Tougaloo activist Joyce Ladner and white nurse Phyllis Cunningham coordinate from the MCHR office in Jackson, sending gauze, bandages, sunscreen, and antiseptic north up Highway-51.


A hard core of activists are committed to marching all the way to the Mississippi Capitol building in Jackson. On any given day they are joined by local Afro-Americans and out-of-town supporters who march for a few hours or a few days. On some days, march numbers might vary between 100-150, on others it might grow to 350-400 or so. Numbers are higher on weekends after supporters with workaday jobs drive in from distant areas on Friday night. On weekdays the proportion of whites on the line is usually somewhere between 10-15%, when weekend bus loads from the north arrive that might increase to as high as 30% on Saturdays and Sundays.
On Monday June 13, 200 marchers head south from Enid Dam. This is Klan country as messages scrawled on walls and pavement attest. …


On most days, the distance marched is determined more by where a campsite and church for the mass meeting can be found than by the endurance and speed of the marchers. No campsite has been found for this stretch, so marchers make about half the distance to Grenada before being ferried back to the tents at Enid Dam. On Tuesday they resume the march from where they [had] stopped in the wilderness of Yalabousha County.


Each evening the march leaders meet to plan (and argue) tactics, strategy and politics. King, McKissick, Carmichael, plus a shifting miscellany of other organizational leaders and local activists participate. Among them is a spy for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (SovCom) known to them as "Informant X" …


The SovCom is the state's secretive political-police agency. Charged with destroying the Freedom Movement and maintaining segregation, it gathers information on civil rights activists and organizations and passes it on to the State Troopers, local law enforcement, the White Citizens Council, and from them to the Ku Klux Klan. It also spreads disinformation and disruption. …


Freedom Movement leaders and organizers, however, are well accustomed to living and working under close scrutiny. If there were no "Informant X" there would be an "Informant Y," along with bugs and taps and other forms of surveillance. So the main victims of such snitches are local folk who are identified to SovCom and then targeted by the White Citizens Council for economic retaliation — firings, evictions, foreclosures, boycotts and in some cases violent KKK terrorism.


Some of Informant X's reports describe the ongoing disputes and rivalry between SNCC & CORE field workers and SCLC staff — particularly SCLC's Executive Staff. Mostly young, all passionately committed to both the Freedom Movement and their respective organizations, SNCC, CORE, and SCLC folk verbally jostle and debate, challenge and disparage each other.


In part, this represents the sort of group-solidarity and competition so typical of young men. But the activists are also genuinely divided by real and substantive issues. SNCC and CORE are egalitarian, SCLC is hierarchical. Some SNCC members mock and disparage Dr. King, referring to him as "De Lawd," a snide disrespect that infuriates some in SCLC (though King himself does not take offense).
…

SNCC and CORE are focused on deep community organizing while SCLC's primary strategy is influencing public opinion and government policy through nonviolent protest — which CORE & SNCC workers see as disruptive to their organizing. In Alabama and elsewhere, SNCC is organizing independent political parties separate from, and opposed to, the Democratic Party, while SCLC is supporting Afro-American participation in and support for the Democrats — which means that SNCC and SCLC are supporting rival Black candidates running for the same offices.


Yet respect toward rival activists does exist.


I remember a great deal about that march with great satisfaction and pride. But the one thing that absolutely stands out about that campaign is the way our relationship with Dr. King deepened during the days we spent together on that march. In fact, the fondest memories I cherish of Dr. King come from that time. We'd always respected him, but this is when I, and a lot of other SNCC folk, came to really know him. I know Cleve [Sellers], Ralph [Featherstone], Stanley [Wise], and others felt that way too. — Stokely Carmichael, SNCC


Though the SovCom and the mass media make much of these internal divisions — and in fact exacerbate them — the March's internal tensions are trivial compared to the hostility, antagonism, threats, and violence from Mississippi whites.


Again, Stokely Carmichael narrates.


By day and by night the harassment never stopped, ceaseless. And, of course, the state troopers were a joke. They intervened only when some of our people were about to retaliate. All day, man, passing pickup trucks and cars would veer over, speed up, and zoom by, inches from where our people were walking. Folks had to jump off the highway. Not once did the troopers issue a ticket or a warning, not once. ... Then at night when we pitched the tents, crowds of armed whites would gather close as they could get and shout insults and threats. The [March] leaders would ask the cops to disperse them or move them back. That never happened.


Add to that, every night when the voter registration teams reported in, more harassment. In these little towns they were stoned with rocks, bottles, what have you. They be followed by groups with guns and clubs swearing to kill them. Cars veering over at them, chasing them down the highway. Those teams went through hell, man, yet they registered a lot of folks. But it was nerve-racking and you'd have folks saying the teams should be allowed to carry weapons. Before someone got killed. But the leadership counseled restraint, nonviolent discipline. But the debate went on ... inside the tents every night. (Marching Down 1-4).


Grenada is the halfway point between Memphis and Jackson and at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 14, the Meredith Mississippi March Against Fear — and with it, the 20th Century — comes striding down Highway-51 into Grenada. No one knows what to expect (Grenada 2).


Works cited:

“Batesville Mississippi, June 10-11.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...

“Grenada Mississippi, June 14.” History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


“The March and the Media.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


“Marching Down Highway-51, June 10-13.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


“Marching through Mississippi, June 8-9.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


“Meredith March.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/meredi...


“Murder of Ben Chester White, June 10.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


Risen, Clay. “The Birth of Black Power.” Chapter 16: A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby. June 2, 2016. Web. https://chapter16.org/the-birth-of-bl...

