Harold Titus's Blog, page 21

Civil Rights Events -- Detroit Riots, 1967 -- Racial Hatred

The Detroit Race Riot in Detroit, Michigan in the summer of 1967 was one of the most violent urban revolts in the 20th century. It came as an immediate response to police brutality but underlying conditions including segregated housing and schools and rising black unemployment helped drive the anger of the rioters (Wang 1).

.. the police force was not in line with the demographic makeup of the city. The police force was 95% white, while the city was 40% black. There were approximately 5,500 cops on the police force and only 100 were black.

…

… just hours before the Algiers [Motel] incident, Detroit police officer Jerome Olshove was shot and killed by a looter. A few days earlier, Newark police detective Frederick Toto was killed by a sniper. The police force was on edge. It was made worse by the fact that, over the course of the riots, 2,498 rifles and 38 handguns had been looted from local stores (Detroit 4, 6).

On Sunday evening, July 23, the Detroit Police Vice Squad officers raided an after hours “blind pig,” an unlicensed bar on the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount Avenue in the center of the city’s oldest and poorest black neighborhood. A party at the bar was in progress to celebrate the return of two black servicemen from Vietnam. Although officers had expected a few patrons would be inside they found and arrested all 82 people attending the party. As they were being transported from the scene by police, a crowd of about 200 people gathered outside agitated by rumors that police used excessive force during the 12th Street bar raid. Shortly after 5:00 a.m., an empty bottle was thrown into the rear window of a police car, and then a waste basket was thrown through a storefront window (Wang 1).

It was about 3:45 a.m. July 23, 1967. William Scott, known as Bill, was among a crowd of mostly young African Americans gathering to watch the police hustle club patrons into waiting paddy wagons. He had a particular interest in two of the people being led away.

His father, William Walter Scott II, was the principal owner of the club, an illegal after-hours drinking and gambling joint. His older sister, Wilma, was a cook and waitress. The night was hot and sticky, and the crowd’s initial teasing of the arrestees devolved into raucous goading of police as they became more aggressive, pushing and twisting the arms of the women.

“You don’t have to treat them that way,” Bill Scott yelled. “They can walk. Let them walk, you white sons of bitches.”

By the time the wagons were full, the crowd had swelled, the taunts had grown more hostile and, though police manpower was thin early Sunday, several scout cars responded to the scene. Cops stood at the ready in the middle of 12th Street, billy clubs in hand, forcing the throng back on the sidewalk.

Scott, tall and lean, mounted a car and began to preach to a crowd long accustomed to the harsh tactics of the overwhelmingly white Detroit police in black neighborhoods: “Are we going to let these peckerwood motherf—— come down here any time they want and mess us around?”

“Hell, no!” people yelled back.

Scott walked into an alley and grabbed a bottle, seeking “the pleasure of hitting one in the head, maybe killing him,” he remembers thinking. Making his way into the middle of the crowd for cover, he threw the bottle at a sergeant standing in front of the door.

The missile missed, shattering on the sidewalk. A phalanx of police moved toward the crowd, then backed off. As the paddy wagons drove away, bottles, bricks and sticks flew through the air, smashing the windows of departing police cars. Bill Scott said he felt liberated.

“For the first time in our lives we felt free. Most important, we were right in what we did to the law.”

The rebellion was underway (McGraw 1-2).

At 5:20 a.m. additional police officers were sent to 12th Street to stop the growing violence. By mid-morning looting and window-smashing spread out along 12th Street. As the violence escalated into the afternoon, Detroit Congressman John Conyers climbed atop a car in the middle of 12th Street to address the crowd. As he was speaking, the police informed him that they could not guarantee his safety as he was pelted with bricks and bottles (Wang 2).

After Scott whipped up the crowd, threw the bottle and watched the last paddy wagon drive away, he said he entered the club to find the interior in shambles. The jukebox and wine bottles were broken; even the typewriter he used for his writing had been smashed.

He said he returned to the street and threw a litter basket through the window of a drug store, triggering an alarm and jacking up the adrenalized atmosphere on 12th Street. “I had to destroy something,” he writes.

People slowly entered the drugstore. “I wasn’t even thinking about looting at the time it all started,” Scott writes. “My interest was to strike out at something that was more powerful and more legitimate than me; at the time this was the white store owners.”

He joined others in breaking windows, and mounted a box to play traffic cop, directing drivers along the increasingly unruly street. There were no real police in sight. At one point, a “young diddy-bopper” stopped him on the street and said, “I am so glad you started this thing.”

Scott says he was staggered by the comment, as his actions began to sink in. He felt sick to his stomach, but soon recovered, believing that whatever the motivation of the looters, they shared a lack of respect for the law, “the law that had abused them and their right to live,” he writes (McGraw 15-16).

Around 1:00 p.m. police officers began to report injuries from stones, bottles, and other objects that were thrown at them. When firemen responded to fire alarms, they too were struck with thrown objects. Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh met with city and state leaders at police headquarters and agreed that additional force was needed in order to stop the violence. By 3:00 p.m. 360 police officers began to assemble at the Detroit Armory as the rioting spread from 12th Street to other areas of the city. The fires started during the riot spread rapidly in the afternoon heat and as 25 mile per hour winds began to blow. Even as businesses and homes went up in flames, firemen were increasingly subject to attack by the rioters.

At 5:30 p.m., twelve hours into the riot, Mayor Cavanaugh requested that the National Guard be brought into Detroit to stop the violence. Meanwhile firefighters abandoned an area roughly 100 square blocks in size around 12th Street as the fires raged out of control. The first troops arrived in the city at 7:00 p.m. and 45 minutes later the Mayor instituted a curfew between 9:00 p.m and 5:00 a.m. Seven minutes into the curfew a 16-year-old African American boy was the first gunshot victim (Wang 2).

The origins of the Scott family’s story is a familiar one in Detroit.

William Walter Scott II, the owner of the blind pig and Bill Scott’s father, was born in Georgia and came to Detroit as a child, just as the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the South to a fresh start in northern cities began before World War I. The influx would boost Detroit’s black population seven-fold within a decade as the auto industry transformed the city into an industrial metropolis starving for workers.

When Bill Scott, his sister Wilma and their siblings – Tyrone, Reginald and Charlotte — were young, their father made a good living at Dodge Main and other factories. But between 1947 and 1963 the city’s manufacturing economy hemorrhaged 134,000 jobs, triggering the start of Detroit’s long decline. William Scott lost his factory job, and subsequently the family lost its house.

Unable to find work, William Scott II turned to “the numbers,” the illegal, lottery-like gambling game ubiquitous in black neighborhoods, even as his political activism grew.

He eventually became involved in organizing black political power by training volunteers for local campaigns. His second-floor suite of rooms on 12th Street was officially known as the United Community League for Civic Action. On the night of the 1967 raid, one room contained a wall chart of local precinct delegates. William Scott’s wife, Hazel, worked in the Detroit office of G. Mennen (Soapy) Williams, Michigan’s Democratic governor from 1949 to 1961, who was popular in the black community.

But the elder Scott’s disgust with Detroit’s white political system grew. Years later, he would tell a sociologist studying the riot that political leaders pass legislation “just to control and contain the Negro.”

Mr. Scott did not hide his militancy, or his anger. He fumed at being called “boy” by police and roughly frisked for no apparent reason. In 1973, when Coleman Young was elected Detroit’s first black mayor on a police-reform platform, he told his daughter Wilma, “I can finally get off my knees.”

“All the people have had their revolutions, and we’re the last. It’s something that’s got to come, you can’t stop it. When people get sick and oppressed, they’re gonna riot,” William Scott told the sociologist.

“My father was a survivor,” said Wilma Scott, now 70, who spent more than 40 years as an office worker at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital. “And he was a survivor without being a criminal. Except for the numbers, which he did not feel was a crime, okay?

“To this day, I understand his logic. He was a black man that was determined just to be free. It’s as simple as that. To say he had to depend on a white man for his living – he did not like that. Especially after being in the factory and being laid off” (MGraw 4-6).

At 11:00 p.m. a 45-year-old white man was seen looting a store and was shot by the store owner. Before dawn, four other store looters were shot, one while struggling with the police. As the night wore on, there were reports of deaths by snipers and complaints of sniper fire. Many of these reports were from policemen who were unable to determine the origins of the gunfire.

At 2:00 a.m. Monday morning, 800 State Police Officers and 8,000 National Guardsmen were ordered to the city by Michigan Governor George Romney. They were later augmented by 4,700 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division ordered in by President Lyndon Johnson. With their arrival the looting and arson began to end but there were continuous reports of sniper fire. The sniper attacks stopped only with the end of the violence on Thursday, July 27th. The Mayor lifted the curfew on Tuesday, August 1 and the National Guardsmen left the city (Wang 3).

Bill Scott was born two years after Wilma, in 1948. In his memoir, he describes a bleak childhood of constant moves, being bullied at school and spending lonely days wandering through alleys, looking for useable junk.

He was close to his mother, but she was often hospitalized with heart problems and died when Bill was 14. He said he feared his father, writing that he beat him, though Wilma Scott says she did not witness such violence.

Bill Scott did not see his own early promise. He had trouble learning in school, and thought himself “ugly,” “dull,” “strange,” “useless,” even “mentally retarded.” By age 10, he was unruly and suffering emotional problems. He was sent to the Hawthorn Center, a state-run facility for emotionally-troubled children in Northville, and later to a similar institution, the Boys Republic in Farmington Hills. In his own mind, he wrote, he pretended to be white because, he felt, being black was bad, but white children were considered good.

…

Bill Scott received counseling at the two youth homes and met adults who mentored him. He writes glowingly of both places, and they seemed to help him stabilize.

As he moved into middle school, the unruly boy began to blossom. Scott writes of becoming intellectually curious and aware of the importance of good values: respecting women and elders; obeying the law; refraining from stealing or premarital sex. He began attending church. “I liked the sound of this heaven place,” he wrote.

After a brief, tumultuous stay in a foster home, Scott returned to his father’s temporary home, a three-room apartment near 12th Street .It was in this rapidly changing neighborhood that Bill Scott said he bumped into the reality of being a black man in Detroit. After years in white-run institutions and attending church, his values were “almost in exact opposition to the way my people lived” back on 12th Street.

Because of his polite bearing, he was mocked by neighborhood toughs, who called him “Proper” and “Whitey.” He said he stood out because he was a “decent” person. “I didn’t have processed hair, a rag hanging from my head or dirty clothes,” he writes, “and, most of all, I had the ‘proper thoughts.’”

At Northern High, Scott noted that virtually all the students were black and most of the faculty was white, a recipe for failure, he believed.

He called Northern “a nigger factory” that churned out unschooled students who wanted to learn but were at the mercy of teachers who either didn’t want to teach black students, or didn’t know how.

Test scores showed 9th graders at Northern reading at a sixth-grade level. But Scott was smart and ambitious and determined to attend college, even as his white counselor tried to steer him to vocational courses. At one point, he tried to transfer to a more competitive majority-white city school, but was refused. So he made the best of it, playing drums in the band, lettering in football, learning to pole vault and, in 1966, graduating (McGraw 7-8).

As he moved through his teens, Scott began to face another fact of life for many young black men in the 1960s: the Detroit police.

Scott wrote that he tried to live like a “civilized Negro,” staying active in a middle-class black church. But as he left a church meeting one day when he was 17, cops stopped him for jaywalking across 12th Street. When Scott asked what he had done, he said one of the officers threw him against the scout car and called him “boy.” They gave him a $10 ticket. Scott wrote that he ripped it up in front of them and threw in a trash can next to their car.

Next was a run-in with the department’s notorious Big Four — three plainclothes cops with a uniformed driver in a big car — a unit that cruised precincts and routinely harassed blacks. Walking out of a store, Scott and brothers Tyrone and Reggie were stopped and frisked for no reason, Scott writes. The confrontation ended with Scott shouting, “You can kiss my black ass.” He said police backed off when an angry crowd began to form.

Scott’s racial consciousness continued to grow during a months-long job search in the spring and early summer of 1967 when, despite an uptick in the city’s economy, 25 to 30 percent of black youths between 18 and 24 remained unemployed. Failing to find work, he was forced to drop out of Michigan Lutheran College, a Detroit school he attended before U-M.

The frustrations piled up, along with a growing perception that his fellow church members attended services to “wallow in their own self-hatred” and ask God’s forgiveness “for being black.” He felt like he was pulling himself up by his bootstraps – as society demanded – but getting nowhere.

It was these accumulated grievances, hardly unique to Bill Scott or to blacks in Detroit, that reached a boiling point in the summer of 1967, when dozens of U.S. cities exploded in violence. At age 19, the Bill Scott who threw the first bottle at police was a young man determined to break with his past. “I decided to reject anything that was white,” he writes.

It also softened how he viewed his father.

…

“I could now understand why my father had given up in the white conventional world. I was black and being black meant I had to live black…no more hating myself because I was black” (McGraw 9-11).

“They are savages,” a Detroit Free Press reporter overheard one police officer say. “Those black son-of-a bitches. I’m going to get me a couple of them before this is over.”

Forty-three people died that week. Detroit Police shot and killed 18. National Guardsmen were involved in the deaths of another 11 people, including a 4-year-old girl named Tanya Blanding whose tiny body was riddled with bullets when Guardsmen aimed a .50 caliber machine gun at her apartment building and opened fire because they mistook her uncle lighting a cigarette near a window for the flash of a sniper’s gunshot.

Guardsmen dispensed an estimated 155,000 rounds of ammunition in five days. They even fired at the police. For example, when police officers shot out the city’s streetlights to avoid detection, Guardsmen stationed a block away heard the gunshots and the glass shattering and believed it was from a sniper. When the Guard returned fire, police officers then reported being under attack by snipers (McGuire 4-5).


In the five days and nights of violence 33 blacks and 10 whites were killed, 1,189 were injured and over 7,200 people were arrested. Approximately 2,500 stores were looted and the total property damage was estimated at about $32 million. Until the riots following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King in April 1968, the Detroit Race Riot stood as the largest urban uprising of the 1960s (Wang 3).

Scott awoke Sunday afternoon to find smoke in the house, which was on a nearby residential section of 12th Street. A neighboring home was on fire, and his father figured the flames would spread before the fire department could arrive. Firefighters showed up, though, and extinguished the blaze, but it rekindled, destroying their house and most of their block.

12th Street was a chaotic scene, with sirens, fires and stunned people running back and forth, fearing for their lives. Scott went to stay with a friend.

The next morning, with widespread confusion across the city, Scott looked for a newspaper. He walked more than a mile, to the usually busy corner of Grand River and West Grand Boulevard, but the streets were deserted, with buildings burned and looted. He watched as two young men climbed through the broken window of a drugstore when suddenly a line of squad cars drove up. Scott told the police he was only watching, but they cuffed him and took him downtown.

Charged with illegally entering the store, Scott spent the next 15 days in a gulag of crowded, sweltering, stinking lockups, from the oily confines of precinct garages to stifling buses with shut windows in the July sun to the Belle Isle bath house, as Detroit Police sought innovative ways to store thousands of arrestees. He was finally released after charges were dropped.

Taking the bus back to 12th Street, Scott got off at Seward and walked past the hollowed-out neighborhood of loose bricks, broken glass and boarded-up buildings.

…

“The further I walked down Twelfth, the more I became aware of the destruction around me, which made me feel less of a man for being part of it,” he writes.

“A man doesn’t destroy his home; he protects it at all cost. This I hadn’t done; I let another man come and force me to destroy my own. This put me at his mercy. I became a boy once more. He could control me completely.”

Bill Scott spoke to his father, who was laying low, fearing retaliation from police for what had happened outside his club. Bill returned to the factory where he had found work, but was fired for missing two weeks with no explanation. His car had been towed, and he couldn’t afford to get it back. He was filled with hatred, he wrote. The thought of killing police constantly crossed his mind.

A month later, Bill Scott paid the $1.80 Greyhound bus fare and moved to Ann Arbor, “never to return,” he wrote, “until” (McGraw 17-19)?


Works cited:

“Detroit Movie vs. the True Story of the Algiers Motel Killings.” History Hollywood. Web. http://www.historyvshollywood.com/ree...


