Harold Titus's Blog, page 22

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...

Civil Rights Events -- Meredith March against Fear -- Canton, Return to Philadelphia

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


On Thursday the 23rd, the Meredith marchers leave Benton and head east on Route 16 for the long 20 mile slog to Canton, the seat of Madison County. Still seething over the brutality in Philadelphia, as they trek across Yazoo County they share a fierce determination to defy violent racists by refusing to back down one inch when threatened by the forces of white-supremacy.


Madison County is 70% Afro-American. Like the Delta counties, most of its Black population are poor laborers, croppers, maids and menials who eke out an existence in grinding poverty. Whites make up less than a third of the population, but through denial of Black voting rights and organizations like the White Citizens Council they still maintain complete control of the political apparatus and they use their white power to keep wages low and working conditions abysmal. Almost 40% of the land is owned by Blacks, but rampant discrimination by the Department of Agriculture which denies them the crucial cotton allotments and federal subsidies that enrich white landowners, and other forms of economic domination by whites has kept Afro-American farmers mired in systemic poverty.


Canton, population 10,000, is the seat of Madison County. Some 60% of its inhabitants are Black and for years both town and county have been centers of CORE organizing. Though it's a racist stronghold, local leaders like C.O. Chinn, Annie Devine, and James McRee, aided by CORE field secretaries like George Raymond, Anne Moody, and Flukie Suarez have built a solid base of Freedom Movement support. When CORE began organizing there in 1963, almost 97% of whites were registered to vote but only 121 Afro-Americans were on the voting roles. Now, significantly, Black voters outnumber white voters in Madison County by 6000 to 5000. In addition to voter registration, the Madison County Movement has fought for school desegregation, mounted an effective economic boycott against white-owned stores, defended the rights of welfare recipients, and established an early childhood education center (Canton 1).

The movement in Madison County relied on the leadership of several key persons. C. O. Chinn, a local business owner known for his fearlessness, provided his store as a space for meetings and protected other activists from violent attacks. George Raymond, a former freedom rider from New Orleans, provided much of the strategy for the Canton movement, serving as the only staff member when the first CORE office opened in the county in 1963. Anne Moody, a Tougaloo College graduate later known for her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, spent Freedom Summer 1964 in Canton. Annie Devine, a well-respected teacher and insurance saleswoman who was intimately familiar with the workings of both Canton’s black and white communities, provided essential leadership and later served as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention (Walton 3).

By afternoon, hundreds of Madison County Afro-Americans, many of them now registered voters, are joining the march in the sweltering heat as it crosses over the Big Black River and approaches the outskirts of Canton. It's just two days past the summer solstice, the sun rises at 6am and doesn't set until after 8pm, and it beats down on the weary marchers for 14 solid hours.


McNeal Elementary School for Negroes is in the heart of Canton's Black community. Annie Devine asks the school board for permission to set up camp on its playground. School is out of session for the summer and at first the board makes no objection. Then they equivocate. Then they say the field is only for "school-sponsored events."

Despite the board's rejection, Local leader C.O. Chinn and Hosea Williams of SCLC proclaim that since Jim Crow schools are paid for by Afro-American taxes all they need is permission from the surrounding Black community which they clearly have. "This is our ground," says Chinn. "We're going to put up the tents or else. We're tired of being pushed around by white folks."

The cops arrest Chinn, Williams, George Greene of SNCC, three white and five Black marchers — one of whom is beaten, kicked, and called "nigger boy" by the sheriff.


Late in the afternoon, a long line of singing marchers parades through town to the courthouse where a big crowd of 1500 local Afro-Americans greet them. They triumphantly surge on to the lawn — long forbidden to Black feet — for a rally. Stokely tells them, "They said we couldn't pitch our tents on our Black school. Well, we're going to do it now!"


As they proceed through the Afro-American community towards McNeal School, more and more Afro-Americans join them. The dirt school yard is only partially fenced and no police block the way as more than 3500 people simply walk on to the grounds like a flowing river. But off to one side lurk a large posse of lawmen from different jurisdictions in their various uniforms. They're all equipped with helmets and those who aren't carrying rifles and shotguns grip long billy clubs in their gloved hands.


By now it's 7:30, a half-hour before sunset. A big U-Haul truck arrives to drop off the tents and people are asked to surround it so the tents can't be seized by the cops. A caravan of Highway Patrol cars pull up in a cloud of dust to unload a company of more than 75 Troopers in full riot gear. They assemble in battle formation upwind of where the tents are being unloaded and begin doning their black gas masks.


March leaders climb onto the top of the truck and speak through a bullhorn. When King speaks it's clear that he assumes the police intend to arrest people for trespass as had happened to Chinn, Williams and the others earlier that day. "We're gonna stick together. If necessary, we are willing to fill up all the jails in Mississippi. And I don't believe they have enough jails to hold all the people!"


"The time for anybody running has come to an end!" shouts Stokely from atop the truck. "You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead! You tell 'em they shot all the rabbits — they gonna deal with the men!"


Many of the local supporters cautiously retreat off the field, but 2,000 or more defiantly remain — as do all of the Meredith Marchers. "Pitch the tents!" chant militant activists circulating through the crowd around the truck. "Pitch the tents! Pitch the tents!"


SCLC’s Bruce Hartford narrated what followed.


Without any warning at all or order from the police to disperse there came the loud sounds of Pop! Pop! Pop! Burning, stinging gas was everywhere. A white cloud enveloped me, blinding me with tears. My lungs burned with searing pain. I couldn't breath. I thought I was going to die. Everyone was running, choking, gasping, fleeing in all directions, bumping into each other in the blinding miasma.
A gas canister fired from a shotgun hit a woman near me and exploded — she screamed in agony but I couldn't see where she was. Some kind of hideous monster with a long black snout — a cop in a gas mask, I realized — abruptly materialized out of the fumes and smashed the butt of his rifle into my shoulder, knocking me to the ground. Someone tripped over me before I managed to get up and continue trying to escape. Every gasping breath was agony. My chest burned, my eyes gushed tears.
More cops appeared and disappeared in the acrid, stinking smoke, flailing with their clubs at anyone and everyone. I could hear the sickening thuds of wood striking flesh, and I must have been hit several more times because the next day I had long, dark, aching bruises on my back and side. At the time, though, I didn't feel the blows at all. An adrenaline rush can often block out pain — for a short while."


Both regular CS tear gas and the more powerful military-grade CN war gas are fired into the throng. Normally, police use tear gas to herd protesters out of an area, but the Troopers blanket the entire field leaving no avenue for escape. Crowd control is not their objective — their purpose is to punish the Meredith March for challenging the southern way of life and defying white-supremacy.




Some of the marchers try to take shelter against the school building's brick wall until a local cop lobs three gas canisters right into them. So-called lawmen knock down the tent poles and then toss tear gas bombs under the collapsed canvas to gas those now trapped beneath. "You niggers want your freedom — well, here's your freedom," a cop yells at Odessa Warwick, a mother of eleven as he kicks her, fracturing her spine.


Marchers are overcome by the fumes, passing out where they fall. Heads are bloodied and bones broken by rifle butts and billy clubs. A young boy coughs up blood, a four year old child fights to breath. Trying to aid the victims, MCHR medical worker Charles Meyer is clubbed down and kicked into a ditch. A woman is dragged down by her long blond hair. One-legged Jim Leatherer is brutally beaten, Troopers continually kick a young Black man who is on the ground vomiting uncontrollably. Another trooper smashes a priest with his shotgun and a marcher cries out, "He's a man of God!" "I'll put him with his God," shouts the Trooper as he hits the priest again.


Stokely Carmichael:


I took a direct hit in the chest from a canister and was knocked to the ground. Semiconscious and unable to breathe; my eyes tearing. My ribs felt as though crushed. Gas in my lungs was always my weakness. ... Choking for breath, I could hear screams, shouts, and Dr. King calling on people to remain calm amid the sickening thud of blows. They were kicking and clubbing people lying on the ground to escape the gas. Men, women, children, it made no difference. Then they were gone, leaving us to tend the wounded. So obviously it had simply been a demonstration of naked brute force for its own sake (Canton 2-4).
Jo Freeman, a white volunteer:
“My whole body felt blistered; my scalp felt like every hair was being pulled out one by one, and my lungs as though I was inhaling molten steel” (Weisbrot 2).


By sundown, the school grounds are cleared of protesters except for those too injured or overcome by gas to move. In the Afro-American community around the periphery of the McNeal grounds protesters and bystanders are all suffering from the after-effects of chemical attack and in many cases injuries and wounds from rifle butts and billy clubs.


A small child convulses on the floor of his home across the street from the school. His frantic mother grabs him up and runs outside desperately searching for help. "Lady, give him to me!" shouts a marcher. "I just got back from Vietnam, and I know what to do for him." The ground is muddy from the garden hose people are using to wash out their eyes and rinse the burning reside from their skin. He washes out the boy's eyes and then grabs a handful of mud, coating the child's face with it.


The emergency aid resources of MCHR are overwhelmed. Many of its volunteers are among the injured and incapacitated. Dr. Poussaint rallies his team to set up an emergency triage point in the Holy Child Jesus Mission with the nuns doing what they can to ease suffering. He phones for help to Jackson just 30 minutes down the road. From there, funeral director Clarie Collins Harvey directs Afro-American owned hearses to Canton where they act as makeshift ambulances carrying the worst injured to a Jackson hospital willing to treat Black protesters. All through the night, MCHR workers and the nuns labor to treat the victims of a brutal police riot.


Poussaint would later tell an interviewer, "We were all enraged. There was just so much rage." Stokely has to be restrained by friends from a futile charge into the police line. Rev. Andrew Young of SCLC, normally a calming presence, later recalls that with gas burning his lungs and eyes he thought to himself, ""If I had a machine gun, I'd show those motherfuckers!" Yet he manages to subordinate his anger to strategic realities and talk down a SNCC militant who is urging people to assault the heavily-armed Troopers and set fire to their cars.


Boiling fury engulfs Canton's Afro-American community and the Meredith Marchers. Some Black residents grab their guns and have to be pulled back from suicidal retaliation. His eyes still burning with tears, Dr. King manages to assemble those march leaders who can be found for an emergency meeting at George Raymond's home just a block from McNeal. Soon march marshals and local leaders are out on the night-dark streets urging people to assemble at a nearby church where the Meredith Marchers can grab some food, the injured be directed to the MCHR aid station, and local folk rally in the adjacent Catholic Mission's basketball court.


Bruce Hartford, SCLC, explained the marchers’ counter-response.


We would march that night through Canton's Afro-American neighborhoods to express our defiance and provide a nonviolent channel for the community's rage. ... Along with the other SCLC staff, I was given a colored armband and assigned to act as a march marshal, keeping people moving, defusing trouble, and maintaining nonviolence.


… Five or six hundred of us marched out of the church onto the unpaved and unlit roads of Canton's Afro-American community. This wasn't an on-the-sidewalk or avoid-blocking-traffic march. Instead we filled the streets singing and calling bystanders to come join us. Block by block our numbers grew as people joined us, but in the dark it was impossible to estimate or count how many were marching.


Some of the ultra-militants and the most strident Black Power advocates called for people to go downtown and "get whitey," others shouted that we should challenge the cops who were still guarding the disputed schoolyard. Fortunately, they had little support. Marshals like me urged the marchers to hold together and maintain nonviolent discipline. Most of the marchers were local folk with a solid grasp of Canton's tactical realities and they heeded our call.
Seething with anger, for an hour or more we surged through the dark streets, defiantly singing our freedom songs and chanting "Black Power" and "Freedom Now!""


A year earlier, when Alabama Troopers savagely attacked voting rights marchers in Selma, the world, the media, and the national political establishment reacted with outrage and determination. But now in the new political context shaped by violent urban uprisings, the "white backlash," media-hyped hysteria over Black Power, and the Freedom Movement's efforts to address issues related to economic justice and northern-style segregation, the media response to Canton is sparse and ambivalent.


After Selma, President Johnson addressed the nation and pushed the Voting Rights Act through Congress. About Canton he says nothing. Nothing at all. He refuses to meet with a delegation of ministers who want federal protection for civil rights protesters in Mississippi. The Attorney General's response is tepid, he "regrets" the use of tear gas and adds, "I'm sorry it happened. It always makes the situation more difficult." He then assures the public that he is confident Mississippi authorities will protect the civil rights of Afro-Americans in their state (Canton 4-6).


After a few short hours of exhausted slumber on the hard floor of the Holy Child Jesus basketball court, the Meredith marchers awake bruised and battered the next morning, Friday the 24th. Their clothing is still impregnated with chemical residue of the gas attack and their eyes sting and tear. Local Afro-American women have been laboring since dawn in the church kitchen to provide the Meredith Marchers a breakfast of hot coffee, bacon, grits, and biscuits smothered in gravy. As they wolf it down the marchers huddle in organizational staff meetings to be briefed on the plan that march leaders working late into the night have agreed on.
The tactical situation is complex. …


To ensure maximum participation by local Blacks the [march’s culminating] rally [in Jackson] is scheduled for Sunday the 26th two days hence, and out-of-state supporters have made travel plans accordingly. So the rally date can't be changed to accommodate surprise events such as the violence in Philadelphia and the gas attack in Canton. Which means that a march contingent has to depart from Canton on this Friday to be sure of reaching Tougaloo on time.