Access this map to follow the direction of the Meredith March. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mmm_map.htm


As you drive through Grenada's well paved, tree-shaded, streets past red-brick homes and lush green lawns you know you are in Grenada's white world. Grenada's Negro world exists on dusty dirt roads, with small, weather-beaten "shotgun" shacks jam crammed side by side into every available inch of land. Negroes still sit in the rear of the four Greyhound busses that briefly pause each day at the bus depot. White women work behind the desks and cash registers of downtown Grenada, Negro women push the mops and scrub the floors. The median income for Black families is $1401 (equal to about $10,700 in 2018) and the great majority of them eke out livings below the federal poverty line. For whites the median income is around $4300 (equal to about $32,800 in 2018), comfortably above the poverty line.


Grenada County has always been a segregation stronghold. Few Afro-Americans are registered to vote, and fewer still dare cast ballots. Of 4300 eligible Blacks only 135 (3%) are registered while white registration is almost 95%. Over the previous century there have been a number of lynchings — four in one day in 1885. Blacks don't get "uppity" in Grenada, not if they want to stay. There has never been any significant Civil Rights Movement activity in the county, it was considered too tough a nut to crack. The NAACP is moribund, Freedom Summer did not touch Grenada, and an organizing effort by SNCC in 1965 was swiftly suppressed.


In June of 1966 Grenada still lives as if it is 1886.Two years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, every aspect of life, from lunch counters to the public swimming pool to the school system still remain completely segregated. Blacks are not permitted to enter or use the library, nor can they obtain jobs at the federal Post Office (Grenada 1).


Enter the Meredith marchers against fear. One man, who worked for a company that did repair work on Highway 51 near Grenada, said they were told to stop work for three hours to let the marchers pass. That says something about the size of the March, long before it reached Jackson. He said he “was scared to death.” When asked why, he said he was “scared those white folks were going to start shooting.” He crystallized for me [his interviewer] the magnitude of the risks the marchers were taking by exercising their basic rights (Sibley 3).


Cleveland Sellers of SNCC, interviewed by Eyes on the Prize in 1988, emphasized the drawing power of Martin Luther King. Jr.


Ah, one of the things that was happening along the way was that Black folk would come out to see Martin King. They'd heard about him. They had never seen him. Thought they would never, ever see him. And … it was a good feeling. Because they came to touch the hem of the garment. And I think in a lot of instances Martin was kind of embarrassed by it. Because they would literally kiss his feet and bring him something, a drink of water, an apple, an orange or something. … They could not allow this opportunity to pass them by. Martin Luther King was going to be walking down the street and they would come from 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 miles away just to be able to see him. And … there would be groups along the highways of just sharecroppers and … poor people …And … there were a number of Whites who would come out also to see Martin Luther King make that pilgrimage down the highway (Interview 8).

Clapping hands and singing loud, some 200 spirited marchers cross over the Yalabousha River bridge. … The marchers swing left on to Pearl Street and head downtown for the courthouse on the square. One of them is 71 year-old Nannie Washburn in an old sunbonnet, a white sharecropper's daughter from Georgia she had marched all the way from Selma to Montgomery the previous year. Vincent Young, an Afro-American bus driver from Brooklyn NY carries a "No Viet Cong Ever Called Me Nigger" sign.


Grenada's white power structure has adopted Batesville's strategy for handling this emergency — make promises and provide no pretext or reason for continued protest. See to it that these "outside" marchers have no issues to demonstrate about and assume that local Afro-Americans will "stay in their place." As City Manager John McEachin explains to a reporter, "All we want is to get these people through town and out of here. Good niggers don't want anything to do with this march. And there are more good niggers than sorry niggers."


McEachin's plan fails. The response of Grenada's Afro-American community is overwhelming, far more powerful than at any previous stop. A surge of local Blacks — women, men, young, old — come off their porches and pour out of their shanty shacks to join the march as it moves up Pearl Street. So many that an amazed State Trooper estimates to a reporter that, "About a mile of niggers" are marching up towards the town square.


Meredith Marchers and Grenadan Blacks rally on the square across from the courthouse. Robert Green of SCLC places a little American flag on the Confederate War Memorial, "We're tired of Confederate flags," he tells the crowd. "Give me the flag of the United States, the flag of freedom!"


Green's action infuriates the big crowd of white onlookers. To them, placing an American flag on a Confederate memorial is a "desecration." Up in Washington DC, Mississippi Senator James Eastland responds to Green's audacity from the well of the Senate by asserting, "I would not be surprised if Martin Luther King and these agitators next desecrate the graves of Confederate soldiers and drag their remains through the streets."

After the rally, Afro-Americans line up at the courthouse to be registered by four Afro-American registrars who have been temporarily hired by the county. When the Civil Rights Act became law in 1964 the courthouse toilets were relabeled from White and Colored to #1 and #2, though, of course, any Colored person who dared use #1 would quickly suffer the consequences. Now, grinning Black citizens make use of #1 for the first time in their lives. White onlookers and courthouse officials seethe in fury.


Later that evening, Fannie Lou Hamer leads the mass meeting in freedom songs and Dr. King tells them, "Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.” Afterwards, the weary Meredith marchers bed down in the men's and women's tents that Grenada officials have allowed them to set up on the playground of the Willie Wilson Colored Elementary school as part of McEachin's plan to quietly ease the march through Grenada without sparking unrest among local Blacks. When the march continues on its way the following day, several members of SCLC's field staff remain behind to continue the voter registration drive and within a few days some 1300 Afro-Americans are registered, many times the number of Black voters in the county before the Meredith March arrived.


But the Afro-American registrars are quickly fired and the little American flag placed on the Confederate memorial is torn down by enraged whites. The power structure immediately rescinds all of the promises they had made in response to the march, including desegregation of public facilities as required by the Civil Rights Act — a law that clearly has not yet come to Grenada, Mississippi. It's then discovered that more than 700 of those just registered at the courthouse have been tricked. By some mysterious quirk of local law, all residents of Grenada town have to be given a slip of paper by the registrars at the courthouse which they then must take to the City Hall so that they can vote in city elections. No one was given those slips, or informed that they had to register twice, so they have no vote in municipal elections.