McGraw, Bill. “He Helped Start 1967 Detroit Riot, Now His Son Struggles with the Legacy.” Detroit Free Press. December 29, 2016. Web. https://www.freep.com/story/news/loca...


McGuire, Danielle. “Detroit Police Killed Their Sons at the Algiers Motel. No One Ever Said Sorry.” Bridge. July 25, 2017. Web. https://www.bridgemi.com/detroit-jour...



Wang, Tabitha. “Detroit Race Riot (1967).” BLACKPAST. July 3, 2008. Web. https://www.blackpast.org/african-ame...

Civil Rights Events -- RFK Visits Mississippi Delta

Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination … still reverberates in American life. One reason his standing as a political leader endures is the genuineness of his concern for the most disadvantaged Americans. A child of privilege, Bobby Kennedy was a perhaps unexpected champion of the poor and the marginalized. But living out his strong Catholic faith, he was determined to go to the margins of society—and was always empathetic with the people he met there.

Through 1967 and 1968, in the runup and course of his campaign for president, Robert Kennedy traveled to some of the places in the United States hardest hit by poverty and racism. In the midst of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, the U.S. senator from New York wanted to see how change was playing out and what still remained to be done.

Over the course of what became known as his “poverty tour,” Kennedy visited the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky and western Pennsylvania, California’s Central Valley and the Mississippi Delta. Among whites, blacks and Latinos alike, Kennedy found a nation within our nation in need of aid and wrongs that needed righting (De Loera-Brust 1).

Robert Kennedy consistently related to the underdog. He made a point of witnessing first-hand the hunger of children in the Mississippi Delta as well as the hardship of those living in urban ghettos and on Native American reservations. He was relentless in his efforts to provide for improved circumstances for those who were hungry and poor.

…

After a visit [in 1996] to Harlem in New York City, RFK described the experience: “I have been in tenements in Harlem (New York) in the past several weeks where the smell of rats was so strong that it was difficult to stay there for five minutes, and where children slept with lights turned on their feet to discourage attacks…”

Robert Kennedy believed that the best way to help the poor was not have them rely on government bureaucracy, rather to give them the means by which they could work their own way out of poverty. After touring a highly run-down area of New York City known as Bedford-Stuyvesant – riddled with crime, unemployment and deteriorated housing – Kennedy was challenged to find a way to help the community to rebuild itself. He met with community activists, who were cynical of his interest. They claimed that he was just another ‘white politician who was out visiting for the day and would never be heard from again’. But Kennedy was a man of action. His response was to launch the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Project, a joint venture between residents and businesses. The project was designed to revitalize and rebuild businesses within the community and, in doing so, restore hope for its residents (Baldes, Gould, and Marien (1-3).

Robert F. Kennedy was two years into his first term as a U.S. senator from New York when [in 1967] he visited the Mississippi Delta. At the time, many were already eying him as a presidential candidate, someone who could carry on his brother’s political legacy. But at that moment, Kennedy was trying to carve out his own political identity. Still grieving over his brother’s assassination, he threw himself into trying to make a change in issues that he cared about.

Although many accounts hold that Kennedy’s interest in poverty arose after his brother’s death, former aides link it to work he did as attorney general on juvenile delinquency in the early 1960s. Kennedy believed delinquency was a product of economic inequality, linked in part to the racial tension that was beginning to erupt all over the nation.

…

Though the local officials he traveled with had planned where to take him, Kennedy often ordered the entourage to pull over for unscheduled stops so that he could talk to families at random. He didn’t simply want to rely on what his tour guides wanted to show him. “It was more like a fact-finding mission,” [Ellen] Meacham [a University of Mississippi journalism professor accompanying the tour] said. “He was much more interested in finding the truth of the matter and connecting with people than creating a photo op.”

For hours, Kennedy and his entourage traveled by car from one dusty town to another, visiting families who lived in terrible conditions. The senator peeked in refrigerators and cupboards, often finding them empty. He quizzed adults on whether they had heard of any of the government assistance programs created as part of the War on Poverty — and many had not. But it was the children he was most moved by.

In Cleveland, he asked the television people to wait outside while he, [NAACP activist Marian] Wright and [longtime aid Peter] Edelman went into a darkened home. Inside, they found a small baby on the dirty floor, listlessly picking at scattered pieces of rice and cornbread — the day’s meal. As Meacham recounts in her book [Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi], Kennedy became fixated on the child, who wasn’t much younger than his son Max, who had just turned 2. Kennedy ignored the stench of the open toilet in one corner of the room and despite the sores on the baby’s arms and legs crouched on the dusty floor, trying to coax a response from the dazed child, whose belly was swollen from malnourishment. Kennedy touched the boy’s face and cheeks again and again, softly saying, “Baby … hi, baby.”

According to Edelman, Kennedy tried for at least five minutes to get some reaction from the child, but the baby never acknowledged him or made a sound. “It was an incredibly awful but powerful moment,” he said (Bailey 1-4).

A reporter for the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Mississippi, covering civil rights, the courts, and municipal affairs, witnessed part of the first morning of Kennedy’s tour. His observations were printed in 2002 in American Heritage.

Kennedy decided he wanted to see how bad things really were in the Delta, and he asked [Marian] Wright to find a pocket of poverty that the entire subcommittee could visit the next day.

He may not have realized that finding pockets of poverty in the Mississippi Delta in the late spring of 1967 was as easy as finding pockets in a pool hall.

…

At about 10:00 A.M. we reached a black community lost in a sea of cotton fields. The few average-income whites and better-off blacks had separated their houses from the much poorer blacks we were visiting with a cyclone fence. The poorer people had outhouses and used big tanks for water storage. There were some indoor bathrooms but very few phones or television sets.

The houses were probably 40 years old, unpainted and sparsely furnished but in good repair. They were bunched together higgledy-piggledy in what anyone raised in Mississippi would have recognized as “quarters,” around a central tamped-earth court where women washed their clothes in huge pots of boiling water, stirring the laundry with short paddles just as they had in the 1850s.

I introduced myself to Kennedy, who was shorter than I had imagined and seemed frail. His nose was more hooked than it appeared in photographs, he was deeply tanned, and he kept trying to brush his thick, longish hair out of his face when the wind kicked up. His blue suit didn’t look much better than mine. He spoke in a low, breathy voice, and at times we reporters and the blacks we had inflicted ourselves upon had to strain to hear him. Most of all, he just looked terribly, terribly tired. I knew that he had played football for Harvard and still played touch football with his family. I knew he didn’t smoke or drink. But he seemed worn out, chastened, by something that had to be more than fatigue.

Then we began moving through the houses. The people in the small crowd we had attracted ranged in age from 3 to 63, yet none appeared to be between 15 and about 50. When you saw Third World population distribution like that, you knew that those in the middle, the employables, had gone off to the cities—the ones that had burned that year and the year before. No one here had a job, and very few had decent clothes.

The first house we walked into had a refrigerator in a big room. Kennedy opened it. The only item inside was a jar of peanut butter. There was no bread. We walked outside, and he held out his hand to a bunch of young, filthy, ragged but thrilled kids. In a minute or two he was stopped by a short, aging, very heavy black woman in old, baggy clothes. I regret to say that I’d become inured to poverty by a childhood and young adulthood in the Delta, but this poor woman was in awful shape even for Mississippi.

She thanked Senator Kennedy for coming to see them and said that she was too old to be helped by any new program but she hoped the children might be. Kennedy, moved, softly asked her how old she was. “I’m 33,” she said. Both he and I recoiled.

We moved into the central courtyard, where the local weekly editor interrogated Kennedy almost belly to belly, lighting into liberals of every stripe. Kennedy would patiently reply and then touch his neck right above the collar with his right hand. It got to be eerie; it reminded me of his brother’s reaction to the first shot that had hit him.

I had my deadline to meet, so after a while I thanked Kennedy and drove to a pay phone to call in my story. I never saw him again… (RFK 2-5).



It’s been a long time since Charlie Dillard went to bed hungry, but he still chokes up thinking about it. Growing up poor in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, there were days when he and his eight brothers and sisters had only a slice of cornbread or a spoonful of syrup apiece, and that was it.

Sometimes there was no food at all, and he would go to bed face down on the dusty floor of his grandparents’ old shotgun house pressing his hollow belly into the wood hoping it would somehow ease the sharp pains of hunger that pulsed through his skinny body and kept him up at night.

...

Dillard’s mother was a farm worker. She picked cotton, soybeans and vegetables, depending on the season. And like many black children in the Delta at the time, Dillard was often with her, working 12-hour shifts, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., for five dollars a day. He only sporadically attended school. When he wasn’t in the fields, he and his siblings were doing odd jobs — mowing lawns or raking leaves for white families on the other side of town — anything to help make ends meet. His father was out of the picture, so it was up to the whole family to work to survive.

But in 1967, jobs were hard to find in the Delta, especially for blacks. Farmers were increasingly turning to machines to harvest and process their crops, eliminating the need for manual labor. Dillard’s mother had gone to Florida in search of work, leaving her children behind in circumstances that seemed to grow more desperate by the day. His grandparents didn’t have enough money or food to take care of all the kids, a group that had grown to include some of his cousins. On any given night, there were 15 people or more, mostly children, crammed into a tiny three-room shack where there was no heat or air conditioning.

One Tuesday afternoon in April 1967, when Dillard was just 9, he was playing outside with his siblings when he saw a crowd of people walking up the street. He stopped and stared. He had never seen anything like it. There were men with giant television cameras on their shoulders, and while there were a couple of blacks, most in the group were white, which was unusual because white people rarely came to their blighted part of town with its unpaved streets and decrepit homes.

Suddenly, a white man in a dark suit emerged from the crowd and made a beeline for Dillard and his siblings. To the boy’s surprise, the man walked up and offered his hand — an unusual gesture at the time in racially charged Mississippi. The man introduced himself as Robert Kennedy — a name that didn’t mean much to Dillard, who didn’t have a television. Only later did he learn that the man was the brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, a former attorney general and a U.S. senator from New York.

“He was the first white person I ever shook hands with,” Dillard recalled.

Glancing over the kids, who were filthy and dressed in tattered, ill-fitting hand-me-downs, Kennedy had a somber air about him. He spoke quietly, asking Dillard why he wasn’t in school. The child explained that he wasn’t enrolled. Looking distressed, Kennedy asked the boy what he had eaten that day. “Molasses,” Dillard replied.

As Dillard walked up the wooden steps of the house to go inside and tell his grandmother about their visitors, Kennedy and his entourage followed. Inside the house, the senator questioned the woman about what she had fed the kids that day. Just bread and syrup, she replied. And they wouldn’t eat again until the evening because there just wasn’t enough food. The cupboards were empty. “I can’t hardly feed ’em but twice a day,” the woman told Kennedy, who could not conceal his shock.

As he turned to go, Kennedy, a father of 10 at the time, including a boy just three weeks old, smiled sadly at Dillard and his siblings. He touched their heads and gently caressed their cheeks. They looked up at him with sad, worried eyes. “It wasn’t like a politician kissing babies,” said Ellen Meacham … He touched those children as if they were his own.”

Traveling abroad, the senator had seen poverty and hunger first hand in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. But as his… aide Peter Edelman recalled, Kennedy seemed more shaken by what he had seen in Mississippi. He was disturbed to see so many children suffering in a way they weren’t in other places stricken by poverty.

“I remember he came out of one of the houses, and he was just … he couldn’t believe it. He told me this was the worst poverty he had ever seen, worse than anything he’d ever seen in a Third World country,” Edelman recalled. “That might have been a little bit of an overstatement, but it was shocking to see that in the United States. He couldn’t stop thinking of those hungry kids, those children in rags and [with] swollen bellies and running sores on their arms and legs that wouldn’t heal. It was horrific.”

…

Hours later, Kennedy arrived back at Hickory Hill, his family’s stately brick home in the rolling countryside of McLean, Va. It was his wife Ethel’s birthday, and she and the kids had stayed up late to welcome the senator back from Mississippi.

But as Kennedy crossed the threshold to the dining room, where his family awaited, his kids later recalled how their father had suddenly halted, looking anguished as he surveyed his opulent home and his happy, healthy children. It was a stark contrast to what he’d seen in Mississippi earlier in the day. “He looked haunted and started talking to me, shaking his head in distress as he described the people he’d met in the Delta,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, his oldest daughter, who would later serve as the lieutenant governor of Maryland, wrote in the New York Times. “‘I was with a family who live in a shack the size of this dining room,’ he told me. ‘The children’s stomachs were distended and had sores all over them. They were starving.’ He was outraged that this could happen in the world’s richest country.”

The senator slammed his fist on the table and looked around at his children, who sat stunned at their father’s outburst. “Do you know how lucky you are?” Kennedy asked them. “Do you know how lucky you are? You have a great responsibility. Do something for these children. Do something for our country.”

In Clarksdale, Kennedy had stood atop a car, vowing he would not forget the people of the Mississippi Delta. And he did not. He moved quickly to make differences where he could, including getting meals to the struggling families. He called wealthy friends and charity organizations, soliciting help. Within hours of Kennedy’s visit, food showed up at his grandparents’ house, Dillard recalled. Not much later, after images of Kennedy’s visit had aired on national television, the city of Cleveland suddenly decided to pave the roads in his neighborhood and throughout the poor black section of town. “I think they were probably shamed or something,” Dillard said.

The morning after he arrived back in Washington, Kennedy and [Pennsylvania Senator Joseph S.] Clark began lobbying the Agriculture Department to get additional food aid into the Delta — a push that federal officials initially resisted. Among other things, he successfully argued for changes in the food stamp program, which was then operating as a pilot program. Under the old policy, individuals had been required to buy food stamps, but Kennedy successfully lobbied to expand the program to allow families with no income to qualify for assistance.

The senator petitioned private groups for help. The Field Foundation sent doctors to investigate medical conditions in the Delta and confirmed reports of malnourishment. Meanwhile, the Senate held fiery hearings on the plight of the Delta. Embarrassed by the revelations about the struggles of poor blacks in his state, Sen. John Stennis, who had initially suggested that Kennedy had exaggerated his interactions in the Delta, set up a $10 million emergency fund for food and medical help for impoverished residents in his state.

Eventually, the federal government would dramatically expand its aid programs into the region, including offering school lunches. But Kennedy saw the need for more transformative change. He didn’t believe the solution to the Delta’s problems could be solved by government alone. As he had in Brooklyn, he pressed for community partnerships and incentives that would help attract skilled jobs to the region, offering residents hope and opportunity. But those efforts ended with his death a little over a year later (Bailey 5-8).


Works Cited:

Baldes, Tricia, Gould, Katie, and Marien, Dr. Joanne. “Poverty.” RFK Legacy Education Project. Web. https://rfklegacycurriculum.wordpress...


Bailey, Holly. “Hunger 'Hurt So Bad': How Robert Kennedy Learned about Poverty from a Boy in the Delta.” Yahoo! May 30, 2018. Web. https://www.yahoo.com/news/hunger-hur...


De Loera-Brust, Antonio. “Infographic: Revisiting R.F.K.’s Poverty Tour.” America: The Jesuit Review. June 1, 2018. Web. https://www.americamagazine.org/polit...


“With RFK in the Delta.” American Heritage. Volume 53, Issue 2, 2002. Web. https://www.americanheritage.com/rfk-...

Civil Rights Events -- Dr. King and the Vietnam War -- Aftermath

The Riverside audience responds to Dr. King's address with tremendous enthusiasm. John Bennet states, "There is no one who can speak to the conscience of the American people as powerfully as Martin Luther King" (Aftermath 1).

“I felt lifted up,” John Lewis said. “I thought he would become much more aggressive in trying to get our country and people in high places in our government to put the issue of poverty and hunger back on the American agenda” (Hedin 7). I came away from that evening inspired. I still believed, in the face of so much that seemed to be falling apart, that slowly, inexorably, in ways I might not be able to recognize or figure out, we were continuing to move in the direction we should, toward something better. I wasn't in the midst of the movement anymore, not at the moment, but I knew I would get back to it.