After the mob violence in Philadelphia MS, Dr. King promised to return on this Friday for a second protest in Neshoba County. One that will express the anger and defiance of local Blacks and show that the Freedom Movement cannot be halted by mob violence. Movement supporters from both Mississippi and Alabama are already on the road and Black communities in Neshoba and Lauderdale counties are mobilizing. If King doesn't show up now it will appear he is surrendering to fear of white violence — which he will not do. So King and a sizable contingent of marchers from Canton have to drive east to join the Philadelphia march.


Local Afro-Americans and the Meredith Marchers in Canton, of course, are still enraged over the gas attack and savage beatings of the evening before. And just as white violence in Neshoba can't be allowed to deter the Movement neither can police repression be allowed to do so in Canton. Which means that in addition to marching south towards Jackson and protesting in Neshoba there has to be strong direct action this day on the streets of Canton.


Albert Turner of SCLC is chosen to lead a small contingent of Meredith Marchers south on Highway-51 towards Tougaloo, while a larger contingent fills the available cars to accompany Dr. King, Floyd McKissck, and Stokely Carmichael to Philadelphia and the largest group of marchers and local folk remain in Canton for a day of action.
In a telegram to LBJ sent immediately after the violent outbreak in Philadelphia, Dr. King cited the "Clear and absolute breakdown of law and order in Philadelphia." And in reference to the planned return march he added, "We therefore implore you to send the necessary federal protection to Philadelphia, Miss. to protect the lives and safety of the citizens seeking to exercise our constitutional rights."


After the Philadelphia violence, a delegation of clergymen asked for a meeting with LBJ to press for federal protection and a thousand Movement supporters rallied in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. Johnson, however, is unwilling to forgive King's opposition to the Vietnam War. And with the Meredith March manifesto explicitly condemning federal civil rights failures, as a matter of practical politics he can't use the march to further his own legislative agenda. Nor does he want to be seen as in any way siding with "Black Power" militancy. So the clergymen were turned aside and the protesters outside ignored.


The President rejects King's plea for federal protection replying that, "Personnel of the Department of Justice will be present" (as they had been on the first occasion). And in willful denial of self-evident realities he goes on to tell King that, "Governor Paul Johnson has assured [us] that law and order will be maintained Friday in Philadelphia and throughout the march, and that all necessary protection can and will be provided."


The mob violence in Neshoba and the horrific police assault in Canton pleases and gratifies many white voters in the state, boosting Governor Johnson's public support. But behind the scenes the state's power-structure remains split between hard-line segregationists determined to restore the old Jim Crow order with club and gun and self-described "racial moderates" who want to bring northern investment and business opportunities into Mississippi.


Across the state, affluent white businessmen desire lucrative national franchise opportunities like Burger King, Holiday Inn, 7-11, and the like, but those chains now insist on full compliance with the Civil Rights Act because they know they face consumer boycotts in the North if they tolerate segregation in the South. Yet any business that tries to operate on a desegregated basis in Mississippi faces economic boycotts by the White Citizens Council and possible Klan violence. …


On the previous Philadelphia march, State Troopers had been conspicuous by their absence but on this day they are out in force. Many of them had been part of the brutal attack the evening before in Canton but now they have new orders from the governor to maintain law and order and prevent the kind of lynch-mob violence that damages the state's reputation.


A newspaper editorial and radio announcements by local white leaders urge whites to ignore the march and refrain from ugly violence "[even though] "we know it is hard to take a lot of the lies, insults, and actions of beatniks who are worked up to fever pitch by their leaders with sessions of 'prayer.'"


When the marchers reach the downtown area, the sidewalks bordering the paved streets of white-controlled Philadelphia are again lined with hostile, jeering whites, men and women held back by flimsy rope barriers strung up by law enforcement. Those on the sidewalk jeer, curse, and spit at the marchers while others lean out the second story windows shrieking hate. State Troopers, however, do hold the mob at bay. When the Black protesters reach the courthouse the mayor uses a bullhorn to warn surrounding whites against violence.


Local leader Rev. Clint Collier opens the rally with a prayer and a freedom sermon: "We have been dictated to long enough," he tells the demonstrators. From the rear of the jeering crowd of whites glass soda pop bottles are hurled at him. In his short address Stokely says: "The people gathered around us represent America in its truest form. We will start representing ourselves in our way, and we will do it in our way." True to his nature, Dr. King offers a positive message of hope: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice and "We're gonna win, because the Bible is right when it says, 'Ye shall reap what ye sow.'"


"Go to hell!" scream the mob of surrounding whites, "Nigger! You're a nigger! Wait till tonight, you black bastards, we'll find you then! We're gonna kill King! We're gonna kill King!" Their rage is palpable, yet the police presence holds violence in check.


As the marchers return to Independence Quarters a white man guns his engine and attempts to drive his car into the line — protesters manage to dodge out of the way at the last second. The Troopers then arrest him and his passenger. But in that instant of swirling action and confusion, Neshoba County lawmen draw their pistols and point them at the demonstrators rather than the vehicle trying to run them down.
…
Rather than wait to join the caravan of Meredith Marchers returning to Canton, a car with three white ministers from the North and a Black NAACP official from Memphis decide to leave the rally early. Alone.


Their route takes them across Leake County where in response to the Meredith March, the local KKK has just bombed the St. Joachim Catholic School for Negroes. They are now patrolling Route-16 for marchers traveling between Philadelphia and Canton and a car with an Afro-American and three whites in cleric collars is an obvious target. A pickup truck driven by Klansmen tries to run them off the highway but the freedom car dodges. The KKK truck then blocks the road ahead while another car driven by Klan tries to ram the integrated vehicle. Somehow they manage to escape, turn around, and flee back towards Philadelphia at high speed with the KKK in hot pursuit until they reach Independence Quarters where armed Blacks stand on guard (Return 1-4).


In Canton on Friday morning the local Afro-American community continues to seethe over the savage police riot of the previous evening. Crowds gather early at Asbury Methodist Church and the adjacent Holy Child Jesus Mission. Everyone is determined to take strong action — but there's no agreement over what that action should be.


Local Movement leaders call for renewing the 1964 boycott of downtown Canton's white-owned stores with the slogan, "Black Out for Black Power." And also a day of disciplined, nonviolent protest as a show of determination and defiance. The white merchants of Canton are particularly vulnerable to boycotts by their Afro-American customers because they're in direct competition with the larger, more numerous, and better-stocked stores in Jackson just 30 minutes down the road — which is one reason the previous boycott had hurt them so badly.


Soon local members of the Madison County Movement are downtown, handing out boycott flyers, picketing stores with boycott and Black Power signs, and tying up traffic by slowly crossing the street at a leisurely pace. A voter registration march to the courthouse is blocked by the cops. A second march is allowed to proceed, but only on the sidewalk, not in the streets. When they arrive at the courthouse they are told that the clerk is "out to lunch." Some 50 or so Black citizens then add themselves to the voting rolls by registering with the federal examiner under the Voting Rights Act (VRA).


Bruce Hartford recalled:


… more than 500 chanting and singing marchers were snaking through the streets of Canton. In the Black neighborhoods we walked two-by-two on the side of the dirt roads next to the drainage ditches and in the white neighborhoods on their well-kept sidewalks. Marching into white areas was a bold and defiant move, a decisive declaration that rejected the deferential subservience of the past and a gesture that risked spontaneous violence from enraged whites. ... I remember nervous rumors passing up and down the line — that a parked car we were about to pass concealed a dynamite bomb, that in the next block they had a pack of dogs waiting to attack us, that the old white woman scowling at us from her porch had a big pistol hidden under her apron as she rocked back and forth on her rocker and that she'd sworn to shoot anyone who stepped on her lawn.


None of the protests, however, approach McNeal Elementary which remains guarded by heavily armed Troopers who have now stationed rifle-equipped snipers on the roof and erected searchlights to pick out targets after nightfall. The local power structure and police forces remain adamantly opposed to Blacks using the school for any Movement purpose. Yet almost all of those boycotting, picketing and marching — local movement and Meredith Marchers both — are determined to return to the schoolyard and defy the cops by pitching a tent. Some are collecting donations to buy new tents, others are trying to sew together bedsheets for a symbolic, make-do tent. "Come hell or high water," Movement activists tell each other, "a tent's gonna go up tonight."


For both sides now, the right of Afro-Americans to use McNeal has become a make-or-break symbol. Even though Blacks are marching and picketing all over the streets of Canton, white politicians can't accept Afro-American use of a Colored school for a protest-purpose because doing so concedes the point that Black taxpayers have the same legal right to access public facilities for public politics that whites have enjoyed for generations. Moreover, having denied permission the previous day, allowing Afro-Americans to protest there now would be an obvious concession, a retreat of white power forced by growing Black power. Which in turn clearly implies that henceforth elected officials must take Afro-American concerns into account. In essence then, Afro-American use of McNeal has become a practical clash between the traditional dominance of white power and the Freedom Movement's demand for Black Power.
…


Living in Canton is Colonel Charles Snodgrass, the state-wide commanding officer of the Troopers — an appointed rather than elected position. He breaks the impasse by inviting Madison County Movement leaders to a meeting in his office, the first such official meeting between the Movement and white authorities ever held in Canton. He offers other camping sites, but George Raymond replies that after the savage brutality of his Troopers the Black community needs to see tents go up at McNeal.


Local, state, and national Movement leaders assemble for an emergency summit meeting in the sweltering, jam-packed living room of Afro-American store owner George Washington. …


The meeting is tense and contentious. Stokley and Chinn argue for pitching the tents regardless of consequences. But Devine, Goodloe, and King convince the group to accept an invitation arranged by Snodgrass for a Black delegation to meet for the first time ever with the Mayor and city attorney. At that meeting a compromise agreement with the white power-structure is worked out. The Madison County Movement can hold a political rally on the school grounds — a tactical win for Black political power; and by forcing recognition from white politicians and establishing a precedent of communication and consultation it's a strategic victory as well. But no tents can be erected — a concession to property rights and white power. …


Shortly before sunset, more than 1000 local Afro-Americans and a couple hundred Meredith Marchers pack the Holy Child Jesus basketball court for a mass meeting. Most are determined to defy the Troopers by setting up a tent at McNeal. Speaking for the Madison County Movement, Annie Devine begins by saying "We're going to the schoolyard," but before she can complete her thought the crowd roars approval and rushes out into the street to form up for a march to McNeal.


Singing and chanting, the crowd surges forward and steadily grows in number. Marchers find garden hoses to soak towels and handkerchiefs in case of tear gas. Rumors spread up and down the line, Troopers with machineguns ahead, attack dogs seen at the school, busses waiting to haul protesters to Parchman Prison. No one knows what lays ahead but everyone's determination and courage are at the peak.


When they reach McNeal, the Troopers have distanced themselves, the snipers are gone from the roof and the searchlights dismantled. But there are no tents to set up. Mrs. Devine and others try to explain the compromise, but many of the marchers, probably a majority, feel let down and betrayed. With their expectations dashed, some grumble "We've been sold out." Others shout, "Get the tents!" But there are no tents for anyone to get.


Discouraged and disgruntled, the marchers return to the basketball court for a mass meeting with reporters barred (an unusual occurrence). Local leaders argue their case that recognition by elected officials and opening up communications represented a significant step forward and that another bloody confrontation would be a setback. To fierce approval, Stokely and other militants condemn the compromise of a rally without the tents. Rev. James Lawson who had attended the leadership meeting that accepted the deal, counters that no one proposed any way to pitch the tents without another savage attack by the Troopers, "You are as much to blame as anyone else," he tells Stokely. "You should have been prepared to suggest how it could be done."


The divided and impassioned mass meeting drags on until 2am, leaving some feeling bitter and betrayed, others seeing in the compromise a partial victory won without another round of police violence, no one hospitalized with injuries, and no one shot to death (Streets 1-4).


Works cited:


“Canton: Tear Gas & Rifle Butts, June 23.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


“On the Streets of Canton Mississippi, June 24.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


“Return to Philadelphia MS, June 24.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


Walton, Becca. “Canton Civil Rights Movement.” Mississippi Encyclopedia. Web. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/e...


Weisbrot, Robert. “Remembering the March Against Fear.” Colby Magazine. Summer 2014. Web. https://www.colby.edu/magazine/rememb...

Civil Rights Events -- Meredith March against Fear -- Yazoo City, Civil Strife, Philadelphia

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


… as the marchers trek through the muggy heat from Greenwood to Belzoni and thence to Louise, Stokely's call for "Black Power" has created a sensation in the press and consternation among white liberals. No one is surprised that the white-owned southern media reacts to "Black Power" with predictable outrage over the threatened end of the social norms that shape their white identity and sense of God-granted privilege. Nor that most of them see it as a confirmation of all their worst, fever-fear imaginings of Black vengeance and anti-white violence. What's new is that significant sectors of the northern "liberal" media echo those southern themes — as does even a portion of the Black-owned press.