The SCLC organizers who remain behind continue efforts at voter registration and begin helping local leaders build an ongoing movement. But the reporters and TV cameras have followed the Meredith March out of town and Grenada quickly reverts to type. Black SCLC staff members are arrested for the crime of sitting in the "white" section of the Grenada Theater. Police and sheriffs deputies return to policies of intimidation and retaliation and newly registered Afro-American voters are fired and evicted. But now that Grenada's Black community has tasted freedom they're determined not to back down. In a well-attended mass meeting they vote to form the Grenada County Freedom Movement and affiliate with SCLC. For the following five months they mount one of the longest-sustained, most brutally attacked, and consistently courageous direct action movements of the 1960s (Grenada 2-4).

Led by Mrs. Hamer, the march leaves Grenada on Wednesday morning. But instead of continuing south down Highway-51 as Meredith had originally planned, it swings west towards Greenwood and the Mississippi Delta. The Delta is the state's Afro-American heartland and most of its counties and towns have Black majorities. South of Grenada, Highway-51 skirts the Delta to the east, traversing sparsely populated hill country. SNCC wants the march to cross the Delta counties where they have been organizing since 1962. CORE prefers that the route remain on Highway-51 which will bring it through Madison County and the town of Canton which has long been the center of their work.

SCLC's priority is for the march to reach Jackson as quickly as possible where they hope a massive protest rally will spur passage of the new civil rights bill which is facing stiff opposition in Congress. SCLC is also footing the largest portion of march expenses, though like SNCC and CORE they are essentially broke. White-owned businesses won't extend credit to CORE or SNCC, but some will sell or rent to SCLC on credit. Or, more accurately, they'll extend credit to Martin Luther King because they trust him to make sure they'll eventually get paid. Costs for truck and tent rentals, food, gas, and phone bills are mounting higher every day and a longer march means more debt that SCLC will have to pay off. Yet to the dismay of some on SCLC's Executive Staff, King agrees to extend the march through the Delta and then return to Highway-51 through Madison County where CORE has its base.


Greenwood, Mississippi, population 20,000, is the seat of Leflore County, population 47,000 in 1960. The town is roughly half Black, half white, but in the county Afro-Americans outnumber whites by almost two to one.


Greenwood is home to some of the most ruthless racists in the Deep South, one of whom is Byron de la Beckwith, who assassinated Medgar Evers in 1963. There's a plaque in the police commissioner's office honoring "Tiger," a police attack-dog who savaged Afro-American men, women, and children who were peacefully marching for voting rights three years earlier. "We killed two-month-old Indian babies to take this country, and they want to give it away to the niggers," commented one local white segregationist at the time.


Greenwood and Leflore County are the heartland of "King Cotton" country. Some 800,000 bales pass through Greenwood each year. From time immemorial the plantations have been worked by Afro-American hand-labor — first as slaves and then as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and day-laborers precariously surviving conditions not that different from what was endured by their slave ancestors. Now with the rise of the Freedom Movement, the White Citizens Council has been working with landowners to replace Black field-hands with machines so they can be evicted. For Mississippi's white power-structure the new strategy is "Negro-removal" — driving Afro-Americans out before they become a voting majority.

…

By 1966, an estimated two-thirds of the Delta's former cotton labor force is now unemployed. Afro-Americans who remain in the area endure grinding poverty and unyielding oppression. According to the 1960 Census, annual median income for rural Blacks in the Delta is $452 (equal to $3,500 in 2018). The cracks in their wood plank "shotgun shacks" are patched with cardboard and old license plates. Few of them have any form of plumbing or running water. Their children suffer from malnutrition and lack of health care. They barely survive on the surplus "commodity" food supplies that the federal government distributes — when it's not blocked by white authorities.

…

It takes two days, Wednesday and Thursday, for the marchers to cover the 40 mile stretch between Grenada and Greenwood. As the march moves west into the Delta, teams of organizers guarded by the Deacons travel the dusty back roads and the dirt streets of Black communities, canvassing door to door in counties like Bolivar, Coahoma, Leflore, Quitman, Sunflower, and Tallahatchie that SNCC organizers and summer volunteers had worked in previous years.
“Up to now many of these towns were too hot to touch. But the people are moving with us now — and even those who don't register this week are at least beginning to think about it for the first time.” — Fannie Lou Hamer, SNCC/MFDP

…


In Greenwood later that afternoon, the advance crew begins setting up the tents on the grounds of Stone Street Elementary School which is empty for summer vacation. In Grenada and Holcomb the march had been allowed to use Colored schoolyards, but Greenwood's all-white school board denies permission. Cops order the crew to leave.

Stokely arrives and demands that they be allowed to use public land maintained by Afro-American taxpayers. "We are the people and it belongs to us," argue the activists. When they persist, Carmichael along with Bruce Baines of CORE and Bob Smith of SNCC are arrested and hauled off to jail. The march halts just inside the Leflore County line a few miles north of Greenwood so that the marchers can be quickly driven into town to reinforce the tent crew. Vehicles hauling the marchers and their tents and supplies circle through the Black community until they come to Broad Street Park which is across the street from the charred rubble of what had once been a SNCC office before the Klan torched it. They drive onto the softball field and begin erecting the tents to cheers and approval of a gathering crowd.