President Johnson, leaders of both parties, and most of the political establishment react with predictable fury and condemnation, not just at Dr. King's opposition to the war but even more so to his placing the war in a broader context of colonialism that directly challenges the anti-Communist premise of Cold War foreign policy (Aftermath 1).

… Johnson rescinded an invitation to the White House and authorized the FBI to increase its surveillance campaign to discredit and destroy him. Other civil rights leaders spurned him. Even the NAACP issued a statement disavowing King’s sentiments (Burrell 4).

One White House advisor tells the president that King, "who is inordinately ambitious and quite stupid," has "thrown in with the commies," because he's "in desperate search of a constituency." FBI Director Hoover tells the president that "Based on King's recent activities and public utterances, it is clear that he is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation." Carl Rowan, head of the U.S. Information Agency and one of the highest-ranking Afro-Americans in the Executive branch, publishes a red-baiting article in Reader's Digest — the most widely-read magazine in the nation — calling King an egomaniac under the sway of Communist agents (Aftermath 1).

Ralph Bunche, who was the first African-American to win a Nobel Peace Prize, said King “ought not be both a civil rights leader and an anti-war spokesman” and should give up one role or the other (Suggs 1).

By one count, some 168 major newspapers condemned the speech. …

"He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people," The Washington Post declared (Krieg 5). “King has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies…and… an even graver injury to himself” (Suggs 2). The Post called King’s recommendations “sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy” and opined that, “many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence” (Burrell 1).

The New York Times, too, published a damning assessment, titled "Dr. King's Error," arguing that it was "both wasteful and self-defeating" to link Vietnam with domestic inequity and unrest.

"Dr. King," the piece resolved, "makes too facile a connection between the speeding up of the war in Vietnam and the slowing down of the war against poverty" (Krieg 5).

“There are no simple or easy answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country… Linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion” (Hedin 6).


The San Antonio Express ruled that King, "gripped" by some "strange logic," was "tragically wrong in his viewpoint."

"If King and his group really want to help themselves," it continued, "they can show a spirit of support now lacking that will make the impression in Hanoi that America is not greatly divided in its determination to honor the commitment in Vietnam."

Others were less measured in their language. Life magazine described the speech as "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," while James Marlow, in his analysis for The Associated Press, suggested King's drawing together Vietnam and civil rights was a cynical attempt to reclaim the "limelight."

"Some Negro leaders publicly disagreed with these latest tactics of King," he wrote. "Since he needs all the white and Negro support he can get to start the civil rights movement rolling again, it's hard to see how he did it anything but injury."

"Martin Luther King Crosses the Line," The Cincinnati Enquirer blared, calling his words "arrant nonsense."

The "unctuous" King "has been something of a hindrance to the civil rights movement since he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize," they wrote. "Since the award, he has specialized in speaking in Olympian tones, rather than addressing himself to the practicalities of the civil rights movement" (Krieg 6-7).

Fearing to appear unpatriotic in a time of war, much of the Black press echoes the criticisms of white media. The Pittsburgh Courier says King is "tragically misleading American Negroes," on issues that are, "too complex for simple debate." The New York Amsterdam News urges Afro-Americans to "rally around the country" and support President Johnson (Aftermath 2).

Articulating the opinion of conservative Republicans, LIFE magazine describes the speech as:

"A demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi. ... [King] goes beyond his personal right to dissent, ... when he connects progress in civil rights here with a proposal that amounts to abject surrender in Vietnam ... King comes close to betraying the cause for which he has worked so long."

…

Committed to the Democratic Party and its Cold War liberalism, NAACP and Urban League leaders rush to reaffirm — once again — that they do not stand with Dr. King. The NAACP Board of Directors adopts a resolution labeling any attempt to merge the civil rights and peace movements, "A serious tactical mistake." Former NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall who is now LBJ's Solicitor General and soon to be Supreme Court appointee, acknowledges King's right to dissent on foreign policy, but "not as a civil rights leader." During a personal encounter, Whitney Young of the Urban League accuses King of abandoning the poor for the antiwar movement. King retorts, "Whitney, what you're saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won't get you into the Kingdom of Truth" (Aftermath 2)

A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin refused to talk about it [the speech] in the press. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young distanced themselves from him. Black media that had chronicled his every step since the Montgomery Bus Boycott a decade earlier railed against him … (Suggs 2).

All of these denunciations show that the liberal civil rights establishment, which included the Democratic Party, many media outlets, and civil rights organizations, were only comfortable with the King that spoke of dreams and racial progress, and allowed liberals to remain secure in their condescension toward the South, without having to examine their own assumptions or the policies they had crafted. The liberal establishment did not want to hear a black public intellectual who was not talking about the foibles of black people or how much progress black people had made. And civil rights organizations did not want to endanger relationships with the federal government or white philanthropic organizations that provided much of their operating funds (Burrell 4).

For Dr. King, the most surprising — and disheartening — rebuke comes from his long-time friend, ally, and co-worker Bayard Rustin who defends King's "right to debate" the war but tells Blacks not to join the anti-war movement because the problems they face are "so vast and crushing that they have little time or energy to focus upon international crises." Though himself a pacifist and Conscientious Objector, Rustin later tells Afro-Americans to join the military "to learn a trade, earn a salary, and be in a position to enter the job market on their return." And he opposes immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops because doing so would result in a totalitarian regime ruling Vietnam.

Some Black leaders do support King. CORE leader Floyd McKissick who has been fearlessly condemning the war says, "I'm glad to have [King] with us, no question about that." Dr. Benjamin Mays, King's teacher from Morehouse College in Atlanta calls King, "One of the most courageous men alive today." He defends the speech in terms of Gandhian nonviolence. Others also defend King, and his stand intensifies the Vietnam debates already roiling Afro-American communities across the nation. Sam Washington of the Chicago Defender describes how many Blacks in that city see in King, "a good example to follow," and he observes that while opposition to the war is not yet widespread, Blacks are beginning to move "over to King's side" rather than that of the NAACP and the Urban League.

While King expected attacks from the administration and political conservatives, those from liberals whom he had hoped would be allies trouble him. SCLC leader Dorothy Cotton later commented, "My sense is that Martin was very much pained by the criticism. He really took notice of what people were saying. My very clear impression is that the criticism made him delve even deeper into the way of nonviolence." Rev. Andrew Young later recalled, "Martin was almost reduced to tears by the stridency of the criticism directed against him. [The Post and Times editorials] hurt him the most because they challenged his very right to take a position."

For Vincent Harding, who drafted major portions of Beyond Vietnam, the attacks were a form of racial paternalism, because in essence they were saying:

Martin Luther King, you have forgotten who you are, and who we are. You should be very, very happy that we have allowed you to talk critically about race relations in this country. You should be very happy that we've allowed you to talk about Negro things. But MLK, when it comes to the foreign policy of this country, you are not qualified to speak to these issues. These are our issues. Our white establishment [is] in charge of such things, and you are absolutely out of your place to enter into this kind of arena.

As for Dr. King himself, though discouraged by the fierce condemnation hurled at him from former friends and allies, he is buoyant at having finally declared his full opposition to both the Vietnam War and the destructive values inherent in U.S. foreign policy. Eleven days later, on April 15th, he participates in the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, a mass march from Central Park to the United Nations where he delivers an address to the marchers with the call and refrain of Stop the Bombing! The police claim there are 125,000 marchers; protest organizers place the total at 400,000. By either estimate it is the largest anti-war protest in American history up to that point. In later months and years, even larger ones take place.

Dr. King's Beyond Vietnam speech marks a significant advance in the growing anti-war movement. His eloquent statement and his prestige as a moral leader and Nobel Prize winner bring his condemnation of U.S. foreign policy to people and communities who have not been reached by student protesters. Afro- Americans, even those who reject nonviolence and integration, honor him as a courageous leader who puts himself on the line for freedom and justice, and his principled stand against the Vietnam War resonates in a community that has already begun to question the war.

Public opinion, however, shifts slowly — but shift it does. One year later, in the last poll taken before Dr. King is assassinated, public support for the war has dropped to 40%. Three years earlier, in the Spring of 1965, it had been over 60%. And over the same period, opposition to the war has grown from a little over 20% in 1965 to almost 50% in 1968. Yet almost 75% of all Americans, and 55% of Black Americans, still feel that as a civil rights leader Dr. King should not be involving himself or using his prestige in opposing the war (Aftermath 3-6).

During a recent speech at the National Press Club, King’s youngest daughter, Bernice, noted that once her father started speaking out against the war in Vietnam he became a threat.

“The reason why my father was assassinated was because he had such a love for humanity,” [Bernice] King told the crowd. “It was not because he was talking about black and white together. He was assassinated because once he spoke out against the war in Vietnam, he started talking about how we were distributing our wealth to fight what he felt was an unjust war” (Joiner 1).

What made King truly radical was his desire to act on this empathy for people not like himself, neither black nor American. For him, there was “no meaningful solution” to the war without taking into account Vietnamese people, who were “the voiceless ones.” Recognizing their suffering from far away, King connected it with the intimate suffering of African Americans at home. The African-American struggle to liberate black people found a corollary in the struggle of Vietnamese people against foreign domination. It was therefore a bitter irony that African Americans might be used to suppress the freedom of others, to participate in, as King put it, “the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”

Americans prefer to see our wars as exercises in protecting and expanding freedom and democracy. To suggest that we might be fighting for capitalism is too disturbing for many Americans. But King said “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we … must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Those words, and their threat to the powerful, still apply today. … (Nguyen 5).

It is a truism of nonviolent resistance that the people most profoundly affected by any act of political defiance are the protesters themselves. Whatever its effect on the civil rights and anti-war movements, A Time to Break Silence liberates Dr. King spiritually and politically. Ten days after Riverside, he begins a series of speeches on the theme of The Other America, speeches about race, poverty, economic injustice, and political inequality that directly challenge establishment economic policy and American "business as usual." He continues to speak out against the Vietnam War, and he begins planning and building an inter-racial movement of the poor to demand a fundamental reordering of American economic policies and practices (Aftermath 7).

King began plotting what he called the Poor People’s Campaign, an initiative to unite all of America’s dispossessed, regardless of their race or nationality. The Riverside speech seemed to unlock something in him, and he would no longer concern himself with political allegiance or popular opinion.

“The cross may mean the death of your popularity,” he said at a conference the following month. Even so, he added, “take up your cross and just bear it. And that’s the way I have decided to go. Come what may, it doesn’t matter now” (Hedin 7).

Yet the moral imperatives and political issues Dr. King raises in “Beyond Vietnam” still resonate today in the 21st Century:

When you read the speech, if you replace the word "Vietnam," every time it pops up, with the words "Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan," you will be — it will blow your mind at how King, were he alive today at 81, could really stand up and give that same speech and just replace, again, "Vietnam" with "Iraq" and "Afghanistan". — Tavis Smiley, NPR (Aftermath 7).

… liberal policies only proved, rather than dispelled, King’s arguments. Liberals who had previously supported the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s became the same people supporting laws, such as the Safe Streets Act in 1968, that began the militarization of municipal police forces and put more money into building up the law enforcement and criminal justice apparatuses than had ever been allocated toward Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programs.

In the fifty years since, the U. S. has entered into new war fronts across the world. And the Democrats have often stood in lockstep with the Republicans in supporting increasing funding for the military industrial complex, even as the wars extended to the home front in the forms of “wars” on drugs, crime, and the poor. Increasing funding for military intervention overseas has occurred almost without fail, while attacks on the social safety nets of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs have only ramped up over the last fifty years — mostly from Republicans — and are only getting stronger every year.

Decreasing or eliminating funding to anti-poverty programs, while simultaneously increasing defense spending and allowing tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the top one percent of wealth holders is antithetical to the kind of society Martin Luther King, Jr. was working to create. It smacks of the same double-burden he described poor Americans facing back in 1967. And in light of President Donald Trump’s comments regarding immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, in which he disparaged in racist terms those seeking to escape violence and persecution by coming to the United States, King would say we still have more maturing to do (Burrell 5-6).


Works cited:

“Aftermath.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.h...


Burrell, Kristopher. “To Build a Mature Society: The Lasting Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ Speech.” The Gotham Center for New York History. November 15, 2018. Web. https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/to-...



Hedin, Benjamin. “Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Searing Antiwar Speech, Fifty Years Later.” The New Yorker. April 3, 2017. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cul...


Joiner, Lottie. “King’s Vietnam Speech Still Holds True 50 Years Later.” The Undefeated. April 4, 2017. Web. https://theundefeated.com/features/ma...



Krieg, Gregory. “When MLK Turned on Vietnam, Even Liberal 'Allies' Turned on Him.” CNN Politics. April 4, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/04/politi...


Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. January 17, 2019. Web. https://time.com/5505453/martin-luthe...


Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/

Civil Rights Events -- Dr. King and the Vietnam War -- Riverside Church Beyond Vietnam Speech

Fifty years ago, John Lewis, the civil-rights activist and current congressman from Georgia, was living in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, in a studio on Twenty-first Street. On April 4, 1967, he rode uptown to Riverside Church, on the Upper West Side, to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver a speech about Vietnam. Lewis knew that King would declare his opposition to the war, but the intensity and eloquence of King’s speech, titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” stunned him. What King offered was a wholesale denunciation of American foreign and domestic policy. He had never spoken with such fathoms of unrestraint. For Lewis, the force of the speech eclipsed that of all the others that King gave, including his most famous.

“The March on Washington was a powerful speech,” Lewis said to me recently, over the phone. Lewis was present for that one, too: he spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial minutes before King did. “It was a speech for America, but the speech he delivered in New York, on April 4, 1967, was a speech for all humanity—for the world community.” He added, “I heard him speak so many times. I still think this is probably the best.”

Half a century later, the Riverside speech also seems to carry the greater weight of prophecy. King portrayed the war in Vietnam as an imperial one, prosecuted at the expense of the poor. Vietnam, he said, was “the symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” and, if left untreated, if the malady continued to fester, “we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight” (Hedin 1).

Dr. King began his speech with these words. “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. …The world now demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam. In order to atone for our sins, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.”

For the 3,000 anti-war faithful who jammed into New York’s majestic Riverside Church to hear King speak, his decision to break his long public silence on Vietnam was cause for celebration. For King, the decision was fraught with political danger (Wernick 1).

Many of King’s civil rights allies discouraged him from going public with his antiwar views, believing that he should prioritize the somewhat less controversial domestic concerns of African Americans and the poor. But for King, standing against racial and economic inequality also demanded a recognition that those problems were inseparable from the military-industrial complex and capitalism itself. King saw “the war as an enemy of the poor,” as young black men were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

What King understood was that the war was destroying not only the character of the U.S. but also the character of its soldiers. Ironically, it also managed to create a kind of American racial equality in Vietnam, as black and white soldiers stood “in brutal solidarity” against the Vietnamese. But if they were fighting what King saw as an unjust war, then they, too, were perpetrators of injustice, even if they were victims of it at home. For American civilians, the uncomfortable reality was that the immorality of an unjust war corrupted the entire country. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” King said, “part of the autopsy must read Vietnam” (Nguyen 2).

Stanley Levison and others had arranged for a respectable antiwar group, Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, to schedule an appearance at Riverside Church, a bastion of establishment liberalism. For Dr. King, the speech couldn’t have come soon enough. Three days prior he told a reporter, “We are merely marking time in the civil rights movement if we do not take a stand against the war.”

At Riverside, Dr. King told the 3,000-person overflow crowd that “my conscience leaves me no other choice” than to “break the betrayal of my own silences” over the past two years. Following the widespread urban riots that had marked the summer of 1966, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government” (Garrow 3).

How, King asked, could he tell young men in rioting cities "that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems" when Americans in Vietnam were "using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted" (Krieg 3).

Dr. King acknowledged how his sense of prophetic obligation had been strengthened by his receipt of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, which represented “a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man’” — a calling “that takes me beyond national allegiances.” Dr. King emphasized that he counted himself among those who are “bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism.”