…

Again and again, the mass media equates Black Power with a call for Black violence. Newspaper columnists and TV pundits express fear that the slogan will inevitably inflame northern ghettos into summer explosions even larger than Harlem and Philadelphia in '64 and Watts in '65. …

On Sunday the 19th, Stokely appears on Face the Nation, the premier talk show of CBS. The panelists confront him again and again with statements and questions like:

Q: This would seem to imply that you are advocating taking power by force and violence — by the overthrow, in effect, of the government. Is that what you mean?
Q: Mr. Carmichael, do you reject the ultimate use of violence as a final last resort in bringing down the power structure?

Q: How can you not reject violence and be the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee?

Q: Are you telling us that the Negro can riot and take over? What do you mean by Black Power? Are you saying the Negro can take over parts of the country?

…

Stokely deftly avoids either endorsing or opposing violence on the part of Blacks, arguing instead that it is up to oppressed people themselves to decide for themselves the best tactics and strategies to end their subjugation. He defends the right of Afro-Americans to enjoy and employ political power the same way that the Irish, Jews, and Italians have done. He focuses on building up Afro-American economic power, and in black-majority regions developing third-party political organizations that are independent of the white-dominated Republican and Democratic Parties — as in Lowndes County, Alabama. Yet so focused are they on their own assumptions, his establishment interlocutors don't hear what he's actually saying. It's as if they are in two completely separate conversations.

Some months later, Dr. King described the media's coverage of Black Power:

The press kept the debate going. News stories now centered, not on the injustices of Mississippi, but on the apparent ideological division in the civil rights movement. Every revolutionary movement has its peaks of united activity and its valleys of debate and internal confusion. This debate might well have been little more than a healthy internal difference of opinion, but the press loves the sensational and it could not allow the issue to remain within the private domain of the movement. In every drama there has to be an antagonist and a protagonist, and if the antagonist is not there the press will find and build one.

…

Though disconnected from the media frenzy, the Meredith marchers still passionately argue and debate Black Power from their own perspectives. Disputes are intense and at times bitter and angry — particularly between members of SNCC and SCLC. Chants of "Black Power" and "Freedom Now" increasingly become antagonistic battle cries used to drown out, dominate, and defeat the other side. So much so, that the most extreme proponents seem to be on the verge of physical violence against each other — in full view of the national press who are eager for ever more dramatic stories of internal dissension (Controversy 1-2).

Days of marching in the muggy heat and the debilitating effect of internal dissension reduces the number of non-local marchers. On the morning of Tuesday the 21st, just 60 or so men and women head south from Louise on state Route-149 for the 17 mile trek to Yazoo City.

Situated on the southern edge of the Delta, Yazoo City is a racist stronghold that has resisted the Freedom Movement for years. Though Afro-Americans are a majority in Yazoo County, barely more than 10% are registered to vote. Yet as the marchers cross over the Yazoo River bridge into town their number is doubled by an enthusiastic crowd of local Black youth who give the protesters a warm welcome.

As with Grenada a week earlier, Yazoo's white power-structure adopts a conciliatory, "no-confrontation-in-front-of-the national-press strategy." They urge local whites to avoid the marchers and refrain from heckling and acts of violence — instructions that local whites accept and obey. Yazoo is not unusual in the control that the powers-that-be have. As elsewhere throughout the South, while the KKK and similar organizations are on occasion a law unto themselves, most of the time white violence is — to a significant degree — controlled and directed by power elites who either encourage or discourage it as they choose.

Police officers escort the marchers along Broadway and Main Street … to the municipal recreation center where they allow a tent encampment. Though they've drained the public swimming pool to prevent any interracial swimming, the city makes the pool showers available — a welcome and needed refreshment for marchers who have been slogging through the summer heat for days.

Matters, however, are quite different 100 miles to the east in Philadelphia MS, the seat of Neshoba County, where for the past several days CORE and MFDP [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party]organizers have been mobilizing for a protest march and memorial to commemorate the 2nd anniversary of the Chaney-Schwerner-Goodman lynching. During Freedom Summer just two years earlier, on June 21st 1964, the three civil rights workers had been detained and held in jail by local lawmen who then turned them over to a KKK death squad for execution.

Since then, against great odds a local Freedom Movement has been built in Philadelphia and Neshoba County. Courageous Blacks have registered to vote, filed desegregation lawsuits, protested intolerable conditions and launched an economic boycott of white merchants to demand police reforms. But the same sheriff, deputies, and power-structure that orchestrated the lynching remains firmly in power. They are determined to maintain the Jim Crow, "southern way of life" with economic reprisal, legal repression, and racist violence — white racial "moderates" hold no sway in Neshoba County.

Local Movement leader Rev. Clint Collier who is running for Congress as an MFDP candidate has been fired from his job as a public school teacher, been beaten by whites for trying to buy a cup of coffee at a segregated diner, and arrested and thrown in jail because of his civil rights work. Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Price, the architects of the Chaney-Schwerner-Goodman lynching continually threaten Afro-Americans who fail to "stay in their place." As do their Ku Klux Klan allies.

While most of the Meredith marchers head towards Yazoo City, Dr. King and a small group of SCLC and CORE members drive over to Philadelphia from Louise to join local Blacks, supporters from Meridian, and MFDP activists from around the state in the memorial and commemoration march. They all gather at Mt. Nebo Baptist Church in the "Independence Quarter" — Philadelphia's main Afro-American neighborhood.

After a brief mass meeting, Dr. King and Rev. Collier lead 200 marchers out of Mt. Nebo Church towards the county courthouse. Though local law enforcement has known about the memorial march for weeks, only a dozen or so poorly-trained and ill-equipped cops are on duty — and their sympathies are clearly aligned with white-supremacy. No Deacons for Defense are present because they're guarding the marchers who are trekking towards Yazoo City. Some FBI agents and Justice Department officials are on hand, but as usual they self-limit their role to taking notes rather than actively upholding federal law or defending the constitutional rights of Afro-Americans.

Singing "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around," the marchers approach the small "downtown" district where a large crowd of furious whites screaming hatred wait for them. Cars driven by hostile whites charge at the protesters, forcing them to jump aside. Rev. Abernathy of SCLC leads a brief memorial prayer at the county jail where the three men had been secretly held before they were handed over to the KKK lynch mob. Against the noise of the jeering whites and their honking car horns almost no one can hear him. A furious white man attacks a TV camera crew. The local cops smile, grin, and do nothing.

"Freedom Now! Freedom Now!" chant the marchers in defiance. "You done killed our boys! But we on the march and ain't turnin' round. Ain't nobody gonna turn us 'round. You cain't turn us 'round!" shouts a Black woman at the white hecklers. Another Afro-American woman sees her white employer screaming hate at her, "Yes! It's me and I've kept your children," she shouts back.

On the steps of the Neshoba County Courthouse, King and Abernathy confront Deputy Cecil Price who had played a central role in the lynching. "You're the one who had Schwerner and the other fellows in jail," says King. "Yes, sir," responds Price with pride in his voice.

The 200 marchers at the courthouse are mostly Afro-American with a scattering of white supporters. They are outnumbered two or three to one by the surrounding mob who hurl exploding cherry bombs at them. "I am not afraid of any man. Whether he is in Mississippi or Michigan, whether he is in Birmingham or Boston. I am not afraid,” preaches King as firecrackers explode around him (Ordeal 1-3).

In his book Bearing the Cross author David Garrow described the scene. “Heckling from the whites almost drowned out King’s words, and newsmen looked on nervously as he spoke prayerfully about the three young men’s sacrifice. ‘King appeared to be shaken’ as the whites’ shouts grew more vociferous, and his voice quavered when he declared that ‘I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment’ while Cecil Price smirked only a few steps behind him. ‘You’re damn right, they’re behind you right now,’ Price muttered” (False 4).

Ignoring the white violence erupting all around them, Deputy Price suddenly grabs local leader Rev. Collier and throws him to the ground, declaring him under arrest for prior traffic tickets. Bruce Latimer, the Chief of Police, orders the protesters "Now you better GIT!"

Under a fizzled of firecrackers, rocks, and bottles the march retreats towards the safety of Independence Quarter. An elderly Afro-American marcher falls out of the line and collapses, suffering an epileptic seizure. MCHR nurse Dorothy Williams hovers over him, protecting him from hostile whites armed with clubs and knives while she tries to ease his suffering. Somehow she manages to get him into a truck driven by a Movement supporter but then she's grabbed and surrounded by the mob until a volunteer leaps from the truck and drags her over the tailgate as the vehicle races off under a hail of missiles.

Meanwhile, back at the courthouse, fights break out between whites armed with ax-handles and knives and Afro-American onlookers who had been watching the protest. Finally, with the protesters now gone, the police exert their authority and command a halt to the violence.

King tells a reporter, "This is a terrible town, the worst I've seen. There is a complete reign of terror here," He has no idea that within a month he will face far worse white violence during fair housing marches in the Chicago suburbs. So much so that he will then tell another reporter, "I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I had never seen, even in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as in Chicago."

The marchers who retreat to Mr. Nebo Church are battered, bruised, frightened, discouraged — and determined to continue fighting for their freedom. Dr. King promises that in three days time, on Friday June 24, he will return to lead an even larger march back to the Neshoba County courthouse. One that will defy white supremacy and racist violence and make evident to all that the Freedom Movement won't back down. He and Abernathy then bravely return to the Neshoba County courthouse to bail out Rev. Collier before harm befalls him. Cecil Price glares at Collier and tells him, "We'd like to work you over, and we would have worked you over if that crowd hadn't been out there. And we will work you over yet" (Ordeal 4-5).

Interviewed by Eyes on the Prize in 1988, SNCC activist Cleveland Sellers made these comments.

Philadelphia was the area where Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney had been killed, the summer of '64 and it was an area that, that I personally had been in because I went in there to try to look for the bodies in the summer of '64. And, we felt a kind of, of bitterness about Philadelphia because we knew that they were murdered but there was not going to be any justice done. So we felt like we needed to go back to Philadelphia even though the march was coming down the eastern part of the state of Mississippi. We felt it important to, to move over to Philadelphia and make a statement. And we did that. And we went into Philadelphia and as I remember Martin King was kneeling and praying and, and all of the people who went to Philadelphia, we had a little, short march. We were kneeling down and praying. And, ah, I, I remember, ah, Dr. Abernathy, ah, giving the prayer and he was saying something to the effect of "Let us pray for those who have murdered our comrades, our friends, and wherever they may be." And over from out of the back you heard this response saying, "Well, we're standing right over here." And that was quite terrifying because you knew that that was a serious retort because we're talking about the sheriffs and the deputies who were involved and many of the outstanding citizens. So, at that point, people recognized that the situation was turning. We had absolutely no protection from the local police authority, the State Police authority or the federal government. So we felt like it was important for us to try to turn around and ease out of that community. But what, what happened there was, I think Martin King became really, ah, an eye witness to the violent nature of Mississippi and how hostile the place could be. And we were able to get out of there before anybody was hurt seriously. There were some scuffles that took place. But we just got out of there barely with our lives, we feel. And, ah, that began to, to change the dynamic and get people to understand the nature of the struggle and the commitment and dedication on the part of many SNCC people who had to work under those conditions for long, long, long periods of the time without any kind of outlet (Interview 9).

While protesters are defying a racist mob in Philadelphia and Meredith Marchers are trekking towards Yazoo City, Charles McLaurin of SNCC and Joe Harris of the Delta Ministry lead more than 100 Afro-Americans on a 10-mile voter registration march through Sunflower County in the heart of the Delta to the courthouse in Indianola. Sunflower is the birthplace of the White Citizens Council and political stronghold of the ultra-racist Senator James Eastland. It's a Black majority county, the home of MFDP leader Fannie Lou Hamer, and an area where SNCC has been helping build a local Freedom Movement since 1962. Yet white-supremacy continues to dominate through intimidation and fear. Despite four years of hard, dangerous organizing and passage of the Voting Rights Act, only 13% of the county's Afro-Americans are registered to vote.

From Philadelphia, King and other SCLC leaders fly to Indianola to join them. When King arrives, he addresses a spirited rally of more than 300 local Afro- Americans. McLaurin leads the crowd in calls for, "Black Power." Ralph Abernathy of SCLC leads chants of "Freedom Now!" The people enthusiastically shout both slogans. … As in Yazoo City and Grenada, the local white power-structure chooses not to foment white violence so there is none (Ordeal 5).