Gripping their hardwood clubs, cops surround the park, but the crowd isn't intimidated. George Raymond of CORE shouts, "I don't care what the white people of Greenwood say, we're going to stay in this park tonight." And Robert Green of SCLC asks the Black onlookers, "If any of us have to go to jail we want all of Greenwood to go. Are you with us?" People roar their approval. Tension builds as the camp is set up while the police hover on the verge of violence. The white power-structure backs down. They decide a violent confrontation and costly mass arrests broadcast to the nation isn't in their interests. Greenwood Chief of Police Curtis Larry suddenly becomes friendly and cooperative and the three arrested at Stone Street School are released on low bail.

Though the tents are allowed and violence avoided (for now) the fundamental issue remains unresolved — whites, and whites alone, determine how public property and tax-supported resources are used or denied. Afro-American taxpayers and Black leaders have no power or influence though they are half the population in the city and two-thirds in the county.


Meanwhile, the field organizers canvassing door-to-door find the going hard. Cops aggressively tail them to intimidate the local Afro-Americans they meet with. Everyone knows how the information flows — from police to White Citizen Council and thence to employers, landlords, and businesses. Everyone knows that if they are seen talking to the "freedom riders" they face loss of job and eviction. And for those who own their own land or homes, there's termination of phone, gas, electricity, and other necessities (Greenwood 1-3).


For some time there's been discussion among SNCC staff on the march over when (or whether) to publicly proclaim a call for "Black Power" by using the slogan in front of the national press. Field organizer Willie Ricks urges Stokely to "Drop it now" at the evening rally in Broad Street Park. With Dr. King in Chicago, Stokely is the last speaker after Floyd McKissick and local Movement leaders (Cry 1).


Carmichael faced an agitated crowd of six hundred. "This is the 27th time I have been arrested," he began, "and I ain't going to jail no more!" He said Negroes should stay home from Vietnam and fight for black power in Greenwood. "We want black power!" he shouted five times, jabbing his forefinger downward in the air. "That's right. That's what we want, black power. We don't have to be ashamed of it. We have stayed here. We have begged the president. We've begged the federal government-that's all we've been doing, begging and begging. It's time we stand up and take over. Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt and the mess. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell 'em. What do you want?"


The crowd shouted, "Black Power!" Willie Ricks sprang up to help lead thunderous rounds of call and response: "What do you want?" "Black Power" (Garrow 6).

Cleveland Sellers of SNCC recalled:


When Stokely moved forward to speak, the crowd greeted him with a huge roar. He acknowledged his reception with a raised arm and clenched fist. Realizing that he was in his element, Stokely let it all hang out. "This is the 27th time I have been arrested — and I ain't going to jail no more!" The crowd exploded into cheers and clapping. "The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin' us is to take over. We been saying "freedom" for six years and we ain't got nothin.' What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!" The crowd was right with him. They picked up his thoughts immediately. "BLACK POWER!" they roared in unison.

Jumping to the platform with Stokely, ["Willie Ricks] yelled to crowd,
"What do you want?" "BLACK POWER!"
"What do you want?" "BLACK POWER!"
"What do you want?"
"BLACK POWER!! BLACK POWER!!! BLACK POWER!!"


CORE’s Floyd McKissick had this to say about the expression:


… it is a drive to mobilize the Black communities of this country in a monumental effort to remove the basic causes of alienation, frustration, despair, low self-esteem and hopelessness. ...

I think it scared people because they did not understand, they could not subtract violence from power. They could only see power as having a violent instrument accompanying it. In the last analysis, it was a question of how Black Power would be defined. And it was never really defined. …


Among local Afro-Americans, reaction to the call for Black Power is immediate, powerful, and overwhelmingly positive. The reaction from Freedom Movement activists and out-of-state marchers is more mixed …
…
Some Blacks, including some of the northern Afro-Americans who had come down to participate in the march, interpret "Black Power" less as a matter of political and economic power and in varying degrees more as an endorsement of nationalism or separatism, as a rejection of integration as a goal, as a rejection of any cooperation or even friendship with white supporters, as a repudiation of tactical nonviolence, and as a call for retaliatory violence against whites and "burn baby burn" urban uprisings.


Some, though not all, of the white marchers experience the "Black Power" cry as hostile to them personally. A white activist [David Dawley] who had come down from Michigan to join the march later recalled:


“Everyone together was thundering, ‘Black Power, Black Power.’ And that was chilling. That was frightening. ... Suddenly I felt threatened. It seemed like a division between black and white. It seemed like a hit on well-intentioned northern whites like me, that the message from Willie Ricks was ‘Go home, white boy, we don't need you.’ Around the tents [later that day] after listening to Willie Ricks, the atmosphere was clearly different. There was a surface of more anger and more hostility. There was a release of more hostility toward whites. Suddenly, I was a ‘honky,’ not ‘David.’"


Outside of Mississippi, many prominent Afro-Americans fiercely condemn the Black Power slogan. At the NAACP's national convention in Los Angeles, Roy Wilkins condemns it as "...the father of hatred and the mother of violence." Whitney Young of the Urban League concurs, claiming that Black Power is "...indistinguishable from the bigotry of [Senators] Bilbo, Talmadge, and Eastland. Most elected Afro-American officials and the most important Black religious leaders in the North echo similar anti-Black Power sentiments.


Martin Luther King, Jr. eventually defined Black Power as “a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals. … Black Power is also a call for the pooling of black financial resources to achieve economic security. If Black Power means the development of this kind of strength within the Negro community, then it is a quest for basic, necessary, legitimate power.”


For people who had been crushed so long by white power and who had been taught that black was degrading, ["Black Power"] had a ready appeal. Immediately, however, I had reservations about its use. I had the deep feeling that it was an unfortunate choice of words for a slogan. Moreover, I saw it bringing about division within the ranks of the marchers. For a day or two there was fierce competition between those who were wedded to the Black Power slogan and those wedded to Freedom Now. Speakers on each side sought desperately to get the crowds to chant their slogan the loudest. ... We must use every constructive means to amass economic and political power. This is the kind of legitimate power we need. We must work to build racial pride and refute the notion that black is evil and ugly. But this must come through a program, not merely though a slogan (Cry 2-4).