Dr. King then turned his full wrath against the war. He insisted that “we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam” and that “we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam.” He alleged that the United States tested its latest weapons on Vietnamese peasants “just as the Germans tested out new medicines and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe,” and he decried “the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets” in South Vietnam (Garrow 4-5).

"Now [the Vietnamese] languish under our bombs and consider us — not their fellow Vietnamese — the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go — primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees.

“They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Viet Cong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. ... We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force — the unified Buddhist church.”

Of American GIs he says:

"I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor." (Time 2-3).

He recommended that all young men confronting the military draft declare themselves conscientious objectors… (Garrow 5)

"Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors," he said. "These are the times for real choices and not false ones."

King …offered a plan, in five steps, "to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict." It began with a call to immediately end the bombing in both North and South Vietnam and ended with the US setting a date for the withdrawal of "all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement" (Krieg 4).

The United States should prepare to “make what reparations we can for the damage we have done.”

But the war wasn’t just a mistake; it was “a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Civil rights, inequality and American policy in Southeast Asia were all of a larger piece. When “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered” (Garrow 6).

… he had his sights beyond the current war. “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,” he said. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” King warned of a time of endless war, when the U.S. would be trapped in one overseas entanglement after another while the gap at home between the rich and poor grew ever larger.

King had come to see war, poverty, and racism as interrelated; taking on one necessarily meant confronting the others. He told his audience at Riverside that the United States was “on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.” He was talking about Vietnam, but the sickness that he named, that “far deeper malady,” could be detected in everything America did, he suggested (Hedin 5).

He concludes his speech with a stirring call to action:
"We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world — a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight" (Beyond 2).


Works cited:

“Beyond Vietnam.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.h...

Garrow, David J. “When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam.” The New York Times. April 4, 2017. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/op...


Hedin, Benjamin. “Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Searing Antiwar Speech, Fifty Years Later.” The New Yorker. April 3, 2017. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cul...


Krieg, Gregory. “When MLK Turned on Vietnam, Even Liberal 'Allies' Turned on Him.” CNN Politics. April 4, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/04/politi...


Nguyen, Viet Thanh. ““The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. January 17, 2019. Web. https://time.com/5505453/martin-luthe...


“A Time to Break Silence.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.h...


Wernick, Adam. “Martin Luther King's 1967 speech opposing the Vietnam War Ended a Historic Partnership with Lyndon Johnson.” PRI. October 6, 2017. Web. https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-10-0...

Civil Rights Events -- Dr. King and the Vietnam War -- The Times Has Come

By the end of 1966, large numbers of American soldiers have been fighting in Vietnam for almost two years and close to 400,000 of them are "in country" with more serving aboard Navy ships in the South China Sea and at air bases in Thailand, Guam, and elsewhere.

The Viet Cong rebels the U.S. military has been fighting for almost two years have been a melange of Communists, Buddhists, nationalists, religious sects, students, and peasant associations in a coalition called the National Liberation Front (NLF). To the surprise of the Cold-War liberals running the White House, they not only refuse to surrender in the face of overwhelming American might but their resistance has intensified — resistance that is now bolstered by units of the North Vietnamese Army.

…

As American casualties mount higher and higher, more troops have to be sent than Pentagon planners had originally estimated. To meet the insatiable demand, the number of young men conscripted into the military is increased. By the end of 1966 over half of the American military personnel serving in the war zone have been directly — or indirectly — coerced into uniform by the draft. Known as "Selective Service," the draft is a biased system. Blacks, Latinos and poor whites are more likely to be "selected" for conscription (or pressured into volunteering) than middle and upper-class whites. In the words of a popular anti-war slogan, it's a, "Rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

Conscription becomes even more skewed towards the poor and uneducated in August of 1966 when "Project 100,000" significantly lowers the minimum qualification-test scores required for induction into the Army. In the 1960s, Blacks comprise 11% of the population yet more than 40% of those entering the service as part of Project 100,000 are Afro-American — and their casualty rates are double those of men who enter the service through other routes.

Despite these race and class disparities, overall public opinion still supports Johnson and his war. In March of 1965 when LBJ first sends combat units to Vietnam more than 60% of Americans approve of his action and barely 20% oppose it. Two years later in April of 1967, support for the war has dropped to 50% and opposition has risen to 32%. Though in two years his majority has shrunk its still a majority nonetheless.

The Johnson administration promotes the war as a struggle to "defend democracy," a democracy that by 1967 seems increasingly remote for nonwhites in America. Yet while support for the war among Afro-Americans and Latinos lags behind that of whites a majority also continue to back LBJ's policies — in part out of respect for Johnson's commitment to civil rights. And "mainstream Negro leaders," Afro-American politicians, NAACP and Urban League officers, and a significant portion of the Black press, help sustain Black support for the Vietnam War by publicly condemning those who question it. They warn that civil rights activists who speak out on foreign affairs endanger the freedom cause. (Many of them are the same "leaders" who also condemn sit-ins, civil disobedience, mass protest marches, and armed self-defense as "harmful" to Black social progress in America.)

For a large portion of the American population, dissent against Cold War ideology is "un-American." For conservatives and right-wingers, anyone who opposes military action against the "Red Menace" is a traitor. For the liberal establishment, including many labor leaders and influential clergymen, criticizing Johnson's anti-Communist foreign policy is tantamount to heresy. Outside of college campuses and away from university towns, anti-war protesters are often met with widespread hostility — and occasionally violence.

Anti-war activists are harshly condemned by the political establishment. To law enforcement officers and many campus authorities, anti-war students are subversive enemies of all that is right and holy in America. And in homes across the nation, families are split into warring generations when young opponents of the war and the draft come into bitter conflict with parents proud of their patriotic service during the Second World War (War 1-4).

Most Americans remember Martin Luther King Jr. for his dream of what this country could be, a nation where his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While those words from 1963 are necessary, his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” from 1967, is actually the more insightful one.

It is also a much more dangerous and disturbing speech, which is why far fewer Americans have heard of it. And yet it is the speech that we needed to hear then–and need to hear today.

… By 1967, the war was near its peak, with about 500,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. The U.S. would drop more explosives on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than it did on all of Europe during World War II, and the news brought vivid images depicting the carnage inflicted on Southeast Asian civilians, hundreds of thousands of whom would die. It was in this context that King called the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” (Nguyen 1).

As a man of God, Dr. King rejects Communism for it's antagonism to religion and as a humanist he opposes its anti-democratic totalitarianism. As a pacifist, he opposes all wars, and as an opponent of colonialism he sees the Vietnamese struggle as a nationalist revolt against an oppressive and corrupt government imposed by foreign powers. As a minister committed to the social gospel, he's dismayed by the damage the war is doing to both American and Vietnamese societies and he's distraught by the negative effects of spending national treasure on bullets and bombs rather than alleviating poverty and human suffering. And as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he sees it as his duty to speak out on issues of war and peace.

But ever since the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King and SCLC have used nonviolent protests to pressure the federal government to enforce existing laws and enact new civil rights legislation. This strategy, however, relies on political support from the liberal wing of the northern Democratic Party establishment. Now, as SCLC begins to shift its focus from southern segregation and denial of voting rights to national issues of economic justice that challenge business practices in the North, some of that support is drying up. Confronting LBJ over Vietnam will cause more establishment liberals to turn away on all issues — not just the war — so much so that it may become impossible to win passage of important new civil rights laws, or convince Johnson to take executive action against housing and employment discrimination.

King is also the head of a major social-justice organization, and with that role comes responsibilities. Public figures who challenge the Johnson administration face condemnation, ostracism, and retribution against not only themselves but also the organizations they are associated with. Which is why most of SCLC's key activists and supporters caution Dr. King against speaking out in opposition to the Vietnam War. Some of SCLC's board members are vulnerable to political and economic retaliation from the Democratic Party and liberal establishment. So too are pastors of SCLC-affiliated churches, as are prominent supporters. And the bulk of the organization's funding now comes from northern liberals, many of whom are loyal Democrats who support the war and the administration's Cold War policies.

Within the broadly defined Freedom Movement, Dr. King occupies the vital center between militant, youth-led groups like CORE and SNCC and more conservative organizations like the NAACP, National Council of Negro Women, and Urban League. King is determined to hold the Movement together as a united force for equality and social justice. He knows that if opponents manage to divide the major Afro-American organizations against each other they can stymie all future progress. As SNCC and CORE begin to take increasingly strong stands against the Vietnam War, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League remain committed to maintaining good relations with LBJ and the liberal establishment. They adamantly support Johnson' Vietnam policy and they relentlessly pressure King to mute his anti-war statements.

For whites in general, Dr. King speaks for Afro-Americans on political and social issues. For many whites, he is the only Black notable they can name outside of athletes and entertainers. Therefore, at least to some extent King's actions and politics affect how Blacks in general are treated by whites. Within the Black community, most Afro-Americans are patriotic and as 1966 comes to an end the majority support President Johnson and his Vietnam War (though not by as large a percentage as among whites). And while King is still widely admired for his past achievements, his influence and leadership are under constant challenge. The majority of his fellow Black Baptist ministers, for example, reject his social activism and their churches do not support SCLC or engage in political efforts (Road 1-3).

As early as the first months of 1965, even before Johnson had begun his troop buildup in Vietnam, Dr. King was calling for a negotiated settlement to the conflict, telling journalists, “I’m much more than a civil-rights leader.” But his criticism of the government’s refusal to halt widespread aerial bombing and pursue peace talks attracted little public comment until that fall, when Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, a close ally of Johnson, attacked Dr. King and cited an obscure 1799 criminal statute, the Logan Act, that prohibited private citizens from interacting with foreign governments.

Dr. King was privately distraught over the war and Dodd’s response. The F.B.I.’s wiretapping of his closest advisers overheard him telling them “how immoral this is. I think someone should outline how wrong we are.” But he reluctantly agreed that he should “withdraw temporarily” from denouncing the war. “Sometimes the public is not ready to digest the truth,” he said.

Dr. King remained relatively mute about the war through most of 1966, but by year’s end he was expressing private disgust at how increased military spending had torn a gaping budget hole in Johnson’s Great Society domestic programs. “Everything we’re talking about really boils down to the fact that we have this war on our hands,” Dr. King said in yet another wiretapped phone call.

Finally, in early 1967, he had had enough. One day Dr. King pushed aside a plate of food while paging through a magazine whose photographs depicted the burn wounds suffered by Vietnamese children who had been struck by napalm. The images were unforgettable, he said. “I came to the conclusion that I could no longer remain silent about an issue that was destroying the soul of our nation” (Garrow 1-2).

In late January Dr. King temporarily relocates to Jamaica for the seclusion he needs to write Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Vietnam weighs heavy on his conscience. Though he has publicly questioned the war, urged negotiations, and bemoaned its effect on poverty and public morality, he knows that out of pragmatic caution he has held back from speaking forthrightly about Vietnam from his heart and his head. He determines that the time has now come for him to break his public silence, to take his stand and speak truth to power regardless of consequences. No longer will he curtail his public statements because of how Johnson, liberal Democrats, and conservative Black leaders might react.

On February 25, 1967, Dr. King joins Senators Gruening (D-AK), Hatfield (D-OR), McCarthy (D-MN) and McGovern (D-SD) — all of whom have come out against the war — at an anti-war conference organized by Nation magazine in [Beverly Hills] Southern California. In a speech titled, "The Casualties of the War in Vietnam," King tells 1,500 people that "The promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam," and he speaks of a million Vietnamese children burned by napalm in a war that violates the United Nations Charter and the principle of self-determination, cripples the antipoverty program, and undermines the constitutional right of dissent.

At the same time, he distances himself from those in SNCC, CORE, and SDS whose politics are increasingly being rooted in disillusioned hatred of America by positioning himself as a patriot with a vision of a better nation:

"Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak against this war because I am disappointed with America. There can be no disappointment when there is not great love" (Road 4).

King's fiery aide James Bevel has been given leave from SCLC to organize the first major mass-mobilization protest against the war — a march from New York's Central Park to the United Nations on April 15, 1967. King decides that … he will march … and share a speaker's platform with war opponents from a wide range of political viewpoints including radicals urging men to resist the draft, socialists condemning capitalism, and revolutionary communists calling for a Viet Cong victory over American GIs.

With the exception of Bevel, almost all of Dr. King's closest advisors argue against his decision. Strenuously. He understands their political concerns but remains adamant. "I'm going to march," he tells them.

An opportunity for King to march against the war comes sooner than expected. On March 25th, 1967, he joins Dr. Benjamin Spock in leading 5,000 people through the Loop in the Chicago Area Peace Parade (Road 3-4)

King’s presentation in Beverly Hills and appearance in Chicago received modest press coverage, and in their wake Dr. King told Stanley Levison, long his closest adviser: “I can no longer be cautious about this matter. I feel so deep in my heart that we are so wrong in this country and the time has come for a real prophecy and I’m willing to go that road” (Garrow 3).

King's advisors fear media coverage of the April 15th mass protest will (as usual) focus on the most radical and sensational rather than the most thoughtful and profound. Andrew Young arranges for CALCAV, which now has 68 chapters nationwide, to invite King to give a major anti-war address on April 4th in the historic Riverside Church. Vincent Harding and others begin helping King with the text of his speech.

The SCLC board meets in Louisville KY where SCLC is supporting mass protests against residential segregation and Hosea Williams is threatening that "streakers" will disrupt the famed Kentucky Derby horse race. Dr. King meets with boxing champion Muhammad Ali who has announced he will defy his draft notice and refuse induction into the armed forces. King supports Ali. "My position on the draft is very clear, I'm against it," he tells reporters.

But many of SCLC's 57 board members still oppose King's stand against the war — some out of anti-Communist fervor, others because SCLC donations have dropped by 40% and they fear the consequences of going too far down the anti-Vietnam War road. Though it's now less than a week before King is to speak at Riverside, they vote down a resolution calling for SCLC to oppose the war. Eventually, they agree to a watered-down version so as not to "embarrass" King, their president (Road 4-5).


Works cited:

Garrow, David J. “When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam.” The New York Times. April 4, 2017. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/op...

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. January 17, 2019. Web. https://time.com/5505453/martin-luthe...


“The Road to Riverside.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.h...

“The War.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.h...

Civil Rights Events -- Grenada County Freedom Movement -- Recollections

From 1963-1967 Bruce Hartford was a full-time civil rights worker for the Congress of Racial Equality and then on the Alabama and Mississippi field staff of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). After attending UCLA and San Francisco State he became a freelance journalist covering military and political affairs in Asia during the Vietnam War. For 30 years starting in 1980 he worked as a technical writer for Silicon Valley software firms. He was a founding member and officer of the National Writers Union (NWU). Today he is webspinner for the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website (http://www.crmvet.org) and continues to be active in social justice causes (Bruce 1).

Interviewed by Shiela Michaels of Oral History in February 2002, Bruce Hartford recalled the following:

I was in Grenada from the summer of '66 until the spring of '67. And the Grenada movement was amazing. In many ways it was equal to Selma in terms of the popular support. Didn't get the publicity, but we did things in Grenada that just —
We had marches every day. Sometimes day, sometimes night marches. And the Klan would mobilize mobs against us. And we would be doing these marches at night. Very dangerous.
…

Grenada became so intense at times that when SCLC field staff who had led demonstrations in places like St. Augustine — which was also very heavy — came to Grenada, they were taken aback. One guy — I won't call his name — the first demonstration he was assigned to lead in Grenada he saw the mob and he turned us around. He didn't know what we were used to facing. He didn't think we could — I mean, he was right from his point of view. I'm not criticizing him. He made the call to protect the people. Later, everyone lit into him because to us it was just the ordinary mob. We were used to it. No big deal. After that he led marches into the teeth of it. [laughing].
…

I'm not philosophically nonviolent. But you know, I'm definitely down with the tactic. I saw us do nonviolent things in Grenada that to this day are just unbelievable to me. Every night, we had these marches of two or three hundred people circling the square. On several occasions there were periods of three or four nights in a row when violence against the Movement would peak, and surrounding us would be mobs of 500 or more Klansmen. These weren't your typical spur-of-the-moment pick-up mobs, they had been mobilized by the KKK from all over the state to come to Grenada to do business. Some of the time — not always — we could literally hold them off by the quality of our singing. We could create a psychic wall that most of the time they could not breach, even though they wanted to. And on those times when they did attack, our nonviolent response minimized their injuries to us.
…

Another time, I was walking one day towards Bellflower Church which was our headquarters. A pickup truck pulls alongside me. A guy leaps out and just starts to beat the crap out of me. So of course I drop down on the ground, curl up, like we were trained to do. He knocked my glasses off. Now I had special industrial glasses, the kind somebody working welding or a machinist uses — unbreakable. And the guy's kid, a boy, I don't know maybe 10, 12, something like that, he starts jumping up and down on the glasses. He yells, "Daddy, Daddy, they won't break! They won't break!" So eventually they both got tired and walked off, and I wasn't hurt because of the nonviolent training.
…

So the first day of school, I think we screwed up. For some reason we didn't really anticipate serious trouble. We sure should have though. So we're in Bellflower Baptist Church, and this TV reporter comes running in — national network TV. I won't call his name, but he was major known. He covered the South for ABC, or NBC, or CBS. He's totally freaked. His face is beat up, his shirt is torn. He runs to the pay phone, and he dials — I guess his boss or someone — and he's shrieking. He's not going to leave the church! They're trying to kill him! Call the Govenor, turn out the National Guard!