As evening falls on the evening of the 21st, a huge Afro-American crowd numbering close to 1,000 gather for a rally in the Yazoo City park where the Meredith Marchers are camping. Local leaders, SNCC, SCLC, and Deacons for Defense speakers address the crowd who loudly cheer them all. But beneath the surface the speeches are becoming increasingly antagonistic duels between supporters and opponents of Black Power, different interpretations of Black Power, and violence versus nonviolence. SNCC militant Willie Ricks urges the crowd, "When a white man attacks us, attack him back!" and Deacons leader Ernst Thomas argues that few Afro-Americans support nonviolence and that if "rednecks abuse any Black people ... there'll be a blood-red Mississippi"

In the view of King and SCLC staff, that rhetoric violates the agreement of a nonviolent march with self-defense against terrorism outside of the protest. It moves the march into a realm of aggressive retaliatory violence and a step down the road towards race war. When it's his turn to address the crowd, King [who has just returned from Indianola] tells them:

“I'm ready to die myself. When I die I'm going to die for something, and at that moment, I guess, it will be necessary, but I'm trying to say something to you, my friends, that I hope we will all gain tonight, and that is that we have a power. We can't win violently. We have neither the instruments nor the techniques at our disposal, and it would be totally absurd for us to believe we could do it. The weakness of violence from our side, the weakness of a riot from our side, is that a riot can always be halted by superior force. But we have another method, and I've seen it, and they can't stop it. ... Don't worry about getting your guns tonight. Don't worry about your Molotov cocktails tonight. You have something more powerful and if you work with [nonviolence], morning will come” (Holding 1).

King added: “I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetuated evil throughout our civilization. I'm sick and tired of violence . . . . I'm tired of evil. I'm not going to use violence no matter who says it!”

The next day, in a small item without a byline, the New York Times reported on Dr. King's comments:

YAZOO CITY, Miss., June 21 - Tonight at a rally in Yazoo City, Dr. King lashed out at the student committee's policy of advocating "black power" and at the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which urges Negroes to arm themselves in self-defense.
"Some people are telling us to be like our 'oppressor, who has a history of using Molotov cocktails, who has a history of dropping the atom bomb, who has a history of lynching Negroes," he said. "Now people are telling me to stoop down to that level.

"I'm sick and tired of violence. I'm tired of the war in Vietnam. I'm tired of Molotov cocktails" (False 7-8).


That morning, Wednesday June 22, a large voter registration rally is held at the Yazoo County courthouse and more than 100 Afro-Americans are added to the voting rolls. A hostile crowd of local whites look on, but obedient to instructions from the power-structure they commit no violence. The Meredith marchers then head east on State Route 16 for the 10 mile hike to the little hamlet of Benton MS where they camp on the grounds of Oak Grove Baptist Church. Among the marchers are those who had faced mob violence in Philadelphia the previous day. They recount the brutality and terror of police-sanctioned mob violence. The marchers seethe with rage. and a fierce determination not to back down fills them. Many vow that on Friday they will return to Philadelphia to stand with Dr. King and the Black citizens of Neshoba County.

While the increasingly angry marchers head for Benton, Dr. King convenes another summit meeting of Meredith March leaders in Yazoo City to address the "widening split in our ranks" — particularly the increasingly bitter division over Black Power between SNCC and SCLC staff and the strident condemnations of nonviolence and calls for aggressive Black violence by some of the most militant speakers at recent mass meetings. It is clear that King is pondering whether he and SCLC is going to withdraw from the march.

For hours they debate philosophy, strategy, tactics, perceptions, nuance and anticipated consequences. There is little indication that any minds are changed, but in the interest of maintaining enough unity for the Meredith March to continue as a coalition effort including King and SCLC they mutually agree to tell their organizational staffs to refrain from stoking contentious rivalry, that march leaders won't invoke dueling chants of either "Black Power" or "Freedom Now," or make inflammatory public calls for retaliatory violence (as opposed to self-defense outside of the march) — though march participants and local folk remain free to say and chant whatever they wish.

The meeting ends with enough organization unity to continue, but the majority of SNCC and CORE members are determined to project the "Black Power" slogan both locally and nationally while SCLC supporters continue with "Freedom Now." Most of the local Mississippi marchers continue enthusiastically chanting both slogans, while white marchers are split, some uncomfortable with "Black Power," others having no problem with it.

Yet though the meeting fails to achieve agreement on substantive ideologic differences it does to some degree clear the air and ameliorate antagonism — at least among the organizational heads. Stokely joshes King, "Martin, I deliberately decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it a national forum, and to force you to take a stand for Black Power." King laughs and replies, "I have been used before. One more time won't hurt" (Holding 2-3).

Cleveland Sellers commented about Carmichael and King’s relationship and SNCC’s commitment to non-violence.

… the relationship between Stokely and Martin was I think a very warm kind of relationship. Ah, we all knew that we had differences in terms of strategies and our tactics. I'll give you one example, that Martin believed in non-violence as a way of life. Ah, our concern about non-violence was only tactical. We used it when it became important for your survival to use non-violence. … What happens in a lot of instances is that the press began to use these differences even though they might have been completely minor to create rifts and try to break up the unity that existed within … the Civil Rights Movement. And I'm not saying that we didn't disagree tactically, organizationally, we did. But I think there was a personal, ah, relationship among SNCC people and SCLC people that was, that was very good and very healthy. Now, those relationships were strained at different times but we always managed to work our way through it.

…

I think that, ah, one of the things that we can look at in, in Philadelphia, Mississippi or anywhere along the march, the mode of non-violence was still there but I think we were beginning to come to grips with the fact that we had to be real with people in terms of, if somebody attacked you, that you expected to be able to protect yourself. So the whole idea, notion of self-defense was a growing, ah, notion inside of SNCC and inside of other civil rights organizations. Non-violence was a tactic for SNCC and we used it as a tactic. Ah, everybody in SNCC was not, ah,… non-violent as a way of life, as a philosophy. Ah, in Philadelphia, Mississippi … it was non-violence that assisted us in getting out of there. If we would of gotten involved in a, a confrontation in Philadelphia, Mississippi, we all probably [would have] been history (Interview 10, 11).



Works cited:

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

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


“Holding Together, June 21-22.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...


“Interview with Cleveland Sellers.” Eyes on the Prize Interviews. October 21, 1988. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eii/eiiweb...


“Ordeal in Philadelphia Mississippi, June 21.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...

Civil Rights Events -- Meredith March against Fear -- Grenada, Greenwood, and Black Power

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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

…

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

…

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

…


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

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


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

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


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


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


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


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

Cleveland Sellers of SNCC recalled:


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

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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


Works cited:


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


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


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

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

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


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

Civil Rights Events -- Meredith March against Fear -- From Coldwater to Grenada

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


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


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


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


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

…

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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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

…

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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


Yet respect toward rival activists does exist.


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


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


Again, Stokely Carmichael narrates.


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


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


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


Works cited:

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Civil Rights Events -- Meredith March against Fear -- The Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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


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


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

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


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

…

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


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


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

…

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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


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

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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


Works cited:


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

Civil Rights Events -- 1966 Civil Rights Bill Defeated

… the mood of the nation in 1966 remained essentially one of sympathy toward the desire of Negroes to improve their lives, tempered by growing concern at the violence fostered by a few spokesmen and slum-dwellers. Negro and white leaders, including the President, unqualifiedly condemned the violence, but the lawlessness of a relatively few thousand Negro rioters generated resentment in a large portion of the nation.

In the South, resentment built up against the efforts of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by requiring schools and hospitals to desegregate. In the North, resentment built up against efforts of civil rights leaders to bus children to different school districts in order to break down “de facto” segregation and against their efforts to break down the pattern of segregated housing generally. Those activities produced counter-pressures in the white community and resulted in a discernible stiffening of resistance to rapid change. Then, too, the year lacked the kinds of events–a march on Washington, police clubbing Negro marchers to the ground before nationwide television, nightrider slayings, the bombing and burning of churches, a massive march for voting rights–which had galvanized the nation into action in 1964 and 1965 (1966 3).

A Gallup Poll in 1966 reveals that nationwide more than half of all whites think that the Freedom Movement and President Johnson are forcing racial integration too fast —particularly regarding housing and schools. This is the highest anti-Movement percentage since early 1962. A Louis Harris Poll is even more negative, claiming that 75% of whites believe Blacks are going too far and going too fast, compared with 50% in 1964. "Where housing is concerned," observes social psychologist Thomas Pettigre, "much of the subtlety which clothes racial prejudice in the North is lost."

But Movement leaders are pushing for critical new legislation in 1966, and LBJ is determined to pass a new bill. Late in 1965, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission issues a report on biased law enforcement in the South. Blacks still face police repression and incarcerations, terrorist murders, beatings, bombings, and rapes for asserting their basic human rights. As the law now stands, racists accused of criminal violence against Black voters are tried under state laws in biased state courts. The commission recommends new federal laws protecting voters and civil rights workers — something long sought in previous acts, but not won. This is the most urgent necessity.

All-white, all-male juries are another problem. Most southern states use various schemes and tactics to ensure all-white juries — either across the board or in cases where race is a factor. Many states, including Alabama, Mississippi & South Carolina forbid women from serving on juries while others such as Florida, Louisiana & New Hampshire require that women volunteer for jury service rather than being summoned as is the case with men. Other states have other jury selection inequalities; New York for example, requires all jurors to be property-owners, if you don't own real estate you can't serve on a jury. President Johnson announces that provisions barring discrimination in jury selection will also be included in the new bill.

A section authorizing the Attorney General to initiate desegregation suits is then added to strengthen the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Under the 1964 law, the Justice Department could not intervene until someone filed a formal complaint and asked for assistance. But anyone who did that faced retaliation from the local sheriff, Ku Klux Klan, and White Citizen Council.)

Civil rights leaders also want action against discrimination in housing. But they know that including open-housing legislation in the bill will be hugely controversial and could well doom the entire package. Rather than risk defeat of the crucial voter-protection and jury-reform provisions, they urge Johnson to expand coverage of Kennedy's Executive Order 11063 which prohibited discrimination in federally-assisted housing. Kennedy's order covered about 3% of total housing units, but LBJ can use his executive power to significantly expand it without going through Congress — or risking the new bill.

Johnson disregards their advice. He believes he has the political power to enact whatever legislation he desires, and he is certain he knows best. In his State of the Union Message on January 12, 1966, he adds Fair Housing legislation to the new bill. Republican Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) — whose support was crucial to passage of both the Civil Rights Act in '64 and the Voting Rights Act in '65 — immediately declares adamant opposition to open housing legislation as an unconstitutional limitation on the sacred rights of private property.
Identical bills are introduced in the Senate and House. Led by Emanuel Celler (D-NY), the House acts first, holding hearings in May of 1966. The bill as a whole is named "Civil Rights Act of 1966," but its housing provisions are separately named the "Fair Housing Act" (FHA). Opposition to the FHA is fierce both North and South. And Southern Democrats oppose all the other provisions as well. Complex political battles are waged in public and behind the scenes the various sides maneuver against each other. (Civil 1-4).

Civil rights leaders desired a fair-housing executive order but Johnson’s legal aides doubted its constitutionality. Many administration officials felt housing legislation was unwise at the time because it would not pass due to the social unrest in urban areas. Attorney General Katzenbach was not confident in its passage because there were many in Congress that felt they would lose their seats if they voted for open housing. (Miles 108).

The sections (titles of the initial bill) were as follows.

Titles I and II … sought to guarantee non-discriminatory selection of federal and state jurors, respectively. …

Title III … authorized the Attorney General to initiate desegregation suits with regard to public schools and accommodations. …

Title IV. The open housing proposal came as a genuine surprise to Congress. No President in recent years had proposed such a law (1966 12).

The Administration's Title IV, as introduced, prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of all housing.

Title V. A law protecting civil rights workers was one urgently sought by civil rights advocates in late 1965 and early 1966. It was perhaps the one provision they considered essential for enactment in 1966. While efforts to pass a federal anti-lynching law dated back to the 1930s, a proposal for a general civil rights law to protect security of the person first appeared in the Democratic party platform of 1948. The Civil Rights Commission as early as 1961 and as late as its Nov. 14, 1965, report urged enactment of such a statute. No Administration proposed such a law until 1966, however (1966 14).

The chief opponent to the open housing title was the real estate industry. The National Association of Real Estate Boards mobilized a thousand local real estate boards to attack the housing clause. Estimates indicated that congressional mail was running one hundred to one against open housing. Arthur Mohl of the Illinois Association of Real Estate Brokers testified against the bill in front of the House Judiciary Committee and said Title IV would not have positive effects on the ghetto. He argued that New York City had an open housing law that enabled riots and a sixty-five percent increase in substandard housing over a ten-year period, while Chicago did not have an open housing law, had no major riots, and experienced a thirty-three percent reduction in substandard housing. He concluded, “We submit that any law which attempts to regulate a personal relationship between two individual citizens, where the public interest is not involved, is un-American and un-democratic. (Miles 112-113).

Lobbying for and against the bill is intense. The NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and progressives within the AFL-CIO, lobby hard for the bill. The National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) and banking lobbyists fight furiously against the housing provisions, while law enforcement organizations and southern segregationists oppose ending jury discrimination or creating new laws to protect civil rights "troublemakers."

House floor debate begins on July 25. Conservative Republicans reject restrictions or limitations of any kind on property rights. GOP moderates disagree. Southern Democrats continue their traditional opposition to any legislation that favors Blacks. Northern Democrats, particularly those whose reelection chances rely on coalitions of labor, Blacks, and "ethnic-whites," are split. Some fear that open-housing legislation will transform working-class whites into Republicans and they therefore waffle, trying to please everyone while offending no one. Others hold fast in support of the bill.