The following day, Friday the 17th, there's large voter-registration march and rally led by Dr. King and Stokely. More than 600 people march from the Broad Street Park encampment to the Leflore County Courthouse — a gray stone building in the classic southern mode with magnolia trees, emerald lawn, and elaborate Confederate monument. A line of cops confine the marchers to the sidewalk, forbidding them the lawn on which stands their sacred altar to slain slaveholders. The white power- structure, white voters, and white lawmen are all grimly determined to protect their memorial from "desecration" by any American flag or "defilement" by the touch of Black hands as had occurred so recently in Grenada. Of course, Black hands touch the monument all the time, Afro- Americans do the menial work of regularly cleaning it, but their labor is in service to white-supremacy rather than in defiance of it.


Dr. King insists on the Black community's right to hold a rally and after a brief confrontation it's held on the courthouse steps while the police continue to guard the statue. County officials refuse to register any Afro-American voters — that office is "closed" — but 40 new voters are added to the rolls by federal registrars working out of the U.S. Post Office under the Voting Rights Act. King then drives over to Winona, the seat of Montgomery County for a previously scheduled registration rally where close to 100 new voters are registered.


Meanwhile, 150 or so marchers head west from Greenwood on US-82. Hostile whites waving Confederate battle flags and singing KKK songs harass them as they march. Byron de la Beckwith, the self-proclaimed assassin of Medgar Evers, drives slowly past the line of marchers so that all can see him. None of the marchers are intimidated but some have to be restrained from attacking his car and thereby giving the cops an excuse to assault the march.


As evening falls, the marcher halt at the junction with State Route 7 leading south to Itta Bena, home of Mississippi Valley State College (today, University), a segregated Black college. They had intended to camp on its grounds, but the president is beholden to the white power structure for both his budget and his position so he denies permission to use the campus.


A sharp and acrimonious debate erupts among the marchers over how to respond. The most militant demand bold defiance, forcing a confrontation with the cops and troopers over the right to use public property that Black taxes paid for. Others oppose provoking a violent battle with lawmen that cannot possibly be won — a fight that will result in injuries and arrests at a time when there are no funds to bail large numbers of marchers out of jail. Local movement leaders argue that bloodied heads and prison terms for trespass on college property will reinforce fear and intimidation among Afro- Americans rather than achieving the "against fear" goal of the march. It's decided to ferry people back to Greenwood and camp there once again for the night (Marching 1).


Works cited:


“The Cry for Black Power, June 16.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


Garrow, David J. “Bearing the Cross.” “The False Memories of Haley Barbour.” Daily Kos.” February 28, 2011. Web. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011...-


“Greenwood Mississippi, June 15-16.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...

“Grenada Mississippi, June 14.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...
“Interview with Cleveland Sellers.” Eyes on the Prize Interviews. October 21, 1988. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eii/eiiweb...

“Marching through the Delta, June 17-20.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


Sibley, Roslind McCoy. “James Meredith March Route: 50th Anniversary Review.” 50th Anniversary Commemoration of the March Against Fear Saturday 6.25.66. July 22, 2016. Web. https://mscivilrightsveterans.com/upl...

Access this map to follow the direction of the Meredith March. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mmm_map.htm


On Saturday, June 25, freedom marchers from all over the nation begin arriving at Tougaloo College for Sunday's final leg to the Capitol building. Tougaloo is a small private school founded after the Civil War by the American Missionary Association. It's a beacon of hope for Mississippi Afro-Americans and one of the very few Historically Black Colleges and Universities to courageously stand with the Freedom Movement. Students expelled from other colleges because of their civil rights activity are made welcome there and the campus has long been a center of activism, research, and education.

…

All through the day protesters arriving by car, bus, train and plane settle in at Tougaloo for the morrow's march while discussions and debates over Black Power, nonviolence, and the role of whites continue unabated. Those with tear gas residue still on their skin and clothes from the Canton attack finally get to use showers in the gym and the campus laundry. Entrepreneurs peddle pins and pennants and SNCC militants affix "We're the Greatest" bumper stickers to parked cars.

As was the case with the last night of the Selma to Montgomery March, Harry Belafonte pulls together a star-studded concert-rally on the college football field. Thousands from Jackson's Afro-American community are blocked from approaching the campus by Hinds County sheriffs but many others make it through and almost 10,000 cheer Sammy Davis, Rafer Johnson, and stars of stage and screen. James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, shouts "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud!" When he's told that Brown's about to perform, Dr. King bolts from interminable discussions between SCLC, SNCC, and CORE staff over who will pay for this or that, saying, "I'm sorry y'all, James Brown is on. I'm gone."

… If the hoped-for target of 10,000 protesters is to be reached, the bulk of them will have to come from Jackson's Afro-American community. Nightly mass meetings are being held, and working out of temporary offices at Pratt Memorial Methodist Church, a broad coalition of Jackson groups is mobilizing supporters to open their homes to feed, house, and ferry out-of-town marchers, raise funds and donate goods, and above all join the march as it moves through the city after church services.

Sunday morning, June 26, is sun-bright and heavy with muggy heat as the marchers begin forming up on the Tougaloo Campus at the gate. MCHR medical volunteers hand out sunblock and salt tablets. An hour before noon, thousands step off onto County Line Road for the final stretch of the Meredith Mississippi March Against Fear. Led by Meredith, McKissick, Carmichael and King, they soon turn south on Highway-51 headed for the heart of Jackson and the Mississippi Capitol building.