And then suddenly the little children are coming in. Screaming. Bloody. Elementary school kids. Been beaten the shit out of —
…

Anyway, that first day, Joan Baez, the singer, was in Grenada. She was heavy into nonviolence then. And she was with nonviolent teachers, Ira and Sandy Sandperl. They had some sort Non-Violent Institute or something, and they were in town to help. So that day, Joan Baez, she said she was going to go down to the school and chain herself to the flagpole as a protest. And we had a hell of a time arguing her out of that, because we were certain she would have been killed.
But I'll say this for her, she stayed and helped for weeks and was with SCLC in other places too — it wasn't just a photo-op for her. We used to have a simple test for who was part of the Movement and who wasn't. It wasn't an ideology test, or a test of rhetoric and jargon. If you showed up and put your body on the line, you were part of the Movement, and it didn't matter what your political beliefs were, and by that test Joan Baez was a Movement sister.
…

One night, Hosea Williams from SCLC was leading the mass meeting in Bellflower and it was packed. Standing room only. Somebody comes pushing inside, "The cops have the church surrounded, and they just arrested so- and-so." (I don't remember who.) So we scout it out, and the cops are out there all right, and anyone who leaves the church, they're being arrested. Later we found out they had a bunch of warrants, and people for whom they didn't have a warrant, they let go. But we didn't know that then.


Hosea said, "Okay, everybody line up at every door and every window -- back door, front door, all the windows. At a given signal, everyone leave at the same time so that they can't catch all of us." Which was a good plan.
So we did that. The signal was given, and we all run out. Of course, the plan was good for most folk, but not for me and the other two white civil rights workers because we stood out in the crowd, so to speak. I got maybe 20 yards before they grabbed me. They took us to the jail, roughed us up a bit, nothing really serious — you know, the normal. And so we're in jail.
…

Well, Grenada went up and down about four times, in terms of mass activity, and eventually, like all of the mass movements, people got wore out. But we did get a lot of people registered. Towards the end I was trying to form a welfare rights group that would last, but it didn't. … Late '66, early '67. We also tried to form an ASCS group, to protest the agriculture, the crop subsidy issue. … Anyway by then I was burned out. I was just like totally fried. … You know, my stomach was in knots. I couldn't eat, I was down to 120 pounds. I'm now 215. I haven't grown any taller. I've just grown taller from side to side, as Yenta put it in Fiddler on the Roof.

So I left the South in Feburary of '67. I went up to New York to work for Bevel on the Spring Mobilization Against the War, the first big mass mobilization against Vietnam, in New York, a march to the United Nations. The "Spring Mobe" it was called. So I signed on as staff for them, and I was on the Spring Mobe staff from around April of '67 until September when — under pressure from my parents — I went back to school, to San Francisco State (Interview 36-40)

Grenada Today

Today when you drive the back roads of Grenada County today, almost all the old sharecropper shacks are gone, burned or bulldozed down. Grenada's Black neighborhoods are now filled with empty lots where once impoverished rental dwellings were jam-packed side by side on muddy lots. The narrow Union Street block where Chat & Chew used to do business and voter rallies were squeezed into the narrow street by slum shacks is now open and empty. And with commercial trade now drawn away to outlying strip malls and a giant Walmart center, "downtown" Grenada around the square has fallen on hard economic times.
In the years after 1966, Afro-American voter registration and turnout rose steadily. But with many Blacks economically driven out of the city, county, and state, white voters managed to maintain and increase their numeric superiority. Nevertheless, in 2018 two of the five county supervisors in Grenada were Black as were four of the seven city council members. Now that they have a voice in civic government, their streets are paved and many have sidewalks. There are Black men and women working in government offices and wearing badges in patrol cars. The schools are fully integrated, though the children of the white middle and upper class attend well-financed private academies rather than desperately under-funded public schools.

Yet though legally-enforced, mandatory segregation is now a thing of the past, whites and Blacks in Grenada still live largely separate lives. The economic disparities between the races still remain as does a culture that in some ways is still seems rooted in the history of white-supremacy. But the brutally segregated Jim Crow "southern way of life" was permanently ended in Grenada Mississippi — killed by the nonviolent Afro-American Freedom Movement (Grenada 1).

A third year White & Case associate from New York, Peter Eikenberry arrived in Mississippi on the 4th of July weekend of 1966. One week later, he was assigned to work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He was asked to go from Jackson to Grenada to interview black people who had been beaten in Grenada by local police officers and members of the Mississippi State Highway Patrol. Most of the victims were merely spectators watching SCLC organizers picket the local jail to protest the arrest of others of their members. Thereafter, he was present full time in Grenada for over three weeks, including his trying of his first jury trial case.
NAACP lawyers Marian Wright and Henry Aronson were able to obtain federal injunctions mandating that the various police organizations protect the marchers from the hundreds of white Ku Klux Klan members and others who were massed at the town square adjacent to the sheriff’s office determined to stop the marchers. Eikenberry monitored compliance with the federal court’s orders.
Forty eight years later, in early July 2014,
Eikenberry returned to Grenada in the company of Reverend Jerome Robinson to interview 1966 civil rights activists. “Jerome … and I interviewed close to 20 people over four days.” The following stories contain highlights from some of the interviews.
Dianna Freelon-Foster stated that she was 14 in the summer of 1966 and was employed hoeing cotton for the summer. She said, “I put down my hoe, and I never turned back after I heard Martin Luther King. I joined the marches at night to the sheriff’s office. I felt better about us as a collective after the night marches happened – we were in a secluded world. I knew who I was. I did not need to be with white folks to survive. My father Felix Freelon was involved. His barber shop was across the street from the church where the activities were centered. My participation shaped my life as to what I was to become. In September, I was a member of the ninth grade class who integrated the Grenada high school. I and the other black students were constantly failed by the white principal and teachers.

“After the ninth grade was integrated, I did not want to be there, but I had committed to do it, so I wanted to ‘see it through.’ Some of the teachers were horrible including one who became superintendent of schools. Once, we walked out of school because of harsh treatment; it was almost unbearable. Parents led the walk out and we went to court the same day. We received so many demerits that we often failed. I went to summer school to pass my senior year – I was one of maybe two black students that graduated in their right year.

…

“People told me that no one wanted to go to Grenada – it was too ‘tough a nut to crack.’ One of our activists, Annie Lee Stewart, died from injuries she received on what we called Bloody Sunday in Grenada. On one occasion the police used tear gas on the people on their way back from the march downtown. At that time, another woman had a heart attack and died after the tear gas attack. I am a believer of non-violence after protesting in 1966-67, but it was very hard to believe in it when we were protesting.”

In 1966, Toll Stewart was 32 years old and employed by the Baily Brothers Laundry together with over 30 other black employees. His employer “was a racist but did not threaten [his] job when [he] marched.” “When demonstrators were arrested in Grenada, they were just loaded on cattle trucks and carted away to the penitentiary. I made sure that my entire squad of 20 in the march was comprised of my fellow workers at Baily Brothers – so if they got arrested we would all have to be released to avoid closing the laundry down.” (The federal judge had mandated the marchers to be in squads of 20, marching two by two.)

“My mother, Annie Stewart, my sister, and I fed the SCLC organizers every day: pork chops, chicken, and steak – more food than they had seen elsewhere. Annie opened her house for those who wished to sleep there every night. I just realized recently that the Lord provided the food because we did not have the resources to buy it. We bought the food in Greenwood, 30 miles away, because the black people in Grenada were boycotting the white merchants.

“In the summer of ’66 – early on in the first days of the protests – there were often violent events. Once there was a rally across from my mother’s home. The Police Chief, Pat Ray, told people to disperse, and Annie invited the people at the rally onto her property. The police chief said, ‘I told you people to disperse,’ and Annie said, ‘I told them not to, they’re on my land, I pay the taxes.’ The captain cocked his shotgun and Annie said, ‘You are a yellow dog if you do not shoot me.’ I was standing inside the front door in the dark with my shotgun pointed at the chief’s head. If the chief had brought his gun down to shoot, I would have killed him. But the chief turned and walked away.
“Everything became better after the 1966-67 civil rights uprising because before, the police could do anything to you they wished, black people did not have the vote, the schools were not integrated, and the economy was worse. I have never missed a vote in the almost 50 years since the time I received it.”

Gloria James Lottie Williams was 21 in July 1966 and had completed three years of study at Valley College. “I was trained as a typist in high school and was hoping for a secretarial position at the hosiery mill where I worked that summer in Grenada. Rather, they employed me as a folder. That summer, I marched with the demonstrators every night to the courthouse and one morning I was called in by my boss to ask if I had marched. I told my boss that I had and I was told not to do that again. I, however, did continue to march and I was not fired or ever even questioned again.”

“My mother, Lottie Williams, was badly beaten on ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Lottie worked for the owners of the Dalton’s Department Store in Grenada and was fired as a household maid for having marched with the demonstrators. After the marches in July 1966, we all went to the Bell Flower Church for hymn singing, reporters’ interviews, etc. At some point, Stokely Carmichael came to Bell Flower, where he was interviewed in a room behind the sanctuary by 10 or 12 reporters but he was not permitted to take his ‘Black Power’ message to the assembled throng in the main body of the church. The Bell Flower Church had a very dynamic young pastor at the time, S.T Cunningham (27 years of age), which is the reason that Bell Flower became the center for the movement’s activities in 1966 and 1967.”

Jerome Robinson and Eikenberry interviewed Eva Grace Lemon at the Senior Center in Grenada where she was the receptionist/secretary. She was one of the black children who integrated the first grade of a Grenada elementary school in 1966 – shown in a historic photograph with Martin Luther King. She said she was “very scared.” She said, “Dr. King said, ‘come on, little girl, we are going to go inside now.’ I and the other black children were repeatedly failed in our courses for the first few years and after the first year, all of the black children in the school had black teachers and the white children had white teachers.” (Eikenberry 1-10).

In determining to return to Grenada to interview activists from 1966, the biggest question I had was whether all the organizers, lawyers, marchers, court orders, etc., had made a difference in the lives of the citizens of Grenada, especially in the lives of those who participated. Would they say, on the other hand, that they had been deserted when we collectively left little more than a year later? The answer was almost universal that the town was better off, that things had changed for the better, and just about all the people interviewed felt that their lives had been changed for the better in a very substantial way. This was true of Dianna Freelon-Foster, Toll Stewart, and Gloria Williams (Eikenberry 11).

Works cited:

“Bruce Hartford – Webspinner: Civil Rights Movement Veterans.” Huffpost. Web. https://www.huffpost.com/author/bruce...

Eikenberry, Pete. “Return to Granada.” Federal Bar Council Quarterly. March/April, May 2016. Web. http://federalbarcouncilquarterly.org...

“Grenada Today.” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

“Oral History/Interview” Conducted by Sheila Michaels. Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. February 2002. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/bruce1.htm

Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi -- Grenada County Freedom Movement -- School Integration Rages On

Movement leaders put out the word that no Afro-American students are to walk to school on their own. The next morning, Tuesday the 13th, more than 100 courageous Afro-American elementary and high school students gather at Belle Flower church to be driven by Black adults willing to risk mob assault and damage to their cars. Again the white mob has the schools surrounded and again they attack any Blacks who approach, smashing car windows with baseball bats and steel pipes. State Troopers, local lawmen, and FBI agents again watch the violence and again do nothing to stop it. At least 10 kids are seriously injured and many vehicles are damaged. Yet despite the violence, a good portion of the students manage to defiantly enter the two school buildings.

A swarm of journalists and TV crews from around the world are now recording the mob's actions, and law-enforcement's inaction. Again reporters and photographers are attacked. And again the cops do finally bestir themselves to arrest someone — SCLC staff member Major Wright who is on the sidelines, observing and reporting back to Movement leaders. He's busted for "trespass." A civil rights lawyer, also there to observe, begins speaking to Constable Grady Carroll who calls down an "action team" to beat him with fists and clubs.

Meanwhile, out in the world, reports and TV footage of Monday's mob attack on school kids are being printed and broadcast across the globe. Intense political pressure from business interests both inside and outside the state is coming down on Mississippi and its Governor. Around noon, word begins to circulate that he has finally ordered the Troopers to actually protect the children. That word is passed to the mob leaders. More often than not throughout the South, violent white mobs are mobilized, influenced, and directed by the white power-structure rather than occurring as spontaneous outbursts of emotion. Such is the case in Grenada.

Obedient to command from on high, the violent throng around the schools quickly begins to dwindle down to a few disgruntled diehards.

Classes end around 3pm. Led by Dr. King who had flown down from Chicago, a hundred or so Black adults and civil rights workers march out of Belle Flower church to escort the students through the mob they assume is still lurking in ambush. Rifle-armed Troopers stop them at the barricade a couple of blocks from the two schools. They say their orders are that no one but students and parents are allowed through and promise that from now on they will prevent attacks on children. The marchers have no reason to believe them (and every reason not to), but there is no way they can force their way through the heavily-armed blockade.

The adults wait until the kids safely come out through the barricade and report that the mob has dispersed. Everyone marches back to Belle Flower together singing freedom songs and feeling victorious at having survived a second day of integrated school with pride and dignity.

That night the evening march is small, only 170 or so and as usual mostly women and children. Wounds and injuries prevent some of the regular protesters from participating and others have been frightened away by the mob. Those who do march conceal their fear behind a shield of spirited singing. When they reach the square a mob of 500 or more whites are waiting with rocks, bottles, bats, and pipes. No cops or troopers are visible. None at all — a silent but eloquent invitation to mob violence. As the demonstrators circle the green they're bombarded by a hail of thrown missiles and links of steel chain shot from slingshots.

Singing their hearts out, the marchers circle the green two or three times. Soon many are bleeding from stones and chain links. A gang of enraged whites charge into the front of the line, swinging clubs and fists. The tightly packed protesters take the blows on their shoulders and the arms they raise to protect their heads as they keep on marching. A squad of Troopers finally comes around the corner to push the attackers away and hold them back.
…

On Wednesday morning, September 14, there are still 86 children of all ages willing to brave the mob and the implacable hostility of white students and teachers. They are determined to win at all cost, to defeat their white racist enemies and not give an inch. This is not, of course, because they have some great burning desire to sit next to white children in class. Rather they are simply fed up with being treated as inferior, being told they aren't "good enough." They understand, respect, and deeply appreciate the academic fundamentals and self-pride that courageous Black teachers surreptitiously impart to their students in defiance of Mississippi's white education authorities. But they're sick and tired of having to endure the kind of "sharecropper education" that the state forces upon the segregated Colored schools.
On Tuesday, while the mob was attacking cars carrying Afro-American kids the police were carefully noting down the license plates of those driving children to school. For the rest of the day the cops harassed them with bogus citations for imaginary traffic infractions. So GCFM adopts a new strategy of marching the kids to school from Belle Flower. The march is stopped at the Trooper barricade two blocks from the schools. There are some white hecklers nearby, but no mob. None of the children are attacked as they approach the school doors. The small march to the square that night is well protected by Troopers and the waiting mob is subdued, limiting themselves for the most part to verbal abuse.