Some 77 different amendments are fought out on the House floor. Of the accepted amendments, some weaken the bill, a few strengthen it.

Republicans and Southern Democrats join together to win a close 214-201 vote gutting the Justice Department's ability to file lawsuits against segregated schools and public accommodations by requiring a written complaint of discrimination by victims. Southern Blacks will still have to expose themselves to economic and physical retaliation from sheriffs, Klan, and Citizens Councils before the federal government is allowed to bestir itself to enforce the Constitution and the law (Civil 5).

On July 13 The Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) declared that there were 60 million existing housing units in the nation. Of those, 34.9 million were owner-occupied one-family homes, 1,520,000 were units in owner-occupied two-family houses and another 509,000 were units in owner-occupied three- and four-family houses, the Department said. Under terms of Title IV as amended by the House, all of those units–totaling 36,933,000–would be exempt from the law, leaving only about 23 million covered by it. For new housing, however, the picture was different; the House-passed bill exempted only the first two housing transactions by any individual or business in any 12-month period, and major housing developers had many more transactions per year than that. Of the total of about 1.5 million new housing units on which construction was started each year, the vast bulk was built by developers and builders for sale or rental. The initial sales or rentals by the developers would be covered by the bill, but if a family bought a house, subsequent resale of the house would be exempt (1966 17).

By a vote of 237-176, an amendment is added to the Fair Housing Act allowing real estate brokers to discriminate against nonwhites if that's what the property-owner wants.

Another amendment is added allowing brokers and developers to racially discriminate in two transactions per year.

Progressive members of Congress propose an amendment to prohibit gender-discrimination in housing. It's defeated (Civil 5-6).

Violence erupted in many cities across the nation during the summer; it generally took the form of crowds of Negroes roaming the streets, hurling bottles and other missiles and taunting police. Rioting broke out between July 12 and 20 in Negro sections of Chicago, Cleveland, Jacksonville, Fla., New York City and South Bend, Ind. It was at its worst in Chicago and Cleveland, where the National Guard was called out and where two persons were killed in each city. Riots subsequently broke out in Atlanta, Ga., which had a history of stable race relations, and in San Francisco. In many instances, the crowds chanted “black power” and “burn, baby, burn” (1966 8).

Believing that the Black urban uprisings now spreading across the nation are caused by "outside agitators" and fiery speeches by militants like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, a huge majority in the House add an "anti-riot" amendment making it a federal felony to cross state lines to engage in violence, looting, or arson, or inciting or encouraging others to do so.

On the positive side, an amendment prohibiting discrimination on the basis of the number or age of children is added, as is an anti-blockbusting amendment.

("Blockbusting" is the practice of deliberately inciting racist fear among whites immediately after a nonwhite moves into a neighborhood so that white owners will sell their homes at panic prices to industry speculators who then resell the properties to Blacks and Latinos at a tidy profit.)

In the end, the House bill as amended, bars segregation and discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin and the number or age of children in the sale or rental of roughly 38% of existing housing. (Johnson's original proposal barred discrimination in all housing.) However, for new housing (most of which is built by developers), the great bulk of initial sales or rentals are covered by the bill — yet most subsequent sales or rentals by individual owners are not covered.

On August 9, the House passes the amended bill by a roll-call vote of 259-157.
…

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee is also considering LBJ's proposed bill. Subcommittee Chairman Sam Ervin (D-NC), a determined southern segregationist, opposes just about everything in it. He's in no hurry to report it out of his committee — ever.
Senator Philip Hart (D-MI) is the bill's floor leader. In an effort to circumvent Ervin's obstruction, he and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) attempt a parliamentary maneuver to place the House bill as passed directly on the Senate floor for debate and vote. Opponents filibuster their motion. For 12 days, from September 7 to 19, the Senate debates what is technically a procedural motion — but is in fact the pros and cons of the House bill itself. If the motion passes, the bill will inevitably pass, if it fails, the bill dies (Civil 6-8).

The tool used to defeat a Senate filibuster is called cloture. A minimum of two-thirds of the entire membership of the Senate is required to close a filibuster debate.

By now,… the fervor President Johnson expressed back in January for new civil rights legislation has dramatically waned. He and Democratic Party leaders have been shocked by the ferocious opposition of northern whites to residential integration, most visibly by white-ethnics in Chicago attacking Dr. King's open housing marches. The mid-term elections are now just two months away and Republicans are making gains by whipping-up the "white backlash" vote. LBJ's first priority is maintaining political support for his war in Vietnam, and as he would later write in his memoirs, "Open housing had become a Democratic liability." Administration efforts to round up votes for breaking the filibuster are feeble, half-hearted, and ineffective.

Johnson's abdication leaves Senator [Everett] Dirksen (R-IL) in the driver's seat (Civil 9).

Dirksen was critical in delivering the Republican votes necessary to pass the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, … Dirksen was a fundamental conservative that abided by the Constitution and the Supreme Court … (Miles 87).

If he were to support the bill, he'd bring along enough Republicans to end the filibuster. But he opposes it. First, because of the fair housing provisions which, in his view, are an unconstitutional assault on private property rights. And second, upholding "law and order" at all costs is the bedrock foundation of his political creed; ending racial and gender discrimination in jury selection might make it harder to convict and jail those accused of crimes. "For all practical purposes, the civil rights bill is dead," he tells reporters.

On September 14, and then again on the 19th, supporters in the Senate try to break the filibuster. They need 66 votes. They don't get them. The closest they come is 54 "Aye" vs 42 "Nay" — a majority, but not a two-thirds majority.



Senator James Eastland (D-MS), an ardent segregationist, crows, "The civil rights advocates who hope to force an interracial society have been completely routed. The old-time coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans were united and effective. ... [Soon] we can start the fight to repeal those vicious measures," (meaning the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts).

Representative Emanuel Celler (D-NY) tells reporters that it failed because Republicans were searching for votes in the South. "It is a tragic thing that the majority of the [Republican] party which claims the heritage of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, should join in the familiar 'Southern strategy'" (Civil 9-11).

On… Sept. 19, knowing the game was up, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D Mont.) moved to adjourn the Senate and thus to kill the bill.

Defeat of the Act was a stunning setback for the Administration of President Johnson and for the civil rights movement. It marked a signal change in the attitude of the same Congress which had passed the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. … said the Senate vote “surely heralds darker days for this social era of discontent” (1966 1-2).

Works cited:
“1966 Civil Rights Act Dies in Senate.” CQ Almanac 1966. Web. https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac...


“Civil Rights Act of 1966 Killed by Senate Fillibuster (Sept).” Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December) Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...


Miles, Darren. “The Art of the Possible: Everett Dirksen’s Role in Civil Rights Legislation of the 1950s and 1960s.” Western Illinois Historical Review. Vol. One, Spring 2009. Web. http://www.wiu.edu/cas/history/wihr/p...

Civil Rights Events -- Chicago Freedom Movement -- Climax, Conclusion

"In glaring contrast to the arrests and beatings inflicted on Afro-Americans for the crime of opening fire hydrants for children to play in, few of the violent whites guilty of assault, battery, and arson are arrested at all, and fewer still are charged with serious offenses. An AFSC leader notes the friendly relations between whites in the mob and white cops. A federal official with the Community Relations Service concludes that the marchers were given, "very little protection." Al Raby states,


"It is clear that the police were either unwilling or unable to disperse the riotous mob that so brutally attacked Negroes and whites who had come to the community to seek open housing in compliance with the law. The failure ... is especially appalling [since] huge masses of police and National Guardsmen were mobilized to put down the violence of a few hundred Negroes on the West Side." — New York Times, August 2, 1966.


But the nationwide publicity generated by the violent attacks, and the civic disruption caused by the marches, vigils, and picketing, pose serious political problems for Mayor Daley. Working class whites opposed to open housing are a vital part of his machine — but so are Afro-American voters. If the police crack down on violent whites to protect Black demonstrators he risks losing white votes; if his cops fail to protect nonviolent protesters from racists he'll lose Afro-Americans. And on the national stage, his prestige, power and influence in Democratic Party politics may be threatened by continued, unchecked racist violence. Daley meets with leaders of the angry white communities, "Ignore the marchers and they'll go away," he tells them. "[But] law and order is necessary," he also warns.

On Monday, the neighborhood vigils and picketing continue while CFM leaders plan new marches. Though shocked at the scale and fury of white rage and violence, they are heartened to see that the number of protesters — both Black and white — is growing rather than dwindling out of fear. During the week, demonstrators are mostly youth and the unemployed, but on weekends they are being joined by an increasing number of people with jobs.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, August 2nd and 3rd, several hundred march against the Parker-Finney real estate agency in the Belmont-Cragin district of the Northwest Side. Some 150 cops manage to hold back a thousand hostile, jeering, whites who sing an impromptu ditty that becomes popular among White Power advocates:

"Oh I wish I were an Alabama trooper.

Oh, how happy I would be.

If I were an Alabama trooper,

I could kill niggers legally."


When racists in the crowd hurl objects at the marchers, the cops take a more active stance than they had in Gage Park, though, again, only a few of the violent whites are actually arrested. The stark contrast in police reaction to white violence as opposed to Black civil unrest is glaringly self-evident to anyone willing to look. But by and large, the mass media chooses not to notice it.


On Thursday evening, the 4th of August, there is another big mass meeting at New Friendship church on the South Side. Late on Friday afternoon, a large car caravan ferries 700 or so demonstrators to Marquette Park where close to 1,000 cops wait to guard them on another march to Kedzie and 63rd where courageous bands of protesters are already picketing several real estate firms.

A huge mob of 4,000-5,000 whites wait to confront the marchers with eggs, stones, cherry bombs, and bricks. At first, it's mostly teenagers and dedicated white-supremacists, but as the evening advances, adults coming off work join them. The furious throng gathers at the edge of the park, waving Confederate battle flags and holding hand-lettered signs with slogans like, "The Only Way to End Niggers is Exterminate." They chant, "We want Martin Luther Coon" and, as usual, "Kill the niggers!"


Dr. King steps out of his car and a thrown rock hits him in the head, dropping him to his knees. Aides help him to his feet and ask if he's okay. "I think so," he replies (Freedom 7-9). … he remained dazed for several moments as the crowd chanted, “Kill him, kill him.” Then he rose and marched on. Timuel Black was just steps behind King when the rock struck him. As Black recounts, “I said to myself, ‘If one of them bricks hit me, the nonviolence movement is over.’ ”

King told reporters: “Oh, I’ve been hit so many times I’m immune to it.” Later, he added, “I have to do this—to expose myself—to bring this hate into the open” (Bernstein 27).

The tight-packed marchers press up Kedzie behind a wedge of club-swinging police clearing a path through the mob. Stalwarts from the Black gangs try to nonviolently protect the protesters from rocks and bricks. Cherry-bomb explosions sound like gunfire. People flinch, but they keep marching (Freedom 9)!


The veteran political consultant Don Rose, who was King’s press secretary during his time in Chicago, remembers the terror he felt crossing Ashland Avenue, which marked Englewood’s color line at the time. It went from complete peace and quiet on one side, he says, to thousands of screaming, jeering, and taunting whites on the other. A mob had gathered on a grassy knoll nearby, he says, waving Confederate flags and yelling “Niggers go home!” and “We want Martin Luther Coon.” An extra large police force—under Daley’s orders—escorted King and the marchers through the park as rocks, bottles, eggs, and firecrackers rained down on them.

Andrew Young describes a moment from that day that stands out in his memory: “I remember this young woman running up in front of the march and getting in Dr. King’s face and calling him all sorts of vile names, just spewing out venom. He said, ‘You know, you’re much too beautiful to be so mean.’ And it stunned her. She turned around and walked away. And when we came back through that neighborhood on the way to the cars, she came back out of the crowd again and said, ‘Dr. King, I’m sorry, I don’t want to be mean. Please forgive me’” (Bernstein 24-25).

Again, white demonstrators and clergy in vestments are particular targets of hate. Rabbi Marx is struck by a thrown brick but marches on. One furious white woman shrieks at Afro-American cleric George Clements, "You dirty nigger priest!" Blood flows down the faces of those trying to protect King as the column finally reaches 63rd where the picket groups have been surrounded by racists chanting, "White Power!"

The march column absorbs the pickets, and after a brief rally returns to Marquette Park with the cops holding off the pursuing mob. This time, no one left cars behind. Instead, a fleet of transit buses and city vehicles wait to evacuate them back to Friendship church. Whites attack the buses, smashing windows, pouring sugar into gas tanks, and setting vehicles on fire. Father Clements is dragged from a city car and beaten. Once the protesters are gone, the mob turns its fury on the cops. Screams one middle-aged white man in a business suit, "You nigger-loving sons of bitches. I'll never vote for Mayor Daley again!" The police defend themselves with clubs and shots fired in the air.