Bruce Hartford observed:

No longer were we marching on the edge of the road, now we had a permit and we filled the lanes. At first we were mostly marching through Afro-American neighborhoods where local Black folk waved, cheered, and handed out glasses of cool water and cold lemonade while our numbers steadily grew. The hot sun beat down out of a cloudless sky and it was so sweltering hot and muggy it felt like we were in a sauna. The heat was making me woozy. I'd endured hot days in Alabama but this was way worse — maybe because of lack of sleep and tension or perhaps residual effects of the tear gas. I felt like I might pass out and the salt tablets weren't helping.

…

At eight designated spots in Black neighborhoods, throngs of Afro-Americans in their Sunday church clothes wait impatiently to join the march as it proceeds down State Street (US-51). A brass band serenades one group as they share glasses of cool lemonade and cans of cold beer. The line of 5000 or so who march out of Tougaloo before noon doubles and then continues to swell as Black folk watching from the sidewalk step off the curb and into the line.

A law-enforcement army has been mobilized in handle the march. Almost all of the 300 State Troopers are on duty, as are 450 police from various jurisdictions and most of the Jackson city cops. … their hostility is palpable.

…

In a reflection of the white power-structure's split between hardline segregationists and business-oriented moderates, Jackson's mayor, the city's main newspaper and even the Jackson Citizens Council all call for calm. Governor Johnson urges whites to ignore the march, saying, "They will inflict their hate and hostility on other Americans as they sow strife and discord across this nation, which needs to be united behind the brave men who are following our flag in Vietnam."

For their part, die-hard segregationists work to foment opposition to the march, calling on "all southern Christian people to fly their Confederate flags." As a white-supremacist explains to a reporter for Britain's Guardian newspaper: the Civil Rights Movement is run by Communists, puts millions in Martin Luther King's pocket, lies about Black people (who have equal rights, but are too lazy to hold steady jobs), and itself orchestrated the shooting of James Meredith for publicity purposes.

As the marchers continue down State Street towards the downtown business district they pass through a neighborhood of poor and working class whites. Here they are met with hostile crowds shrieking hate and waving Confederate battle flags. "I don't like the niggers, they stink," one racist tells a reporter as others spit at the marchers and give them the finger. White freedom marchers, and particularly white women, are the targets of particular rage with shouted epithets of "nigger-lover," "whore," and sexually explicit jeers about white women and black power.

… by some SNCC and CORE militants who have now turned against nonviolence, a fraction [of the marchers] returns insult for insult, hostility for hostility, and mockery for mockery. In some instances Black marchers dart out of the line to grab a "Stars and Bars" flag from white hands and trample it underfoot or later set it afire at the Capitol. Only when punches start being thrown do the police intervene to break up incipient brawls.

…

There are no objective or reliable estimates for march size. … It's clear, though, that the march represents a massive, overwhelming rejection of Mississippi's racial order. And to white Mississippians it's a stunning repudiation of the oft-quoted claim that other than a few outsiders and malcontents the state's "Nigrahs are happy and content with the way things are."

As the Meredith Marchers in their thousands flow into an eerily empty downtown business district, NAACP activists hand out small American flags as visible rejection of the Confederate emblems still flying from state flagpoles and being waved by hate-shouting racists. A small handful of SNCC militants urge Afro-Americans not to carry the flags, telling them "Those flags don't represent you," but most marchers eagerly take them. In years gone past when protesters had carried U.S. flags the Jackson cops had ripped them from their hands as if to claim that Blacks — even war veterans — had no right to assert themselves as American citizens. Out-of-town supporters also take the flags. One of them is Japanese-American marcher William Hohri who had been imprisoned for years in the Manzanar internment camp as an "enemy alien" during World War II. He later tells an interviewer, "It was the first time in my life that I felt proud to be an American."

A massive police presence surrounds the Mississippi Capitol building. From the moment James Meredith stepped off from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis on June 5th a rally on the Capitol steps had been the goal. But even more so than county courthouses, whites consider the Capitol their sacred ground — a symbol of their supremacy, never to be profaned by Black protesters. Governors are inaugurated on its front steps, ceremonies of white pride and power take place in its halls, and on the expansive tree-shaded plaza in front of the steps stands a large Monument to Women of the Confederacy dedicated to "Our Mothers, Our Wives, Our Sisters, and Our Daughters." For whites, it's unthinkable that Afro-Americans who refuse to acknowledge their "proper place" be allowed to "defile" this monument to sacred white womanhood (though, of course, as is the case with all the other Confederate memorials Black hands regularly clean and maintain it).

But now the white power-structure is in a bind. Their white constituents want the Capitol "protected" from the presence of defiant Blacks, but if they arrest thousands of peaceful marchers … in the glare of national publicity they'll be exposed as the racists that they are, a huge black eye for the state. More importantly, as a practical matter they don't have any place to incarcerate so many prisoners — not even the fairground buildings are big enough — nor do they have funds to feed them.

White constituents demand that tear gas and billy clubs be used to drive protesters from the Capitol grounds — as had been done with the vastly smaller number of demonstrators on the Canton schoolyard. But in Canton the marchers were dispersed into the surrounding Afro-American community, in Jackson 15,000 furious Blacks would be driven into a downtown business district filled with department, jewelry, and liquor stores, big plate-glass windows, and buildings filled with flammable merchandise. A Watts-type spasm of urban arson and looting almost certainly would result — to the intense displeasure of powerful white business leaders.

Freedom Movement leaders are also caught in the mirror image of that same bind. The Meredith Marchers are determined to finish the march at the Capitol and they're in no mood to obey an illegal, unconstitutional limitation on their political right to peaceably assemble and demand redress of grievances. But SCLC, CORE, and SNCC are all flat broke and deeply in debt from the costs already incurred by the march. There's no money to bail out hundreds of arrestees, let-alone thousands or tens of thousands.