Movement lawyers had, of course, immediately complained to Judge Clayton in Oxford about mob violence thwarting his desegregation order. Classes are canceled on Thursday so that school officials can appear in federal court. The next day the judge issues a sweeping injunction ordering the county and city of Grenada and the state of Mississippi to protect children on their way to and from school. For this "intrusive federal interference with states rights" he is roundly condemned and vilified by local white politicians.

That evening there is no mob in the square waiting for the night march. It's unclear to Movement activists whether the white power-structure has gone back to its "no audience strategy" or they're having trouble keeping their mobs mobilized.

A powerful sense of achievement buoys the Movement and the Afro-American community at large. Black Grenadans have defied and endured daily assaults from raging Klan-led mobs. Now the racist mobs are gone while the Movement is still marching and Afro-American kids are still attending the white schools. On Sunday, Dr. King addresses a mass meeting jam-packed with more than 650 people. Three times the normal 200 or so participate in the night march to the square including many adults who have never marched before. Afro-Americans see it as a victory march — and so do many whites.
Over the following week some of those sent back from the white school because of paper technicalities are able to get enrolled, others aren't. As it finally settles down, out of the 450 Afro-Americans who had first asked for Freedom of Choice transfers in September about 150 end up attending the two white schools. While 150 is only a third of the original number, it is far greater than the number of Blacks attending any other integrated school in Mississippi.

On Saturday, September 18, the FBI finally arrests 13 whites on conspiracy charges for organizing and leading the mob attack on the first day of school. One of them is Judge Ayers who has jurisdiction over many of the civil rights arrest cases in Grenada.

A year later, in 1967, they are tried in federal court for mobbing school children. The evidence is overwhelming. The kids identify their attackers from the witness stand. Under oath, two white policemen give reluctant testimony against the defendants, as does the principal of the white high school. The defense arguments offered to refute the charges are pathetic, some claim they weren't there that day despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. One man who is accused of kicking a Black child in the face tells the court "The boy fell down at my feet and grabbed at my breeches — when the boy grabbed my leg I fell backward and my leg went up."

It takes only 30 minutes for an all-white, all-male jury to acquit each and every defendant on every single charge (Mob Terror 6-9).
Bruce Hartford:

Over the next week, we continue to march the kids to school (some of whom are always turned away on various excuses), and pick them up with a return march. We hear that 300 local whites have signed a statement calling for an "end to violence" — and also calling for an end to demonstrations and the Blackout of white-owned businesses.

Thursday, September 29. Pak n Sak market sues SCLC, the GCFM, three Negro churches, and all of the Negro taxi drivers for $960,000 of "lost business" due to the Blackout. They get an injunction against the Blackout.

Thursday, October 6. The 100th mass march of the Grenada Movement. We hold a rally at the courthouse in defiance of the ordinance forbidding rallies there. We leave when the police prepare to arrest us. J. McEachin is rehired as City Manager.

Over the following week we continue to hold nightly marches, but our numbers dwindle down to around 100 or so — less than half what they had been during the September school crises. People are tired, worn out.

Saturday, October 8. For the first time, not enough people show up at the mass meeting to hold a march. The march is canceled.

Over the next ten days, small marches of less than 100 are held, but twice there is no march because too few people show up.
Tuesday, October 18. Instead of a mass meeting and march there is an emergency meeting of parents to discuss what to do about the harassment the Negro children are enduring at the white schools. They are no longer being attacked by mobs outside the schools, but inside it is a daily struggle for survival and dignity. Almost half of the 150 or so who had managed to get enrolled have been driven out by physical attacks and indignities from the white students, harassment by teachers and Principals, and economic retaliation against their parents (loss of jobs, evictions, foreclosures, and so on) (Hartford 19-20).

White kids freely kick and push Black kids in the halls, throw objects at them, curse them, and call them "nigger," "jigaboo," "coon," and other insults. School authorities do nothing to curtail student behavior or protect Afro-American children. White boys are allowed to carry knives, saps, and other weapons but nonwhites are suspended for doing the same. Whenever an Afro-American student has any kind of conflict with a white, the Black is punished — by mid-October 40 have already been suspended or expelled as "troublemakers" — while the white kids get a wink and a nod from administrators and teachers.

Knowing what they face, the young Afro-American school integrators dread going to school each day. By mid-October, 60 of the 150 or so who had managed to enroll at the beginning of the term have been expelled or driven out by indignities, physical attacks, harassment by teachers and administrators, or economic retaliation against their parents. But with raw courage and determined grit some 90 or so Black children still hold out. They pick up their books each morning and walk into what has for them become the halls of hell.

Two new incidents occur on Tuesday, October 18. At Horn Elementary an Afro-American boy is sitting in the cafeteria with some white students. The principal orders him to move and sit with the other Black kids. When he refuses, the principal yanks him from his seat, ripping his jacket. At Rundle High the same day, Dorothy Allen — one of the most courageous and dedicated of the young freedom marchers — is punched by a white boy. She hits him back and is taken to the principal who orders her to bring her mother to school the following day — an indication that she is about to be expelled.

That evening, an emergency meeting of more than 100 parents discusses what to do about the violence and harassment at the white schools. They decide to send a delegation to accompany Dorothy's mother to see the principal and to ask for formal meetings between parents and teachers. Twenty of those present courageously agree to be part of the delegation. (Grit 2-3).

Wednesday, October 19. The Principal refuses to talk to the delegation or set up any future meeting. He says he will talk to any individual parent about any individual problem, but he will not meet with any group. He refuses to admit that there is any sort of continuing problem.

The mass meeting that night is well attended. It decides to try again the next day and, if there is no success, to stage a protest walkout of the school on Friday. More than 200 join the night march to the square.

Thursday, October 20. The parents again try to talk to the Principal. He refuses.

Friday, October 21. At 10am the remaining 70 or so Negro students of the white schools walk out to protest the continuing harassment. A number of students at Negro schools walk out in sympathy. Later, another delegation of parents tries to talk to the Principal and superintendent but state troopers prevent them from reaching the campus.

Saturday, October 22. All of the children who walked out are suspended from school for ten days until Nov 1st.

Monday, October 24. We stage a morning protest march of more than 200 to the white schools. When stopped by state troopers the marchers kneel down to pray. All are arrested when they refuse to disperse. Those over 15 years of age are forced into open cattle trucks and taken to Parchman Prison an hour's drive away. Some of the younger kids are shipped to Greenville jail, an hour and a half away, while others are locked up in Grenada City and County jails. The very young kids are released. More kids walk out and start boycotting the Negro schools in solidarity.

After their arrest, SCLC staff members J.T. Johnson, Lester Hankerson, Major Wright, Herman Dozier, and Bill Harris are beaten by the troopers while in custody. The boycott of the Negro schools continues to grow.

Tuesday, October 25. Another 30 people are arrested when they try to picket the white schools. Some arrestees are shipped to Batesville and Oxford jails. School boycott grows.

Wednesday, October 26. Parents make protest march to the square. Less than 100 march because so many of the activists are now in various jails: Grenada City & County, Greenville, Batesville, Watervalley, Oxford, and Parchman Prison. School boycott continues.

Thursday, October 27. Parents again march in protest. 17 pickets are arrested. Federal Judge Clayton refuses to release the detainees on a Habeas Corpus motion but indicates a deal is being worked out. School boycott continues.

Friday, October 28. Police release all those under 18 years old on their own recognizance (that is, without bail). Others have been bailed out, leaving about 15 still in jail. The SCLC staff who were arrested remain in jail.

By now, all but a few hundred of the 2600 Negro students in Grenada County are boycotting school in sympathy (Hartford 19-21).

By this time, 2200 of the 2600 Afro-American students enrolled in the Colored schools are boycotting classes. White school officials are, of course, pleased that the 90 remaining school integrators are both refusing to attend and under suspension. But having over two thousand Black kids out of school is a serious problem because funding from the state is based on average daily attendance so the student strike is costing them money. And having such a large number of angry youth roaming free on the streets and potentially joining the ongoing protests and marches worries local authorities.

On Saturday, October 29, all those remaining in jail are finally bailed out but white terrorism is again on the rise. SCLC project director J.T. Johnson and SCLC staff member Robert Johnson are shot at by a hidden sniper — fortunately his aim is poor and no one is hit. Some 160 people participate in the march to the square that night. …

…

On Monday, October 31st, Judge Clayton begins hearing the GCFM complaint about the school situation. …

…

… on Monday, November 7, Clayton issues his order. Parents and students are prohibited from demonstrating at the schools or organizing boycotts. Under threat of contempt, the school system is ordered to treat everyone equal regardless of race and to protect children from "violence, intimidation, or abuse." The superintendent is ordered to set up meetings between parents and teachers. A complaint system is put in place to handle disputes. While this is not a total triumph, it is seen by both Blacks and whites as a victory for the Freedom Movement.

On paper, Clayton's ruling appears fair and reasonable but as with so many federal court orders in the South it fails to take into account the grim realities of racism, violence and intimidation that Afro-Americans in Grenada face. Under the details of his order, before Black parents can bring a complaint to him they have to first meet with the teacher to ask for resolution, then if that fails meet with the principal, and after that the superintendent. In real life, however, it requires an act of defiance and courage (and time off from work) for an Afro-American parent to confront any white person in authority over any complaint or grievance. And complainers are marked by whites as "troublemakers" and "shit-disturbers" who become targets for retaliation.

So as a practical matter, Clayton's fine words have only limited effect on reducing abuse in the white schools. The harassment continues. On December 20, Freedom Movement lawyers Iris & Paul Brest and Marian Wright send a report to the parents of the school integrators:

Lawyers from our office spent Friday and Saturday speaking to many of the children still attending the formerly white schools in Grenada. And this is what we found. The Court's order requires the schools to protect your children "from violence, intimidation, or abuse." Your children tell us that in the last month-and-a-half, they have been subjected to all sorts of violence, intimidation, and abuse:

•Every day white students kick and push your children, throw papers and spitballs at them, curse at them and call them names. Often this happens when a teacher is present, but the teacher does nothing to stop it.


•One child was so badly injured when a white boy threw a metal object at him that he was hospitalized at Mound Bayou, and may require further treatment.


•White students bring knives, brass knuckles, and other weapons to school. At least one white boy has actually pulled a knife on a Negro child. Some teachers and other school official continue to abuse the Negro students by calling them "niggers," and by making other derogatory comments.


•At least one teacher has explicitly urged the white students to inflict physical harm on the Negro students.


•Some teachers continue to make the Negro students sit together, in a segregated group.


•Some teachers refuse to allow Negro students to recite in Class, and ignore them when their hands are raised.


•Some teachers grade the Negro students unfairly, giving them low grades even when they do well.


•Several Negro students have been suspended because of arguments or fights with white students; the whites were not suspended.


•All the Negro children who were suspended from school during the week of October 24, were failed in all their courses for the second six-week period.

…

At the end of November, all of the Afro-American school integrators who had walked out of the white schools and been suspended in October are given "Failing" grades for that period. But criminal charges against those under age 13 who had been arrested for marching or picketing are dropped. Those over 13 plead "Not Guilty," with no date set for trial.

By the end of the school year in June of 1967, additional Black students have been forced out but Grenada still has more Afro-Americans attending formerly white schools than any other rural county in Mississippi.

At the same time, over the winter, arrests, sporadic violence, and intimidation continue in Grenada but at a much lower level than during the summer and fall. Occasional marches to the square are held with 75-200 people, but daily, sustained direct action protests are no longer feasible. The SCLC staff and the hard core of local activists are physically and emotionally exhausted from long hours, constant tension, little sleep, and no small amount of fear. They try to keep going on raw rage, grit, determination, and an utter refusal to let each other down, but by the end of 1966 they are debilitated and "running on fumes" as the saying goes. A description that equally applies across the Deep South to most of the other long-term freedom riders from SCLC, SNCC, and CORE who are still doing Movement work and just barely hanging on (Grit 8-9).


Works cited:
“Grit & Determination, Courage & Pride (October 6-November 7).” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

“Mob Terror and the Courage of Children (September 12-19).” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi -- Granda County Freedom Movement -- Back to Violence

Bruce Hartford narrates.

It becomes clear that although our numbers decreased slightly, the "no audience" campaign has failed to stop our marches. The power structure apparently decides to go back to violence.

Friday, August 5. There is a fund-raising party in the Tie Plant neighborhood with SCLC's Freedom Singers. Around midnight, troopers and police surround the Collins Cafe were the party is being held and block all the roads leading into the area. They shoot tear gas into the cafe and arrest as many people as they can on various charges such as "drunk & disorderly" and so forth. About 50 people are arrested.

Saturday, August 6. New demands related to police brutality and state repression against protesters exercising their First Amendment rights of free speech are added to the demands made on July 9.

Monday, August 8. Federal Voter Registrars open an office at the Chat & Chew Cafe on Union Street in the Negro community. (They had previously had an office in the basement of the Post Office, but the aura of fear and violence hanging over the downtown area kept everyone away and they had registered only 22 people in two weeks.) Over 300 people are registered the first day, including many who were finishing up the registration process started at the courthouse but not completed because of the double-registration trick (Hartford 1).

White power-brokers are furious. To them, shifting the registrars into the Afro-American community is evidence of sinister collusion between defiant Blacks and a hostile federal government. They clearly understand that large numbers of Afro-American voters will inevitably doom the continued domination of traditional Jim-Crow-style white-supremacy. …

And in city and county-wide elections Blacks might end up holding the balance of power between competing white candidates. If that came to pass, sooner or later whites challenging incumbent office-holders would begin advocating policies and offering concessions aimed at winning the support of Black voters — thus ending the complete exclusion of Afro-Americans from all aspects of political power. … (Battle 2).

A night voter rally is held in front of the Registrars new offices. The police order us to clear the streets. We do, but continue the rally on the sidewalk and yard. The police attack with tear gas, and beat people with their billy clubs. About 20 people are injured.

Tuesday August 9. Another voter rally is held in front of Chat & Chews. A mob of whites gather at the corner of Commerce (Hiway 51) & Union St. — a quarter block from Chat's. With around 280 folk, we start to march up to the square but are attacked by the mob. The troopers reluctantly clear a path and we continue uptown.

When we reach the square we find it occupied by 700 or so whites, with about 400 of them on the green where we usually hold our rallies. No Grenada police are in evidence. "Now you're going to see a show," Sheriff Suggs Ingram tells Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times.

Under a bombardment of cherry bombs, rocks, and bottles we manage to reach the North side of the green (Hartford 11).

As the marchers approach the central green they come under a bombardment of hurled bricks, rocks, bottles, and exploding cherry bombs. March marshals do what they can to knock the flying missiles aside and dodge incoming. "Hold tight, hold tight," they shout over the massed singing. "Keep moving! Keep moving!"

Suddenly a band of the whites on the green charge against the marchers, trying to break their line and scatter the protesters so that individuals can be surrounded and beat down. Shrieking rage, they attack with steel pipes, baseball bats, and flailing clubs. "Niggers! Kill the niggers! Kill 'em! Kill 'em!"

"Hold tight, hold tight," the march marshals shout. "Keep moving! Keep moving! Don't hit back! Sing! Sing!" The marchers don't really need such instructions, by now they're all experienced protesters. But tight packed against each other with their heads down and faces pressed for protection against the person in front of them they can't see what's happening around them and the shouted commands let them know the line is still intact and discipline holding.

More whites charge in with bats and clubs. The marchers cannot reach the green. Nor can they hold their ground in the street. Under vicious attack they are forced to retreat. The 50 or so State Troopers watch with interest but do nothing to deter the white violence. From bitter experience the marchers know the cops are waiting for some tiny sign of defensive-violence by a protester that the lawmen can then use as a pretext for arresting these defiant Blacks who are daring to challenge white supremacy.