Dr. King tells the press, "I had expected some hostility, but not of this enormity. I have never in my life seen such hate. Not in Mississippi or Alabama. This is a terrible thing."


But more disheartening than the racist violence is the reaction by news media, political leaders, and the general public. "Bloody Sunday" in Selma a year earlier had sparked a national outcry against both violent police repression of peaceful protest and the South's systematic denial of Black voting rights. Similarly, back in '63, dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham had helped form a national consensus that Jim Crow segregation had to go. But while there is wide-spread revulsion at the crude, hysteric, vicious, racism exposed by the open housing marches, there is little evidence of any surge in support for addressing northern economic injustices, or enacting open-housing legislation. Most press pundits and editorials condemn both the violent white- supremacists and the protests. A few, like the right-wing Chicago Tribune, clearly side with the white-supremacists. It accuses the protesters of wanting whites to, "give up your homes and get out so that we can take over" (Freedom 10-11).


Pressure on Daley continues to mount. Afro-Americans — elected officials, precinct captains, clergy, and ghetto voters — are demanding that the Mayor do something about white-racist violence, slums, and segregated housing. White working class voters and their ward bosses are furious at the police for using clubs and arrests to protect the civil rights marchers. Though Daley is not up for reelection in 1966, Democratic Senator Paul Douglas is. Douglas supports the open-housing provisions in the draft Civil Rights Act of 1966, and polls show him steadily losing white support — an ill omen for the future. (In November, Douglas is defeated by Republican Charles Percy.)


But while Daley is feeling the heat, so too is the CFM. The massive white violence has thrown CCCO into disarray. Shocked, dismayed, and fearing worse to come, some coalition leaders urge caution and a shift to less provocative tactics. Others are enraged, demanding even more forceful challenges to white racism. Tensions and arguments flare. …


With King, Raby, and others out of town at the SCLC convention, disagreements and tensions over goals, strategies and tactics roil the CFM. Then on Monday evening, August 8, Jesse Jackson declares to a mass meeting at Warren Avenue Congregational Church that he's going to lead marches into Bogun Park (Ashburn) and Cicero …


...


Jackson's call creates consternation. For years, parents in the Bogun Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side have been waging a furious battle to keep their schools "white-only," and it's expected that a civil rights march there will trigger violence as great — or greater — than Gage Park.


Cicero is worse. An all-white suburban city, it's infamous for its racist violence. During the day, some 15,000 blue-collar and service industry Blacks work in Cicero — but none are allowed to live there. Cicero is an explicit "sundown town," a city that requires nonwhites to be gone by sunset. Blacks spotted on the streets after dark face arrest, or violence from white vigilantes.


...


Many in CFM are furious at Jackson's impromptu call for a Cicero march which had been discussed but never approved by either the Action or Agenda Committees.


On Thursday the 11th, support for mass marches into white areas continues to erode within the CFM as some of the coalition's main labor supporters join the archbishop's plea for the marches to end. SCLC and the more militant CFM leaders reject these calls for protest moratoriums and announce the Bogun march is on for the next day. …


...


On Friday the 12th, 700 protesters surrounded by 800 police march into Bogun. Rocks and bottles rain down on protesters, but the massive police presence succeeds in holding back the huge crowd of hostile whites and preventing mayhem.


The Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, which has close ties to the business community, announces that a summit meeting will be held on Wednesday, August 17th. King and Raby know that now is not the time to back off of direct action. On Sunday, August 14, the Movement mounts its most ambitious action so far — three simultaneous mass marches that stretch police resources to the breaking point. Raby leads some 500 marchers back to Gage Park, Jesse Jackson takes 300 into Bogun, and Bevel leads 400 through the Northwest neighborhood of Jefferson Park. As has now become the norm, the marchers — half Black, half white — endure rocks, bottles, cherry bombs, racist chants, and shrieking epithets of, "Nigger, nigger, nigger!"


...



At mid-morning on Wednesday, August 17, the summit meeting convenes around a long horseshoe table in St. James Episcopal Church. The CFM delegation of 14 is headed by Dr. King and Al Raby. Mayor Daley, city officials, prominent clergy, and representatives of industry, real estate, and banking are present. Railroad president and Daley supporter Ben Heineman presides. All of the 56 participants are men, a pattern so commonplace that no one questions it — or even takes notice.


…


Al Raby presents nine demands distilled from those fixed to the doors of City Hall on July 10th.


...


The main opposition comes from the CREB [Chicago Real Estate Board]. They argue that they are legally required to represent their clients' wishes. If a home-owner or landlord doesn't want to sell or rent to nonwhites there is nothing the broker can do about it. They're not responsible for racial discrimination, and it's not their role to fight it.


...


The discussion bogs down into statements, counter-positions, arguments, and minutia adding up to no progress at all. By evening everyone is exhausted.


...


Andy Young proposes that a smaller working-committee be empowered to develop concrete proposals "designed to provide an open city." A group of 12 is appointed and instructed to report back in nine days on August 26th.


Daley tells reporters, "There does not seem to be a cessation of the marches," and the media reports that the summit is a failure — confirming King's analysis that the power-structure sees the protests as the problem, not violent racism, discrimination, or the inherent injustice of the ghetto economics (Summit Meeting 1-10).


On Friday, CFM testing teams show up at more than 100 real estate offices in white areas. Daley has one of his subservient municipal judges issue injunctions barring more than one demonstration in Chicago per day …


…


Meanwhile, the summit subcommittee struggles towards a settlement acceptable to both the CREB and the CFM. They finally produce a draft 10-point agreement on Thursday, August 25th. …


…


Movement activists criticize the proposal as falling far short of what they originally demanded on July 10 and much less than what they asked for ten days earlier on August 17.


…


On Friday morning, CFM leaders caucus at the AFSC offices to go over the proposal. They are deeply divided. Those who fear that continued marches will lead to mob killings and greater racial polarization favor accepting the deal as the best that can be achieved in the face of massive white resistance. As they see it, the threat of the Cicero march now appears to be their strongest leverage, but the Cicero action is scheduled for the following day and once it's over, more neighborhood protests are not likely to win further concessions.


…


The summit negotiators then reconvene at the Palmer House hotel. City, business, labor, and religious representatives express their commitment to the proposed 10 points. The CREB waffles and equivocates. They claim that real estate brokers would be forced out of business if required to sell or rent to Blacks. Dr. King directly confronts them, but they refuse to budge.


…


… In essence then, neither the city nor the CREB are willing to go any further than what is already in the 10-point draft. Their position boils down to, "take it or leave it."


The meeting is suspended while the Movement delegates caucus. Again they debate whether or not to accept the proposal and again they are in disagreement. But with the CFM splitting over continued direct action, there's little chance they will be able to mount larger, more powerful marches. Instead they risk numbers and political support dwindling away to impotence in the face of increased opposition and continued racist violence.


Reluctantly, Dr. King decides that it's better to take what they've won so far rather than gamble it all on the uncertain premise that more marches will result in a stronger agreement. Rejecting it now, with the CFM weakened and divided, might well result in a worse offer down the line — or no settlement at all.


The document is signed and it's announced that Cicero and all other open-housing marches are suspended, though the CFM does express its intent to mount future protests around issues such as employment discrimination and school segregation.


The summit agreement is not popular. Whites picket the City Hall with signs declaring, "Daley Sold Out Chicago" and "Summit Another Munich." When Dr. King tries to present the settlement to a mass meeting at Liberty Baptist Church he is drowned out by hostile chants of "Black Power."


With his usual grace, he invites one of the critics to address the crowd from the podium. SNCC activist Monroe Sharp argues that Black folk should solve their own problems without begging white mayors or pleading with white neighbors. And he sharply criticizes King and Raby for canceling the Cicero march, as does Chicago CORE leader Robert Lucas. West Side Organization (WSO) leader Chester Robinson states, "We feel the poor Negro has been sold out by this agreement." And a federal Community Relations Service official reports, "A general feeling [that the movement had] sold out."


CORE, SNCC, and other militants from the Action Committee declare their determination to defy white racism at its most virulent by refusing to accept cancellation of the Cicero march. …


On Sunday, September 4, some 250 marchers — 80% Black, 20% white — cross under the Beltway Railroad on West 16th Street to enter Cicero from Chicago. Closely guarded by 500 Cook County sheriffs and local police and 2,000 Illinois National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets, they are confronted by more than 3,000 jeering whites throwing rocks, bottles, eggs, and cherry bombs which some protesters equipped with baseball mitts try to intercept.


The white supremacists chant "White Power!" The marchers chant "Black Power!" Insults and epithets are hurled by both sides. The march halts at Laramie Avenue and 25th Street, the site where 17-year old Jerome Huey had been beaten to death four months earlier by whites. A prayer vigil is held and then the marchers retrace their route back to Chicago. As they are about to exit Cicero, a large gang of whites suddenly charges them. They are driven back by club-swinging cops and soldiers thrusting with bayonets.


After the summit agreement is signed in August, many SCLC staff members are reassigned to SCLC projects in the South or move on with their lives by returning to school or their pulpits. But some stay behind to continue working with tenant organizing, testing compliance with the agreement, other end-slums programs, and voter registration. Dr. King continues to live in his Chicago tenement until January of 1967 when he relocates to write his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Jesse Jackson continues organizing the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket and makes Chicago his permanent home.


…


By late fall, it's clear that the city of Chicago and the real estate industry are not living up to their promises. Testing of real estate offices reports continued discrimination against Blacks, yet not a single broker faces any threat of license revocation. At only one of CHA's 23 ghetto housing projects is there even a gesture at token integration, and two new segregated projects are being built. In March of 1967, Dr. King tells reporters, "It appears that for all intents and purposes, the public agencies have [reneged] on the agreement and have, in fact given credence to [those] who proclaim the housing agreement a sham and a batch of false promises."


Absent legislation or legal contracts, the only real methods for enforcing the settlement are the threat of resumed marches and the sanction of electoral retaliation against Daley. But by the spring of '67, CCCO is rivened by disputes and recriminations. It's incapable of mounting effective new open housing protests. Faced with insufficient support for renewed marches, SCLC responds with a voter-registration campaign built around the idea that, "slum dwellers can begin to break the grip of machine politics." The drive fails. In April of 1967, Daley's machine triumphs at the polls. He is reelected Mayor with 75% of the total vote — and 80% of the Black vote. As a practical matter, the summit agreement is dead (Summit Agreement 1-9).


Dr. King accepts as valid many of the complaints and criticisms. He later tells supporters, "We should have done just what a labor union does, we should have gone back to the members and voted on whether to accept the [summit agreement]." And he expresses regret for not having gone into Cicero. He too questions whether or not they should have started with a smaller, less centrally controlled city than Chicago, and whether in retrospect it would have been wiser to focus on narrower, more practical immediate goals than ending slums. "Promising to solve all their problems in one summer," was a tactical mistake he later concludes. But he also understands that the decisions of the day were forced by the imperatives of the times — pressures that hindsight often fails to take into account (Assessment 3).


Works cited:


“Assessment.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

Bernstein, David. “The Longest March.” Politics & City Life. July 25, 2016. Web. https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Ma...

“Freedom Now! White Power!” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

“Summit Agreement.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

“Summit Meeting.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

Civil Rights Events -- Chicago Freedom Movement -- Violent Backlash

The sweltering heat wave continues into Tuesday, July 12, with the afternoon high hitting close to 100° in the inner-city canyons where heat radiates up from the pavement and out from stone-faced tenements. Nearby Lake Michigan provides an inexhaustible supply of water, so by long summer tradition residents in poor neighborhoods open fire hydrants, deflecting the flow with boards and trash-can lids so that children can cool off in the spray.

For some reason, on this day the cops shut off two hydrants near Roosevelt Ave. & Throop St. in the Near West Side ghetto area. It's not clear why. …


A crowd gathers, protesting that Afro-Americans are barred from three of the four closest swimming pools and that white children in an Italian neighborhood a few blocks north are still being allowed to play in water from hydrants. Someone uses a wrench to reopen the hydrants. The cops shut them off again. There is shouting and arguing. Tempers flare. A bottle is thrown, then more rocks and bottles. Police commanders back at HQ put the "emergency plan" into effect. Additional cops are rushed to the scene, soon more than 100 are trying to quell a small-scale revolt. Fighting breaks out. Clubs are used. Shots are fired. Arrests are made. Store windows are broken. A patrol car is set on fire.


As evening falls, the disturbance spreads out into the darkness. Dr. King, his wife Coretta, and singer Mahalia Jackson witness some of the turmoil on their way to a mass meeting at Shiloh Baptist Church. Tempers at the church are running high. Young men, some in gangs, others not, threaten to "tear up the city."


King, Raby, Andy Young, and Bernard Lee go to the police station and manage to win the release of six teenagers who they bring back to the church. The mass meeting is tumultuous. Outside are sounds of shouting, sirens, and distant gun shots. The six battered teenagers tell of being beaten by the cops in the station. Other youth decry the lack of playgrounds and swimming pools. Older residents berate the young for vandalism and violence. Dr. King tries to unite the crowd around his program of nonviolent struggle but he is heckled down. Hundreds of young militants stream out of the church to join the swelling rebellion.