If the cops attack the march and disperse the throng into downtown they know there's no hope whatsoever of maintaining nonviolent discipline. When looting and arson break out there's no doubt in anyone's mind that the cops will open fire with all the weapons at their command. Dozens will be killed, hundreds wounded. Hundreds more will be arrested for violent felonies, be tried by all-white juries, and face long prison sentences. And, of course, there will be enormous negative political repercussions if a nonviolent demonstration turns into a violent urban riot — regardless of the provocation.

So a compromise is worked out by Afro-American leaders and white officials. The new "no-protests" law is quietly shelved and not enforced. The marchers are issued a permit to rally on the large Capitol parking lot next to the building. In other words, "at" the Capitol but not on the steps where governors are inaugurated. Nor will marchers be allowed to touch the actual structure itself or approach the white womanhood statue.

The power-structure saves face with white voters by assuring them that "we're gonna make the niggers use the back door." Black leaders stress that the basic demands of a Capitol rally and elimination of the "no-protests" law have been won. Some of the super-militants condemn the compromise and urge marchers to breach the police line around the building but few support them and no attempts to break through the cordon are made.

The throng of marchers flow into the parking lot, crowding thick around a stage improvised from a flatbed truck. Some climb trees for a better view, others flop down to the ground, exhausted by the long hike and enervated by the heat. There is no money for an adequate sound system and only those nearest the truck can hear the speakers. And in contrast to the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 rally at the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery the TV networks give scant coverage to the march and choose not to broadcast any of the speeches.

As is customary for march rallies there are many speakers — far too many in the opinion of some in the audience. Among them, Stokely outlines what he sees as the essence of Black Power: ""We have to stop being ashamed of being black! We have to move to a position where we can feel strength and unity amongst each other from Watts to Harlem, where we won't ever be afraid! And the last thing we have to do is build a power base so strong in this country that it will bring them to their knees every time they mess with us!"

Dr. King refers to his famous I Have a Dream speech, telling the marchers that he's "watched my dreams turn into a nightmare." In a foretelling of the Poor Peoples Campaign to come he speaks of the stark poverty and devastating deprivation in the midst of plenty that he's observed on the march and avows that "I still have a dream this afternoon, a dream that includes integrated schools and an end to "rat-infested slums, a dream that Blacks and whites will live side by side in decent housing, and that "the empty stomachs of Mississippi will be filled" (Marching 1-10).

What valid conclusions can we, the reading public, make about the effects of the Meredith March Against Fear?

Thousands — probably more than 15,000 — Black Mississippians defy generations of intimidation to participate in what becomes the largest protest in the state's history. Local freedom movements in places like Greenwood, Neshoba County, and Canton are re-energized and new ones erupt in Grenada and Yazoo City. While widespread white terrorism continues for some time, 1966 marks the beginning of its eventual decline. And as had been so often been the case before, the Meredith March proves yet again that courage is contagious.

… the white-owned northern mass media pays scant attention, focusing instead on hyping internal divisions and reflecting their own fears and political assumptions about "Black racism" and "Black Power." Shaped and influenced by that mass media, northern public opinion fails to force Washington into action. The Civil Rights Act of 1966 is defeated, and federal government efforts to defend the human and constitution rights of Afro-Americans in the Deep South remains sluggish and half-hearted.

…

While laws and court rulings played significant roles, what ultimately ended legally-enforced segregation and race-based denial of voting rights in the South was the refusal of Afro-Americans to put up with it any longer. Civil rights laws and court rulings had been on the books for decades, but it took individual acts of courage and defiance developing into a mass peoples movement to actually implement and enforce those rules at the local level. All the marches and protests of the era — including the Meredith March — influenced individual Blacks, Afro-American communities, and some southern whites to decisively reject the ways of the past. And taken as a whole, the nonviolent demonstrations across the South prodded Washington into enforcing existing federal law, and convinced the nation to enact newer and more effective legislation. The Meredith March was part of that whole and cannot be assessed separate from it.

For generations, violent terrorism and economic subjugation had suppressed the fundamental human aspirations of nonwhite people. The Freedom Movement as a whole, including the Meredith March, provided the knowledge and tools that people of color used to educate and organize themselves for effective resistance. And where once the oppression inherent in the southern way of life flourished in obscurity, mass protests like the Meredith March broke down both the sense of isolation that discouraged hope and opened up access to allies and support that were vital to the success of local community struggles.

…

Most famously, the Meredith March raised the slogan and concept of "Black Power." Nine months before the Meredith March, the Voting Rights Act had been enacted into law and then slowly began to take effect. Which raised the question of what to do with the ballot once it was achieved? As Courtland Cox of SNCC put it, "The vote is necessary, but not sufficient." The MFDP, political organizations independent of the Democratic Party, freedom labor unions, economic coops, the Poor Peoples Campaign, and Black Power were all efforts to answer the question of, "where do we go from here?"

…

The Meredith March also illustrated the realities and frustrations of exercising Afro-American political power. In the Jim Crow South as it had existed since Reconstruction, white power over Afro-Americans was absolute. It ruled by fiat and dictate without compromise. As Blacks gained the ballot and began demanding political and economic power of their own, white power did not evaporate or disappear. The confrontations in Canton and the maneuvering in Jackson over the Capitol building showed that whites could no longer ignore Afro-American demands and interests — they had to negotiate and compromise, which they hated. But Blacks were not in a position to assume the absolute power that whites had held for so long, they too had to negotiate and compromise which frustrated and embittered some activists. Yet in a democracy, absolute power is an aberration, in the long run the exercise of real political power requires negotiation, maneuver, alliances, and balance (Assessing 1-4).