Under heavy attack, the march falls back to the intersection of Green and Doak streets at the northwest corner of the square and then begins retreating up Green towards Pearl Street in good order, taking their injured and wounded with them. The column remains solid, and their spirited singing continues to psychologically repel the hate. One of the lawmen throws a tear gas bomb into the line. With the mob still hounding them, it's too dangerous for the protesters to scatter so they have to hold their breath as they stride through the poisonous fumes.

As the racists begin to follow the marchers out of the square and up Green Street, the Troopers finally bestir themselves. They form a line across the road between the tail end of the march and the howling mob. With their rifles and shotguns resting upright on their hips they face not the violent whites behind them but rather the retreating protesters in front of them — a posture that clearly declares to all that they see themselves as protecting the square and white-supremacy from defiant but nonviolent Afro-Americans demanding justice. Which, of course, is exactly the case. From behind the Troopers, the whites continue to hurl their missiles at the protesters over the heads of the lawmen for as long as the marchers remain in range

Some of the marchers are bruised and bleeding, but just one person needs hospital care— testimony to the effectiveness of nonviolent discipline and training that has carried 280 protesters, mostly women and children, through attack by a violent mob of more than 750 racists.

The next evening, Wednesday, August 10, the Movement rallies yet again outside Chat's on Union St. Again a white mob forms at Union & Commerce, this time armed with large slingshots that they use to shoot exploding cherry bombs, lead fishing sinkers, and sharp links of steel chain over the heads of the troopers and into the rally — missiles that draw blood and might put out an eye. Half a dozen people are injured, though none seriously.

The march to the square that follows, however, is strikingly unusual. After the bloody assault of the night before it is noticeably smaller, less than 250, but it is almost entirely made up of adult Black men who have turned out to face mob violence in place of their mothers, wives, sisters, and children. This is extraordinary. Throughout the South, Afro-American men are the most vulnerable to white violence, police vengeance, and economic retaliation — far more so than women and kids. It is Black men who are most often lynched or assassinated by the Klan, it is they who are arrested on phony charges and sentenced to years in prison. And it is Afro-American men — family breadwinners — who are most likely to be fired from their jobs if they participate in a protest.

But on this night, in this small Mississippi town, these Black men are determined they will not be driven off the square by white violence. They will not retreat from the green. They have told the women and kids to stand aside so they can step up. They understand and accept the necessity of nonviolence, some reluctantly so, others with more commitment. They are ready to endure whatever they have to in order to resist — nonviolently. To enforce this, Afro-American SCLC staff members move through the crowd before the march begins, collecting knives and a few pistols that some of the men have brought with them (Battle 4-6).

Thursday, August 11. The Grenada City Council passes an ordinance forbidding any gatherings on the green. (Earlier in the month the police had resurrected an old ordinance forbidding gatherings at the courthouse, but since voter registration is now being done at Chat & Chew's the courthouse is no longer our focus.)

There are few white hecklers — apparently the "no audience" strategy is being tried again. The night march tries to get on the green but is blocked by a line of police.

Friday, August 12. We decide to make a test-case of the green ordinance. While the march circles around the green, 18 volunteers try to get on the green. They are repeatedly shoved off by the cops and eventually seven are arrested. As the rest of the march begins to leave the square, the line of troopers charge us, hitting people with their rifle butts. Half a dozen marchers are injured, including Emerald Cunningham, a 14 year old girl who had polio and is unable to run or dodge. The troopers beat her in the back with their rifles.

Harassment arrests increase. Twenty or more people are arrested on various charges over the next weeks. The nightly marches no longer try to hold rallies on the green (because of the ordinance) but instead we circle around the green singing freedom songs.

Sunday, August 21. Last attempt to integrate church services. After being refused we put up picket lines at the Baptist and Presbyterian churches.

Monday, August 22. The usual night march. It seems to us no different than any other march.

Wednesday August 24 — Sunday, August 28. Voter registration, Blackout picketing, mass meetings, and night marches continue.

Monday, August 29. This is the first day to pick up and fill out "Freedom of Choice" forms for the court ordered school desegregation. In the morning, 300 students and parents march to the Negro high school to pick up the forms (Hartford 12-15).

… the Civil Rights Act in 1964 requires cutting off federal funds from segregated school systems. Without those federal dollars, southern politicians would have to either close schools or significantly raise taxes — neither of which would sit well with white voters. So most of them reluctantly realize they have to begin accepting at least a few Afro-Americans into all of the formerly white schools.

Yet they remain committed to retaining their separate and unequal duel systems — one white, one "Colored." For the ruling elite, it's not just that they want to limit social mingling between the races, it's also a matter of restricting as many Afro-Americans as possible to the kind of "sharecropper education" that limits them to menial, low-paid and highly-exploited occupations like field hand and domestic servant. To ensure that the federal dollars continue to flow from Washington while simultaneously keeping the great majority of Black students in segregated schools, they devise Freedom of Choice plans. Under such plans, parents are "free" to choose which school — white or Colored — their children are to attend. Everyone knows, though, that Afro-American parents who choose a white school face firings, evictions, foreclosures, boycotts organized by the White Citizens Council, and violent terrorism from the Ku Klux Klan.

Since few Black families can risk losing their job, home, or business (to say nothing of their lives), white political leaders across the Deep South are confident that just a few Black children will enroll in formerly all-white schools. Those few will then face harassment and humiliation by administrators and teachers — and implacable hostility and abuse from the white students who outnumber them hundreds-to-one. Unrelenting pressure on Afro-American students and their families can then be counted on to force many (in some cases all) to "freely choose" to withdraw from the white school and go back to the Colored school.

Such Freedom of Choice plans allow southern whites to piously claim they no longer practice racial discrimination and that Afro-Americans simply don't want integration because they are "freely choosing" to send their children to the segregated Colored schools. Since Afro-Americans are no longer legally required to attend Colored schools, officials argue they are in compliance with the Civil Rights Act and therefore should continue to receive federal funds. From 1964 until 1968 when Freedom of Choice plans are finally ruled illegal they effectively perpetuate segregation in public school systems across most of the South).

Grenada is one of the die-hard segregationist strongholds that has adamantly refused to allow any school integration at all despite Brown and the Civil Rights Act. Which is where matters stand when the Meredith March and the 20th Century arrive in June of 1966.

The newly-formed Grenada County Freedom Movement asks the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to file a lawsuit demanding that Grenada cease operating its still completely segregated white and Colored school systems. Presented with an open and shut case of flagrant violation of both Brown and the Civil Rights Act, federal judge Clayton quickly rules that Grenada schools have to be desegregated forthwith — by September!
The Grenada school board responds with a Freedom of Choice plan — no doubt expecting to end up with just a handful of Black children attending the two white schools. But Grenada now has a powerful and well-organized movement to support Afro-American parents, assist them in resisting intimidation, and provide timely legal aid. And SCLC's Washington office stands ready to make sure that both the Justice and Education Departments diligently enforce federal law.

On the morning of Monday, 29 August, some 300 Black students and parents led by the GCFM march together en masse to pick up the "choice" forms. By Thursday, September 1st, some 450 Black kids have turned in forms choosing to attend the white schools. That's an enormous number — not just for Mississippi but for the entire Deep South where most white schools still have less than a dozen Afro-American students (if they have any at all).

Whites in Grenada are aghast — and enraged. Hecklers begin returning to the square to harass the nightly marches for the first time since the voter-registration violence two weeks earlier. Day by day, the number of hostile whites shouting hate and fury rapidly increase. Though tension is clearly rising, few police or troopers are present.

Segregationists use the ten day delay to wage a fierce campaign against Black parents to coerce them into withdrawing their children from the two white schools. Some parents are fired from their jobs, others evicted from their homes. Black families and Movement activists are plagued with racist phone calls filled with curses, obscenities, and explicit death threats. Most Afro-Americans respond by quickly hanging-up, but men who listen to the call are treated to graphic descriptions of how they will be castrated with rusty razor blades and Black women are regaled with detailed descriptions of the brutal, savage rape soon to be inflicted on them. This campaign of racist intimidation and retaliation is clearly being organized and orchestrated — by someone but it's not clear who. Klan? White Citizens Council? Elected officials?

To counter it, and to support students and parents, marches to the square are doubled to twice a day, afternoon and evening. Day after day and night after night 200-300 courageous activists march and march again. Day after day, night after night the mobs grow larger and angrier, hurling objects and attacking with fists, bats, chains, and steel pipes. Though cops and Troopers are under court orders to restrain violence and protect demonstrators from mob attack, their reluctant, half-hearted, and pro-forma gestures in that direction are clearly no more than a pretense. Neither the mob nor the demonstrators take them seriously — Afro-Americans are on their own (School Crisis 1-5).

Monday, September 12. First day of school. A huge white mob surrounds Grenada's elementary and high school. Equipped with two-way radios, they bar all approaches. Radio-equipped scouts in pick-up trucks search for Negro students (grades 1-12) coming to school and direct the mob to attack them. There are few police in evidence and they do nothing to halt the violence. Some cars carrying Negro children manage to drop the kids off, but others are blocked. The majority of the 250 or so students are walking to school in ones and twos and they are set upon by the roving bands of whites who beat them with clubs, chains, bullwhips, and pipes. This is not a spontaneous mob, this is a military-style action organized and led by the KKK (Hartford 16).

Some of the cars carrying Black children manage to drop their kids off, others are blocked and attacked by the mob who smash windows with baseball bats and steel pipes and then batter those inside. There are few police in evidence and they do nothing at all to halt the violence. A contingent of riot-equipped State Troopers loiter around the corner. FBI agents stand by taking notes. They make no effort whatsoever to enforce the federal desegregation order, or the Civil Rights Act, or the U.S. Constitution, or to protect innocent children from brutal attacks. When asked by a reporter what they are doing one replies that they are "investigating" to, "determine whether any federal laws or court orders had been violated."

The majority of the 250 or so students who are still determined to integrate the white schools come from the Northside Afro-American neighborhood around Belle Flower church where the Freedom Movement has its strongest base. Most of them are walking to school in ones and twos. They are set upon by roving bands who beat them with clubs, chains, bullwhips, and pipes. A white woman trips Richard Sigh (12) with her umbrella, men kick him and beat him with pipes, breaking his leg at the hip. Another young boy is forced to run a gauntlet of cursing men, blood sheeting down his face. "That'll teach you, nigger," yelled one of the whites attacking him. "Don't come back tomorrow!" A white woman watches a gang of men whip a pig-tailed elementary school girl. A reporter overhears her murmur to herself, "How can they laugh when they are doing it?"

Braving the danger and violence, almost a third of the 250 Black kids manage to make it into the temporary safety of the school buildings. For some reason, the mob doesn't follow them inside — possibly out of concern that in narrow building corridors white kids might accidentally be injured by their violence.

The remaining Afro-American children, bruised, bleeding, and terrified, retreat back to Belle Flower church which now resembles a war zone first-aid station more than a place of worship. In a total failure of foresight, SCLC has made no preparations for anything like this at all. Other than singer Joan Baez and nonviolence advocates Ira and Susan Sandperl who are volunteering in Grenada to support the Movement, there are no outside observers. Nor are there any MCHR volunteer doctors or nurses on hand to care for wounded. SCLC staff and parents have to pitch in with emergency first-aid ferrying the badly injured to a hospital in the all-Black town of Mound Bayou more than an hour distant (Mob Terror 1-2).

Less than half the 250 children manage to reach the schools, the rest, bruised, bleeding, and terrified retreat back to Bellflower Baptist church which now resembles a battle zone first-aid station more than a place of worship.

News reporters and photographers, white and Negro, are also viciously set upon. They too, bloody and battered, fall back to the church. …

Around 9:00am, SCLC staff members lead the children [who had fled to the Baptist church] in a march to try to reach the schools as a group and all are savagely attacked. Emerald Cunningham, who walks with a pronounced limp, can't run fast enough to escape. She is beaten down in the street, kicked, and clubbed with an iron pipe. A Klansman puts a pistol to her head and threatens to kill her if she dares go to the white school. The police who are watching the whole incident laugh. Emerald and some other children are hospitalized, as are some of the SCLC staff.

At noon the schools let out. The mob is still outside, waiting for the Negro children who had managed to get inside that morning. Before school is turned out, the teachers call all of the white girls to the office where they wait in safety. The Negroes (boys and girls) and the white boys are then dismissed into the mob. The Negro children trying to leave the schools are beaten and three more are hospitalized (one with a broken leg, one with fractured skull).

Singer Joan Baez and nonviolent activists Ira and Susan Sandperl are in Grenada to support the movement. They join SCLC and GCFM activists who are trying to rescue the kids and protest the inaction of the police. They participate in the marches and share the danger over the coming week. Lula Williamson is arrested for "assault" (because the white woman had attacked her with an umbrella the night before on the march) and held on high bail (Hartford 16-17).


Dianna Freelon Foster was going into the eleventh grade in the fall of 1966 when the civil rights community decided it was time to integrate the public schools. Every night, hundreds of people would gather at a church near the courthouse square to sing freedom songs, pray and preach. Then, in the power of the Holy Ghost, they would march to the courthouse and take a stand for civil rights. And when morning came, the first day of school, hundreds of black children had the audacity to show up at the all white schools of Granada, Mississippi.

“We walked into the school the first morning, ” Dianna remembers, “and the first thing I noticed was how beautiful it was–nothing at all like the black school I had been attending. It was a very tense atmosphere and you had the feeling something was wrong. Then, one by one, all the white girls were called to the office. I remember thinking ‘there was no way all those white girls can fit in that tiny little office’.”

When all the white girls had left the building, the black girls were informed that the school was closing for the day. “We walked out the door,” Dianna recalls, “and all I could see was a bunch of white men, some of them sitting in the branches of the trees, and they were all carrying weapons: baseball bats, tire irons, that sort of thing. We tried to rush back into the school but the principal locked the door on us. That’s the thing that really hurt me–that a human being could do something like that–locking us out when he knew we were in danger.”

“We were walking with a male student and we were trying to get to the church, because that’s where we felt safe and strong. Then the men surrounded us. They were pushing and prodding us girls, but it was the boy who received the real beating. They would have left us pretty much alone, but every time we tried to help our friend who had been horribly beaten, they’d start beating us up too. I guess I blocked it all out of my mind. For a long time I didn’t remember much about it. But then, years later, I talked to my mother and my brother, and they told me how awful it really was” (Bean 1-2).

A huge white mob fills the square waiting to attack the nightly march. The state troopers promise that if we don't march they will protect the children the next day. In return for that promise we agree to cancel the march. We don't trust the troopers, but half the kids are still determined to go to school the next day (the other half are too terrified), and we have to do whatever we can to provide for their safety. (Hartford 17-18.)


Works cited:

“Battle for the Ballot (Mid July-August 14).” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...


Bean, Alan. “The Day Dianna Freelon Foster Refuses to Forget.” Friends of Justice. Web. https://friendsofjustice.blog/2011/11...


“Black Students Attacked While Integrating Schools in Grenada, Mississippi.” Clarksdale News. Web. https://clarksdalenews.com/2-day-in-c...


Hartford, Bruce. “Grenada Mississippi—Chronology of a Movement.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/info/grenada.htm


“Mob Terror and the Courage of Children (September 12-19).” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...


“The School Crisis (August 29-September 11).” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

Civil Rights Events -- Grenada County Freedom Movement -- Giving No Quarter

As you drive through Grenada's 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 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. Negroes are not permitted to enter the library. White women work behind the desks and cash registers of downtown Grenada, Negro women push the mops and scrub the floors (Hartford 1).


When the marchers arrived in Grenada on June 15, 1966, City Manager John McEachin explained the situation 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.”
It didn’t work. The morning after an impassioned sermon by Dr. King, 200 people marched to the courthouse to register to vote. An American flag was set up next to the Civil War Memorial on the square. When the March Against Fear continued south, the registration fight continued (Bean 1).

When the Meredith March ends in Jackson on June 26th, SCLC sends additional staff bcak to Grenada as King had promised — including national-level SCLC leaders like Hosea Williams, Andrew Young, and Dr. King himself who splits his time between Grenada and the Chicago Freedom Movement's ferocious battle for open housing.