King, Raby, SCLC and AFSC staff, CCCO volunteers, and Bill Clark and Chester Robinson of the West Side Organization, go out into the dark and dangerous streets, trying to reduce the violence and channel people's anger into constructive political action. By Wednesday morning, calm is restored.


Then on Wednesday afternoon, city workers begin refitting ghetto fire hydrants with tamper-proof locks to prevent anyone from opening a hydrant so kids can cool off in the spray. Fury explodes across the West Side. At one corner, 1,000 people battle 150 cops with rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails. The police respond with clubs, tear gas, and pistol shots. Stores are looted and some are burned. At a couple of locations snipers shoot at firemen. Cops fire a fusillade of bullets at the windows of a housing project.


While Daley is busy locking up ghetto fire hydrants, Illinois Governor Kerner issues an executive order denying state licenses to real estate brokers found guilty of discrimination. The Illinois Association of Real Estate Boards rushes to a friendly judge who immediately imposes an injunction blocking the Governor's order. … an association spokesman explains, "All we are asking is that the brokers and salesmen have the same right to discriminate as the owners who engage their service."

In Chicago, the local real estate board continues its opposition to the 1963 open housing ordinance, and on the national level the real estate and banking industries are furiously lobbying against the Fair Housing provisions of the proposed Civil Rights Act of 1966.


By Thursday the 14th, more than 600 city blocks are affected by smashed windows, looting, arson, and sporadic gunfire between police and concealed assailants. Some of the cops are now armed with machine guns, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition are stockpiled at police stations for use on the West Side.


On Friday, Governor Kerner orders 4,000 National Guard soldiers called up for duty in Chicago. Daley publicly blames SCLC, "People that came in here have been talking for the last year of violence, and showing pictures and instructing people in how to conduct violence." His ally Rev. J.H. Jackson piles on with, "Some other forces are using these young people."


King, Raby, and other CFM leaders go to City Hall on Friday afternoon and demand to speak with Mayor Daley. They are joined by the politically influential Catholic Archbishop John Cody. Confronted head-on, Daley is conciliatory. "We know you did nothing to cause the disorders and that you are a man of peace," he tells King. He agrees to remove the hydrant locks, replace them with spray nozzles, and deliver 10 portable swimming pools to ghetto neighborhoods. But in regard to the main CFM demands, he concedes nothing.


Later that night, as heavily-armed National Guardsmen begin patrolling West Side streets, gang leaders meet with King in his sweltering tenement apartment. While John Doar and Roger Wilkins of the Justice Department observe in silence, King and his SCLC aides talk through the night with Cobras, Vice Lords, and Roman Saints who are sprawled on chairs and the floor. Hour after hour the young firebrands talk about jobs, race, education, and the cops. King, Abernathy and Young engage them one by one, arguing the merits of nonviolence and constructive political program rather than destructive rage.


Deep in the night, there is a breakthrough. "Peanut" Tidwell of the Roman Saints rejects philosophical, "love your enemy" nonviolence, but he's willing to give tactical nonviolence a try. By 4:00am the other gang leaders have agreed to instruct their members to stand down and avoid further violence — for now.


With the gangs holding to their self-imposed truce and 800 cops plus 1500 soldiers patrolling the littered West Side streets, there is only limited, small-scale violence on Saturday morning. By afternoon all is quiet. The revolt's four-day toll is two dead — a pregnant Afro-American girl shot while walking with friends, and a Black man shot in the back, both presumably killed by police — some 80 or so seriously injured including 6 cops wounded by bullets, $2,000,000 damage (equal to $14,600,000 in 2014), and some 500 arrested (Sprinkler 1-5).


"Somewhere there has to be a synthesis. I have to be militant enough to satisfy the militants yet I have to keep enough discipline in the movement to satisfy white supporters and moderate Negroes." — Martin Luther King.


Testing and evidence-gathering about the practices of white real estate brokers and rental agents is stepped up, as is training for nonviolent protesters (Freedom 1).




For weeks, campaign organizers had been sending blacks posing as home buyers and renters into real estate offices in white working-class neighborhoods. Almost invariably, they’d be told nothing was available—even though the whites sent in soon afterward would be shown a long list of properties. Campaign leaders then staged protests and prayer vigils near these real estate offices. Standing before hundreds of supporters gathered at New Friendship [Baptist Church] on that sweltering July day, King declared that more “creative tension” was needed and that they were going to march into the all-white neighborhoods surrounding the black ghetto, starting with the [Polish,] Irish and Lithuanian stronghold of Gage Park (Bernstein 24).


Gage Park is fiercely "whites-only." According to the 1960 census, only 7 of its 100,000 residents are nonwhite …. the Gage Park district contains a mixture of apartment buildings and single and duplex family homes. King cites his own experience, comparing the slum dwelling he and his family rent in the ghetto with Gage Park:


We were paying $94/month for four run-down, shabby rooms, ... and we discovered that whites [in Gage Park] with five sanitary, nice, new rooms, apartments with five rooms, were paying only $78/month. We were paying 20% tax.


Rent of $94/month in 1966 is equal to about $686 in 2014, while $78/month is equal to around $570. It's not poverty that's keeping Blacks locked in the ghetto, it's deliberate racial segregation, for which, in essence, they pay a "Color Tax." … (Freedom 1-2).


Two days later [Friday evening, July 29], Young, Raby, and other top lieutenants led roughly 450 marchers from New Friendship to H.F. Halverson Realty, at 63rd Street and Kedzie Avenue, in the heart of Gage Park. (King had a speaking engagement and was not present.) (Bernstein 24).


Soon they are surrounded by 200 or so hostile whites who are working themselves up to violence. Police are present, but as the white mob grows larger and begins hurling objects at the demonstrators, the police commander tells protest leader James Bevel that he has too few cops to prevent bloody mayhem. Around 9:00pm, Bevel accepts the commander's offer to evacuate them back to New Friendship.

CFM leaders and activists passionately argue over whether or not they should have retreated in the face of violence. The principled position is to nonviolently stand your ground — and if necessary suffer the consequences. The practical problem is whether or not the War on Slums would be able to continue if Black pickets or white supporters were maimed or killed by racists. And there's another danger. Few ghetto residents are willing to participate in nonviolent protest, but that doesn't mean they're indifferent to white-racist violence. Many are from the South, with raw memories of lynchings and savage brutality. If a demonstrator is murdered or seriously wounded, Black leaders fear the West and South Side ghettos might erupt in massive violence on a scale dwarfing the sprinkler revolt of two weeks earlier.


There is no consensus about Bevel's decision to retreat, but there is general agreement that violence cannot be allowed to deter them. They must return on the morrow.


The next morning, Bevel, Raby, and Jackson lead several hundred marchers out of New Friendship on their way back to the Halvorsen office in Gage Park. Their route takes them west on 71st Street across the ghetto border at Ashland Avenue, through the all-white Chicago Lawn district, then on to Kedzie Avenue where they turn right through Marquette Park.


The vigil the night before had been at the end of a work day and racist whites had had little time to mobilize against the protesters by word-of-mouth. Now it is Saturday, and as the marchers emerge from Marquette Park at 67th & Kedzie they are met by a mob chanting, "Niggers go home!"


Police line the street, but the racists are well-supplied with eggs, rocks and bottles that they hurl at the protesters who march up Kedzi to 63rd Street where they hold a brief rally under constant aerial attack. Then they return to Friendship Baptist. Law enforcement does little to protect the Black and white demonstrators. They do arrest half a dozen of the attackers — for directing their rage or missiles at cops rather than the nonviolent freedom marchers.


The Halvorsen office is closed on Sundays, so the plan is to hold a prayer vigil at a Methodist church in the Gage Park district. Rather than marching all the way from Friendship Baptist, the demonstrators — 500 strong, half white, half Black — travel by car caravan through Chicago Lawn to Marquette Park where they form up their march column. The police have 200 officers at the scene and they assure Movement drivers that their cars will be safe if left in the park, so the drivers join the march rather than return their vehicles to the safety of the ghetto. (At this point, Movement leaders are still more concerned with the danger of ghetto youth exploding into riot than large-scale white violence directed at nonviolent protesters — but that's about to change.)


As the column of protesters march up Kedzie Street they are attacked by a huge throng numbering in the thousands, now including many white-supremacists coming in from all over the greater Chicago area. Chanting, "White power!" and screaming, "Burn them like the Jews!" they hurl rocks, bottles, bricks, and cherry bombs at the marchers. Black gang members acting as march marshals hold steadfast to their nonviolent commitment, doing what they can to protect the other protesters by trying to knock away the thrown missiles.


Gage Park is a "white ethnic" neighborhood and heavily Catholic. Chicago clergy, particularly Roman Catholics, are strong and visible civil rights supporters. To the mob, white priests, nuns, rabbis, and ministers — all identified by their religious garb — are "race traitors." With unflinching courage, it is marchers from the community of faith who bear the brunt of racist fury.


Sister Mary Angelica is a teacher at Sacred Heart grade school. She's struck down, bleeding and unconscious. The white mob cheers. Growing larger and more vicious, they now outnumber the marchers five or six to one. Jesse Jackson and many others are hit, blood flowing down their faces. Some are taken to hospital by cops. Others grimly march on, tenaciously holding their place in column because anyone who falls out of line will be surrounded and savagely beaten.


The march turns off Kedzie into a tree-lined residential street and the attackers dart through alleys and gaps between the houses to assault them from the flank. To block the column, they push empty cars onto the sidewalk and across the street. Barred from going forward, the marchers fall back under constant assault to Marquette Park where the cops have failed to protect their vehicles. Tires have been slashed and windows smashed. Some cars are overturned, two are pushed into a pond, and more than a dozen are on fire. Without vehicles, the protesters must retreat on foot back to Friendship Baptist in the ghetto. More than 40 marchers (and two cops) are treated for injuries at Holy Cross hospital, others are cared for at a makeshift aid station at the church.


Movement marcher Bernard Kleina recalled:


As we started marching, angry whites started spitting on me and the other marchers. Not being mentally prepared to accept this kind of degrading abuse, I told someone in the mob, "I wouldn't do that if I were you," as if I were ready to take on the whole mob. (I think I may have been a little naive at the time.) Then an older African-American man in front of me turned around and said, "Remember why you're here, brother," and from that point on, I remained silent and walked in solemn procession while rocks, bottles and cherry bombs were being thrown at us over the heads of the police who were "escorting" the marchers through the park.

With the escort of reluctant police officers, it turned out to be the most brutal march I had ever been involved in. In fact, when we returned to our cars, we saw several pushed into the lagoon and others that were set on fire, turned over or damaged in some way. ... So, the marchers headed east on 71st Street where at least for awhile, police protection broke down completely. ... without the police presence, the mob threw the rocks much harder and windows broke above and around us
.
Even though the rocks hit my legs and the marchers around me, we had to just keep walking. Even if the police escort had been there, little would have been done to protect the marchers. However, the police did take swift action when one of the mob hit a police officer. Then the police clubbed him down to the ground. It wasn't until we approached Ashland Avenue that the mob retreated because Ashland, at that time, was the "dividing line" between Black and White.


SCLC leaders and organizers, veterans of Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma, are shocked — stunned — by the ferocity of racist hate and rage — and the huge size of the mob — worse and larger than anything they'd seen in the South.


Bottles and bricks were thrown at us; we were often beaten. Some of the people who had been brutalized in Selma and who were present at the Capitol ceremonies in Montgomery led marchers in the suburbs of Chicago amid a rain of rocks and bottles, among burning automobiles, to the thunder of jeering thousands, many of them waving Nazi flags. Swastikas bloomed in Chicago parks like misbegotten weeds. Our marchers were met by a hailstorm of bricks, bottles, and firecrackers. "White power" became the racist catcall, punctuated by the vilest of obscenities — most frequently directly at Catholic priests and nuns among the marchers.

I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I had never seen, even in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as in Chicago. — Martin Luther King (Freedom 2-6).


Works cited:
Bernstein, David. “The Longest March.” Politics & City Life. July 25, 2016. Web. https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Ma...


“Freedom Now! White Power!” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...


“Sprinkler Revolt.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...

Civil Rights Events -- Chicago Freedom Movement -- Inroads

For all of the hoopla surrounding King’s arrival, the campaign started slowly. King spent his first weeks touring the city and meeting with local activists, city officials, and ghetto residents (Bernstein 1).


Working with Rev. Clay Evans of the Chicago Baptist Ministers Conference and Al Pitcher a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, SCLC staff member and divinity student Jesse Jackson begins organizing a chapter of SCLC's Operation Breadbasket. This is a program that uses church-led consumer boycotts to combat job discrimination and open up employment opportunities for nonwhites — an effort that finds favor among Afro-American clergymen who are reluctant to participate in militant protests or directly confront the Daley machine around a hot-button issue like segregated housing.