Here are some of the assessments made by historian Aram Goudsouzian, the chair of the history department at the University of Memphis and author of Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.

The march is an extraordinary story, full of dramatic moments, both uplifting and chilling—including the shooting of James Meredith, the voter registration of a 106-year-old man who had been born a slave, Stokely Carmichael’s unveiling of the slogan “Black Power,” a mob attack in the town of Philadelphia, soaring oratory from Martin Luther King, a brutal tear gassing in Canton, and a climactic 15,000-person march through the streets of Jackson, the largest civil-rights demonstration in Mississippi history.

…

Black communities in small Mississippi towns served the marchers food and lent them land, while local leaders helped coordinate voter registration rallies. The improvised response showed the flexibility of the march’s leaders, who worked together despite their ideological differences. More important, it illustrated that the foundation of the civil-rights movement was the “ordinary” black people—men, women, and children—who sacrificed to serve a greater cause.

…

The Meredith March revealed Martin Luther King at his finest, even as it tested him like never before. He was simultaneously planning an ambitious campaign in Chicago, where he hoped to apply nonviolent tactics to tackle racial barriers in a large Northern city, and serving as the central figure in this three-week march through Mississippi. He was the voice of moderation, balancing the militant impulses of the young radicals, offering statements that framed their quest as a noble ideal that reaffirmed American democracy. But he also spoke to the militants. During the walk through Mississippi, many activists had a chance to meet him and appreciate his character.

Without King, the march would have attracted much less attention from the national media and law enforcement. Moreover, black Mississippians flocked to the demonstration for the opportunity to see King, to hear him, to touch him.

The Meredith March changed King, too. For all the terror he had witnessed in his life, the state of Mississippi in 1966 exposed him to the depths of racist hatred. He later saw that same hate in Chicago, and it molded his evolving radicalism in the last years of his life. Just as important, he encountered people in Mississippi suffering from deep poverty. That experience shaped his vision for what became the Poor People’s Campaign, which compelled him to revisit Memphis in 1968, when he met his end.

Black Power grew out of the civil-rights movement, even as it challenged some of the principles embodied by figures such as Martin Luther King. It reflected existing frustrations about how, despite the passage of civil rights laws, nothing had changed in black people’s daily lives, whether in the South or the North. Black Power, as Carmichael defined it at the time, was about creating unified, independent blocs of black voters, whether in the South Side of Chicago or the Mississippi Delta. It also meant taking pride in black history and culture, while recognizing the linked experiences of dark-skinned people across the globe.

Carmichael turned just twenty-five years old on the Meredith March, and he had just become chairman of SNCC. He was always charismatic and dynamic, but the march transformed him into a national celebrity—an heir of sorts to Malcolm X. He refused to soothe white anxieties, instead addressing the aspirations and anger of many African Americans. He served, by the end of the march, as a human embodiment of Black Power. The media gravitated to him and the slogan, which intensified the devotion of militants, the unease of liberals, and the hatred of conservatives. 7

It was an end because it was the last great march of the civil-rights era. It was the last time the nation would see a coalition of black political organizations launch a sustained mass protest that captured the world’s attention and stimulated debates about black freedom.

It was a beginning because it was the birth of Black Power. Those ideas had been circulating and percolating, but the Meredith March identified it, gave it strength and attention, and built a sense of an emerging movement. When the Black Panthers formed in Oakland later that year, they could embrace the principles and style of Black Power. As a political and cultural movement, it helped define the era that followed.

Most important, though, is that the march was part of a long continuum. Black people were fighting for civil and human rights long before Martin Luther King ever led a bus boycott, and they continued well after he came to Memphis to help some striking garbagemen. It continues now. For those who are interested in creating a better world, the Meredith March can offer both positive and negative lessons (Risen 2, 4-8).

And what of James Meredith? Historian Aram Goudsouzian made this assessment.

James Meredith wanted a “walk” to Jackson, not a “march.” A march involved lots of people, including women and children, engaged in a mass protest. Meredith’s walk was for him and other independent men. He did not wish to endanger or inconvenience black Mississippians. After he was shot, the demonstration grew huge. It also imposed on local communities, veered from his planned route down Highway 51, and featured public debates about black politics. Meredith was furious! From his hospital bed in Memphis, and then while he recuperated in New York, he kept registering his distaste. He returned to Mississippi for the march’s final days, but even then he followed his own course: he abandoned a meeting of march leaders and led his own walk down Highway 51 from Canton to Tougaloo College, following his original plan.

Meredith may be the least understood figure in the American civil-rights movement. He had grandiose visions of destroying the entire system of white supremacy, but he had a strong independent streak, a deep respect for military order, and a traditional sense of manhood. He was a true conservative, in one sense, but he possessed a mystical sense of his destiny to change the world (Risen 3).

Interviewed in 2016, Meredith considered the effort a “total success” in terms of the goal to “change the whole direction” of the movement. Still, the coming of organized (and competing) Civil Rights groups did change the concept of what had started out as a solitary action. “‘Blacks were too scared to do anything, but they came out to greet James Meredith’: That would have been the story in the evening news if I hadn’t gotten myself shot,” he said. “But I got shot and that allowed the movement protest thing to take over then and do their thing” (Waxman 2).

Not to be overlooked, in November 1966, Aubrey Norvell pleaded guilty to assault and battery and was sentenced to two years in prison.



Works cited:

“Assessing the Meredith March.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


“Marching on Jackson, June 25-26.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


Risen, Clay. “The Birth of Black Power.” Chapter 16: A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby. June 2, 2016. Web. https://chapter16.org/the-birth-of-bl...


Waxman, Olivia B. “James Meredith on What Today's Activism Is Missing.” Time. June 6, 2016. Web. http://time.com/4356404/james-meredit...