A cramped and busy Freedom Movement office is set up in Belle Flower Missionary Baptist Church on Pearl Street close by Highway-51. Belle Flower (sometimes referred to as Bellflower or Belle Flowers) is said to be the 3rd oldest Black church in Mississippi. As the newly-formed GCFM battles against adamant opposition from whites who are determined to return the Jim Crow racial order of the past, Belle Flower becomes the site of nightly, sometimes twice-daily, mass meetings.

And with City Manager McEachin's scheme to ease the Meredith March through town without any local challenges to white authority now proven to be an utter failure, the hardliners who favor Mississippi's traditional "knock 'em in the head and toss 'em in jail" methods of social control regain ascendance. Violence, arrests, and billy clubs are the new order of the day.

On July 4th, SCLC workers and local activists are invited to a barbecue in the rural Sweethome area by an Afro-American woman posing as a Movement supporter. Once they arrive, she calls Sheriff Suggs Ingram and 27 are arrested for "trespass" in what is obviously a set-up. Three days later, on Thursday July 7, a march protesting those arrests is broken up by the cops and more than 40 are arrested for violating a local "parade ordinance" (SCLC 1-2).

Thursday, July 7. At a mass meeting in Vincent Chapel, it is decided to stage a protest march that evening. The march is broken up by the police and 43 are arrested for violation of a parade ordinance (Hartford 3).


With most of its staff now languishing in jail, SCLC calls in reinforcements. By early July, the number of SCLC staff in Grenada is fluctuating between 10 and 15, almost all of whom are Afro-American. At a mass meeting on Saturday the 9th, the GCFM votes overwhelmingly for a campaign to make Grenada an "open city" — the terminology of the day that means a complete end to all forms of segregation. The GCFM presents 51 demands to the white power structure including desegregation of public facilities, Afro-American voter registrars with evening and neighborhood registration, and equal employment by government and private business.

Testing teams of Black high school students are sent to lunch counters & restaurants, the public library, the city swimming pool, and other previously segregated facilities. Most comply with the Civil Rights Act and serve these new Afro-American customers, but the swimming pool permanently closes rather then integrate. Sporadic heckling and threats of violence from white bystanders breaks out at a couple of locations.

The open city campaign continues for weeks with integration testing and lawsuits filed under the Civil Rights Act against non-complying establishments. The swimming pool remains closed because the thought of white girls and Black boys in close proximity to each other while wearing nothing but swimsuits is simply unacceptable to white adults. Other than that, the campaign is largely successful — at least in the technical sense that Afro-Americans willing to defy white hostility and the threat of later retaliation can demand, and receive, service at most establishments without being arrested. As a practical matter, however, most Blacks choose not to run such risks, so the custom of race segregation in Grenada remains largely — though not entirely — intact.

Later that Saturday afternoon, after the mass July 9th meeting, a white man in a pickup truck opens fire with a machinegun on a pair of civil rights workers who are talking to a Justice Department official next to Belle Flower church. They drop to the ground and the assassin misses, though the official's car is shot full of holes. The shooter is arrested a few blocks away and eventually tried on an unrelated minor charge. He is later acquitted by yet another all-white jury.

On Sunday the 10th, small integrated groups try to attend Sunday services at various white churches. Not a single Christian church allows an Afro-American inside to pray. None of the white SCLC staff accompanying them are allowed to enter either. Similar integration attempts are made on following Sundays for several weeks — all to no avail. No Blacks (or white Freedom Movement supporters) are allowed to worship with white Grenadans.

Meanwhile, most of the activists arrested on the July 7th march are still incarcerated and awaiting bail, so after church services a support rally is held outside the county lockup. Since the parade ordinance still bars organized protests, 50 or so demonstrators "drift" toward the jail in small groups from Belle Flower church. When the signal is given they quickly gather around the flagpole flying the "stars and bars" of the Mississippi state flag and begin singing freedom songs as loud as then can so the prisoners inside can hear them. The jail is adjacent to the Northside Black community, and a couple hundred Afro-American onlookers cheer the protesters from the sidelines.

Black kids too young to risk arrest as demonstrators act as freedom scouts. They report that a big force of Mississippi State Troopers in full riot gear are forming up behind the building. The rally quickly disperses, some participants returning back to Belle Flower, others joining the bystanders observing from across the street. When the platoon of shotgun-armed Troopers charge around the corner they find no protesters to attack. So they turn their fury on the crowd of bystanders peacefully observing from across the way, brutally assaulting them with rifle-butts and billy clubs — many are injured (SCLC 2-3).

Bruce Hartford, SCLC leader observed: (As a general rule in Grenada, the troopers preferred to beat folk with their rifles, while the city cops and sheriffs favored the more traditional billy clubs.) (Hartford 4).

At the Monday evening mass meeting on July 11, the GCFM votes to declare a "Blackout" (boycott) of Grenada's white merchants to protest the beatings, the arrests, and to enforce the 51 demands.

…

On Tuesday the 12th, civil rights lawyers persuade Judge Clayton of the federal district court in Oxford MS to declare the parade ordinance unconstitutional. Both Afro-Americans and whites see this as a Freedom Movement victory. Blacks respond with joy, whites with fury at federal "meddling" in their affairs. With the ordinance struck down, small teams begin picketing and leafletting the downtown stores to enforce the Blackout.

White political leaders publish the Movement's 51 demands in the local paper with a statement claiming that no one in Grenada racially discriminates and asserting that: "Demands, threats and intimidation are not proper, appropriate, or acceptable means of accomplishing anything, and any and all such tactics will be ignored. There will be no concessions of any type whatsoever, likewise there will be no acceding to any such demands."

On Wednesday the 13th, a large boycott picket line is mounted in the downtown area. All 45 of the protesters are quickly arrested on charges which are not explained. One activist comments, "It's like the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, arrest first, figure out charges later." Though the protesters are eventually bailed out, SCLC is short of funds so large picket lines are discontinued in favor of small picket teams. Small groups might be harassed or attacked by whites but they're not always arrested. And even if they are jailed, the amount needed to bail them out is less.

In response to the escalating repression, an afternoon mass meeting is held on Thursday the 14th — followed by a mass march.

[Large marches were an important Movement tactic. While enraged whites might spontaneously assault a small picket line, the social psychology was such that big marches were — for the most part — only vulnerable to attack by even bigger mobs incited to violence by Klan or Council leaders with the cooperation, or at least acquiescence, of the cops and courts. And Blacks who had good reason to fear that public support for the Freedom Movement put them at risk of economic retaliation by whites were often more willing to participate in a mass action where they were just one more face among many than in smaller more individually visible actions.]

Led by Hosea Williams of SCLC, some 220 Black Grenadans march from Belle Flower church up to the square to protest the Trooper attack and the increasing number of arrests. By some measures 220 people may seem small, but for a small town with only few thousand Afro-Americans of high school age or older, that so many defy a century of social conditioning and the very real threats of economic retaliation, police repression, and Klan violence is significant.

This is the first big march since the parade ordinance was struck down. Previous actions with 40 or 50 participants resulted in arrests and the demonstrators are tense, expecting at any moment to be confronted by the cops. But it turns out to be the first large action since the Meredith March that is not broken up by police violence or arrests.

When the marchers reach the town square and move on to the central green they discover that a dozen or so Black inmates from the notorious Parchman Prison have been brought in to "protect" the Confederate Memorial statue from "defilement" and "desecration."

Carefully watched by heavily-armed white prison guards, the inmates are under orders to physically assault any civil rights protester who approaches the monument. The prison guards, local cops, and white bystanders smile, and grin, and joke in anticipation of seeing Black prisoners compelled to attack Afro-American freedom marchers in defense of a memorial to Confederate soldiers who had died fighting to maintain slavery.

Understanding the terrible punishment that would be inflicted on the inmates if they refused to do as ordered, march leader Hosea Williams instructs the protesters to leave them and the statue alone. The rally is held at a distance from the memorial and its coerced defenders.

…

After another large afternoon march on Friday, a meeting of Grenada's tiny Black business & professional strata pledges to endorse the GCFM. As in other rural areas of the Deep South, the Afro-American middle class is made up mostly of teachers, ministers, and small business men & women (store owners, morticians, insurance agents, barbers & beauticians, and so on). While most local freedom movements in the south have backing from some members of the Black elite, such broad support among those who have the most to lose from economic retaliation by whites is unusual, attributable perhaps to both the breadth and power of the Grenada Movement and the influence of SCLC leaders — all of whom are themselves from that class.

As is the case elsewhere in the South, formal leadership positions in the Grenada Freedom Movement are held by men, but most of the actual leadership work is done by women outside the spotlight. Day after day, local leader Rev. Sharper Cunningham and senior SCLC staff like J.T. Johnson lead the marches, but women and children form the bulk of the protesters. As is also the case elsewhere in the South, the majority of those marching are high school students with girls outnumbering the boys (Square 1-4).

Bruce Hartford: July 15 we hold our first successful night march. We know that night marches are dangerous because racists can attack from cover of darkness — but more people can participate because it's after working hours. We start with 250 from Bellflower, go up around the courthouse, and then over to Union Street in the Negro section near Bellflower. There we hold a street rally. By the time we get back to the church there are more than 600 people on the march.

This establishes a pattern that is followed every day for the next three months: A mass meeting in the evening, then a night march to the square with either a rally at the courthouse or on the green (Hartford 9).

Day after day the marches and organizing continue. The cops are no longer blocking the big marches but they're continuing to harass and arrest boycott pickets. On Wednesday the 20th, Freedom Movement lawyers appear before Judge Clayton in Federal District court asking that police interference with lawful picketing and protests be halted. Two days later on Friday the 22nd, the judge issues a sweeping injunction commanding the white power-structure to accept that Afro-Americans have First Amendment rights, ordering the cops to stop interfering with legal protests, and instructing them to protect demonstrators from terrorist attack.

At the same time, the judge also issues a set of conduct rules that Movement protesters must obey. Under his order, singing is not allowed in residential areas, marchers have to walk two-by-two on the sidewalks or by the side the road, and obey all traffic rules. Large marches have to be broken into groups of 20 people with 20 feet separating each section. Since the marches were already obeying traffic rules GCFM leaders and lawyers accept his order without demurral — except when a march comes under mob attack at which point everyone closes up tight for protection and the judge be damned.

The white community reacts in fury to Judge Clayton's injunction. It's hard to tell who they hate more, the "Damn Yankee" federal government daring to tell them how to treat their "nigrahs," or the racial troublemakers challenging the tranquility of the Jim Crow "southern way of life." The judge and other federals, however, are distant targets protected by armed law enforcement. Protesters from the GCFM are not only nonviolent, but near at hand.

On Saturday evening, July 23rd, a large mob of 700 or more angry whites gather on the square to attack the nightly freedom march. Young Movement scouts spot cars with license plates from known KKK strongholds like Neshoba County and the Pearl River & Natchez areas of Mississippi and Louisiana. Such large mobs don't form spontaneously, someone with political clout has to organize and mobilize them, though no one takes public responsibility for doing so. The mob is made up almost entirely of white men who are visibly armed with clubs, baseball bats, steel pipes, chains, and knives.

Though the mob members are not brandishing firearms, the freedom scouts reporting back to Movement leaders in Belle Flower church assume they have hidden guns. Everyone gathered for the evening mass meeting understands that Grenada County Sheriff Suggs Ingram has no intention of protecting them from white racists who are his voting constituents. Not on that night. Not ever.

The normal Mississippi practice is to station one or two State Troopers in each rural county, but since the beginning of July the Grenada contingent has been reinforced to a couple of dozen troopers who had been ordered to suppress protests and enforce the recently overturned parade ordinance. Now under court order to guard rather than attack Black marchers, the Trooper commander tells Movement leaders he has been "caught by surprise" at this "unexpected" hostile mob. He claims he doesn't have enough men to protect a march, but he promises that if this night's protest is canceled he will bring in reinforcements to protect demonstrations on the following nights.

Movement leaders don't trust him, but they agree to cancel the march for this night only. When the mob realizes no one is going to walk into their ambush they began advancing down Pearl and Cherry Streets toward Belle Flower church where the mass meeting is being held. To their credit, the Troopers hold them a block away so they can't attack the church.

On Sunday the 24th, another huge mob of whites is mobilized by persons unknown to throng the square. Estimated by newsmen at over 1,000, again they are armed with clubs, bats, and chains. Again the Troopers claim they don't have enough men on hand and ask that this march too be canceled. Knowing that continued surrender to intimidation will simply encourage more mob threats, Movement leaders refuse.

Some 200 frightened but determined protesters march two-by-two out of Belle Flower church into the darkness. Demonstrators in Grenada normally sing exuberantly, but on this night they are uncharacteristically silent as they proceed up the dark, unlit Pearl Street towards the downtown square and the violent mob that awaits them.

As the lead marchers turn down Green Street and enter the square they are greeted with furious shouts of "Niggers! Coons! Commies!" and "White Power!" Only a handful of Troopers plus a few cops and deputies are visible. Many of the local lawmen are socializing with members of the white mob whose screams of hate intensify as more and more of the protesters come into view. The lack of strong police presence — and the attitude of those few who are present — is itself an eloquent invitation to mob violence.

But instead of crossing the street onto the central green for the usual rally, the marchers take the whites by surprise, quickly striding past the courthouse and then turning right on 1st Street to exit the square before the mob realizes what's happening. The racist throng gives chase, but again — and again to their credit — a thin line of Troopers block them from following and attacking Belle Flower church. Furious, the mob turns its hate on the newsmedia, attacking reporters, photographers, and TV crews with clubs and chains and smashing cameras. Which results in a new wave of negative publicity for Grenada and Mississippi in the Monday morning press and news broadcasts (Square 5-6).

As is typical for most Grenada marches, the majority of the demonstrators are students (usually about half the total number) and a third are adult women, along with a handful of adult men and SCLC staff members. Though men — ministers mostly — form the visible leadership of the movement, its backbone and core are women and kids (Hartford 9).


In reaction to Monday's bad press, state and local "racial moderates" demand that the state enforce law and order against violent white mobs. An entire company of Troopers is sent to Grenada. They announce that mob rule won't be tolerated. "Moderate" local white leaders chime in, urging whites to avoid the square and ignore Freedom Movement protests. They tell their constituents that if they deprive the press of dramatic newsworthy events — such as mob violence against reporters and cameramen — the media will leave. And they promise that without national publicity in the northern media, Afro-American protests in Grenada will dwindle away to nothing — leaving the old order of tranquil white-supremacy restored.

By that evening, the new "no audience" strategy has begun to take hold — the white mob in the square waiting to attack the freedom marchers is no bigger than 500 — less than half the number of the previous evening. With the Troopers out in force and clearly on guard, some 220 or so protesters are able to march around the green under aerial bombardment of rocks and bottles but without being physically assaulted by bat-wielding thugs.

On Tuesday the 26th, no more than 100 whites show up and the Grenada Freedom Movement resumes nightly rallies on the green. By Wednesday the general pattern of daytime boycott picketing, nightly marches to a square now empty of hostile whites, followed by a rally on the green or a voter registration rally in a Black neighborhood reasserts itself (Square 6-8).

During the week following the resumption of rallies on the square and the power structure's "no audience" campaign, the police make a series of harassment arrests for alleged traffic violations, disturbing the peace, and other trumped up charges. SCLC staff member R.B. Cottenreader is arrested for "touching" a white lady while picketing, four people in a car are arrested for being in the intersection when the light changes to yellow, and so on.

During this period, bogus "Boycott Over" leaflets mysteriously appear in the Negro communities. People are not fooled, and the Blackout continues.

It becomes clear that although our numbers decreased slightly, the "no audience" campaign has failed to stop our marches. The power structure apparently decides to go back to violence (Hartford 10).


Works cited:

Bean, Alan. “Making a stand in Grenada.” Friends of Justice. Web. https://friendsofjustice.blog/2010/12...

Hartford, Bruce. “Grenada Mississippi—Chronology of a Movement.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/info/grenada.htm

“On the Square (July 11-August 6).” ).” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

“SCLC Returns to Grenada (June 26-July 10).” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

Civil Rights Events -- Meredith March against Fear -- Completion, Assessment

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...