King addresses a meeting of more than 200 Black ministers who form committees to investigate, and if necessary target, racist hiring practices in the food industry, particularly soda-pop, milk, bread, and soup companies all of which sell well in the ghetto. By late spring they are having some success — 75 Afro-Americans hired by two milk companies and 44 at a third, for one example. But the Daley machine strikes back. Evans is erecting a new church. Suddenly, without explanation, his city building permits are withdrawn — halting construction for seven years (Steps 1).


SCLC leaders and organizers like Bevel, Andy Young, Big James Orange, and Jimmy Collier begin working with the Vice Lords, Blackstone Rangers, Cobras, and Roman Saints, urging them to stop fighting each other, support the CFM, and participate in nonviolent direct action.


At first they make scant progress. But they persist. Orange is beaten by gang members, not once but several times. He maintains nonviolence and he doesn't quit. Gradually he begins winning respect. Eventually, Bevel reports great success, and Dr. King addresses a "gang convention" at the Palmer House hotel. "From that period on," Orange later recalled, "we worked with these guys." Later on, some of the gang members guard Dr. King from racist attack, while others act as marshals on the mass marches into white neighborhoods that begin at the end of July.
…

But while some gang members do commit to tactical nonviolence as a requirement for participating in SCLC-led protests, the large number that Bevel hopes to recruit for his "freedom army" does not materialize. Most remain unwilling to forego their enmity with rival gangs, participate with whites in interracial actions, or accept nonviolent discipline — even temporarily (Ghetto 2).


Late in February, five desperate residents of a Coretta King, Al Raby, tenement on South Homan in the West Side ghetto ask Dr. King for help. They have no heat or electricity. Trash and garbage are not being collected. The landlord is doing nothing, and neither are city officials. There are 20 children living in the four occupied flats (the other two are empty). On a frigid winter day, Dr. King leads some 200 marchers to their dilapidated apartment house. King declares they are "seizing" the building and placing it in "supralegal trusteeship" so they can repair it. The Movement will collect the roughly $400/month rent on behalf of the tenants and use the money to make the place habitable. "The moral question is far more important than the legal one," he tells reporters who challenge him on the legality of bypassing the building owner.


Three of the unemployed tenants are to be hired for janitorial and general labor. They will be paid $2/hour (equal to $14.50 in 2014), which Dr. King considers a "fair minimum wage" (the actual federal minimum wage in 1966 is $1.25/hour, equal to $9.13 in 2014). Dressed in work clothes, King, his wife Coretta, Al Raby, and other activists begin cleaning out the furnace and shoveling up mounds of uncollected, frozen trash and garbage while efforts are made to get the electricity and heating back in service.


Media, politicians, and pillars of the community roundly condemn the seizure as "anarchy," "theft," and "revolutionary." Andy Young counters that after seeing a shivering infant wrapped only in newspapers they could not wait months for lawsuits to meander through the courts. "We wanted to do it illegally. We want to be put in jail for furnishing heat and health requirements to people with children in the winter."


But the SCLC staff has failed to do its homework and the seizure blows up into an embarrassment. … the owner is not a greedy real estate corporation, but rather an ailing 81 year old invalid almost as poor as his tenants. "I think King is right," he tells reporters, and he offers to give the building to anyone willing to assume the mortgage and make the necessary repairs.


In Birmingham, defenders of the racist status quo struck back at challenges to their authority with police dogs and fire hoses, in Selma they used billy clubs and tear gas. In Chicago, Mayor Daley and his machine are more sophisticated, they use promises and bureaucracy rather than police violence. Instead of arresting King for seizing the tenement, Daley loudly announces a "crash program" to inspect 15,000 West Side buildings for health and safety problems. The ailing Homan St. owner is charged with 23 code violations.


Behind the scenes, the county welfare department withholds the tenants' rent subsidies so there's no money going into Movement hands. After three months, a court orders that control of the property be returned to the owner. SCLC ends up spending $2000 (equal to $14,500 in 2014) to repair the building, but only collects $200 in rent (Steps 1-3).


The Chicago campaign is draining SCLC's financial resources. …Harry Belafonte recruits Mahalia Jackson, Dick Gregory, Sidney Poitier, and George Kirby to star in a "Freedom Festival" on Saturday evening, March 12, at Chicago's International Amphitheater on the South Side …. A sellout crowd of more than 12,000 attend the festival and thousands more are turned away for lack of space. After expenses, more than $80,000 is raised for the CFM (equal to $580,000 in 2014).

The festival is also an organizing tool. SCLC staff and CCCO activists work the ghetto, selling tickets and using the opportunity to meet, educate and learn from people in the community. Gathering 12,000 enthusiastic supporters in one place imparts a sense of strength and hope inspired by Dr. King's address, in which he says:

The purpose of the slum is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness. In the slum, the Negro is forced to pay more for less, and the general economy of the slum is constantly drained without being replenished. In short, the slum is an invisible wall which restricts the mobility of persons because of the color of their skin. The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated at every turn. ...


It is clear to me that we must organize this total community into unities of political and social power. ... As long as injustice is around, demonstrations will be necessary. So when it is appropriate, we will encourage sit-ins, stand-ins, rent-strikes, boycotts, picket lines, marches, civil disobedience, and any form of protest that are nonviolently conceived and executed.


The day after the Freedom Festival, Mayor Daley again undercuts the CFM. Without mentioning King or the movement, he boasts that his inspection teams have visited more than 96,000 poor families, and he claims that his administration has exterminated more than 1,600,000 rats and rodents in the ghetto. He goes on to promise eradication of all slum conditions in Chicago by the end of the following year, 1967.


Meanwhile, his allies in the Afro-American community continue working against the Freedom Movement. Rev. J.H. Jackson asserts that civil disobedience as practiced by King and SCLC is, "not far removed from open crime," and that Daley and school chief Willis are true-hearted friends of Chicago Blacks. Dr. King responds by observing that, "I don't think Dr. Jackson speaks for [even] 1% of the Negroes in this country" (Freedom 1-2).


Led by local attorney Gil Cornfield, ghetto tenants, fed up with high rents and atrocious living conditions, had begun the employment of a legal strategy, subsequently supported by the CFM, designed to pressure landlords to act responsibly.


In early 1966 tenants on the West Side had begun a rent strike. “The strike,” Gil Cornfield remembers, “was over the poor conditions and services among apartment dwellers in the community and centered on a handful of absentee owners and their real estate companies which controlled many, if not most, of the large apartment buildings.” Residents held mass meetings where they aired their grievances and developed their strategy. “The rent strike,” Cornfield recalls, “was resulting in wholesale eviction proceedings being brought by the affected real estate companies in the Circuit Court of Cook County.”


With Cornfield’s assistance, a strategy was developed to challenge each eviction in court, contending that if a tenant’s nonpayment of rent was in response to the landlord’s failure and refusal to maintain the rental premises in accordance with the requirements of the municipal code, this could be used as a defense in an eviction case. In housing court, defense attorneys presented photographs of the deplorable conditions, along with supporting testimony about unheeded complaints to the landlord. This strategy resulted in the finding that evictions were no longer pro forma, and the attendant legal costs would be borne by the landlords. At each eviction proceeding, the court was filled to overflowing with tenants and members of the community. This legal strategy, coupled with the ongoing rent strikes, prevented landlords from breaking the strikes through evictions.


Beyond court petitions, the coalition of labor and the Chicago Freedom Movement became the platform for conceptualizing the development of a tenant union federation that would use collective bargaining to change real estate management practices. Collective bargaining would empower residents to demand decent, safe housing and result in a fundamental change in the landlord-tenant relationship.


When massive rent strikes in properties held by the Condor and Costalis real estate firm became too onerous, the firm agreed to negotiate. Because of Cornfield’s labor background, the idea of a collective bargaining agreement covering all tenants in Condor and Costalis properties in East Garfield Park and parts of Lawndale was conceived. The collective bargaining approach was intended to improve housing conditions to conform to municipal codes and to strengthen community organization and leadership within a democratic framework (Cornfield 5-6).


Bernard Lafayette and Bill Moyer of the AFSC urge the coalition to focus less on forcing slum-lords to improve and maintain their properties and more on housing segregation as the key demand …. With a local anti-discrimination law already on the books and restrictive covenants unenforceble, achieving an open housing market in the city is a matter of public opinion and political will rather than forcing through new legislation or litigating in court. Perhaps through nonviolent direct action they can generate enough social pressure to make the city actually enforce its own law.
…
… in Bevel's view, addressing the psychology of ghetto oppression is as important as the economic and political aspects. Challenging and defying hate- filled white racists over residential segregation provides a way for those at the bottom of society to, "stand up and be a man, to declare that he was a human being and would henceforth expect to be treated as one."


By May of 1966, SCLC and the Friends are talking about vigils, picket lines and sit-ins at real estate offices — and marches through adamantly resistant all-white neighborhoods. Some in the CCCO coalition fear that such tactics will provoke a ferocious "white-backlash" — and mob violence. Others are impatient to confront residential racism head on (Focus 2).


In late May, King kicks off the action phase of the War on Slums by calling for a mass rally at Soldier Field followed by a march to City Hall. …
…
Shortly before the Soldier Field rally, CFM finally agrees on a Program of the Chicago Freedom Movement which they issue to the press. It's a 12-page document that broadly analyzes the problems faced by Blacks in the urban ghetto, calls for a wide range of systematic reforms and development programs, and lists an extensive (and diffuse) set of "Immediate Action Demands" that cover a variety of issues …


Included is this statement.


For our primary target we have chosen housing. As of July 10 we shall cease to be accomplices to a housing system of discrimination, segregation, and degradation. We shall begin to act as if Chicago were an open city. We shall act on the basis that every [family] is entitled to full access of buying or renting housing that is sound, attractive, and reasonably priced.


On the day before the Soldier Field rally, Daley boasts to the press that his administration has "moved to repair" 102,847 apartments in 9,226 dilapidated tenements and that housing fines have doubled over those levied the previous year.


Movement activists try to point out that "moved to repair" is not the same as actually made habitable, and that the level of housing code enforcement was so abysmally low that doubling the fines was little more than changing one drop in an empty bucket to two drops in the same empty bucket. But local media is well trained to accept at face value whatever pronouncements emanate from City Hall, so the Mayor's claims convince many people that the slum problem is being effectively addressed — and that therefore there is no need for disruptive protests.


Sunday, July 10, dawns oppressively hot and muggy, with temperatures in the high 90s. Soldier Field is the only available large venue, but it has no shade and the crowd swelters through songs and speeches. Organizers had hoped for 100,000 participants but the turnout falls clearly short of that goal. As is typical of large protests in the 1960s, number estimates by the police, media, and activists vary widely — the cops say 23,000, media estimates 30-35,000, and SCLC claims 60,000.


After the rally, King leads marchers out of Soldier Field for an almost three-mile trek to City Hall. Long hikes are not a normal part of urban life, and for many the distance and oppressive heat is too much and they fall out of line well short of the goal. But 5,000 or so manage to make the distance and reach Daley's seat of power. It's Sunday, and the building is closed. In a gesture of contempt that speaks louder than words, neither the Mayor nor any of his functionaries or bureaucrats deign to meet the thousands of constituents who have come to petition for redress of grievances. In an act reminiscent of his namesake Martin Luther, Dr. King tapes Demands of the Chicago Freedom Movement to the locked doors.


By previous arrangement, on the following day CFM leaders meet with Mayor Daley and his top aides. The meeting does not go well. King calls for real action and change, not just empty promises. Daley argues that all cities have slums and he lauds his own "massive" anti-slum efforts which he asks King to join. King restates the necessity of ending housing segregation by making Chicago an "open city," a point the Mayor does not respond to. Al Raby of CCCO goes through the demands, detailing them point by point until he gets to, "Creation of a citizens review board for grievances against police brutality and false arrests or stops and seizures," which evokes angry resistance from officials and umbrage on the part of Daley at the lack of trust in local government shown by Afro-American leaders.


The Mayor refuses to specifically address any of the Movement's itemized demands. King asks him to endorse the Civil Rights Act of 1966 then being debated in Congress — a bill supported by Democratic Party leader President Lyndon Johnson which includes open-housing provisions — Daley evades the question and refuses to do so.


The meeting ends in acrimony and Raby tells Daley, "I want you to know we're going to begin direct action immediately!" Each side speaks separately to the press. The New York Times reports: "Mr. Daley was scarlet faced, as his words tumbled over each other in indignation as he declared that Chicago already had 'massive' anti-slum and civil rights programs." And in the same article: "Dr. King said, 'We're demanding these things, not requesting them,' in the face of 'seething desperation' among Chicago Negroes that was inviting social disaster."


"We cannot wait," Dr. King tells the press. "Young people are not going to wait" (Marching 1-3).


Works cited:


Bernstein, David. “The Longest March.” Politics & City Life. July 25, 2016. Web. https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Ma...


Cornfield, Gil, Heaps, Melody, and Hill, Norman. “The Chicago Freedom Movement’s Quest for Economic Justice.” The Chicago Reporter. January 15, 2018. Web. https://www.chicagoreporter.com/the-c...


“A Focus on Housing.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...



“Freedom Festival.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...


“Ghetto Youth Gangs.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...


“Marching to City Hall.” .” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...


“Steps & Missteps.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm...