The March Against Fear: The Last Great Walk of the Civil Rights Movement and the Emergence of Black Power

CHAPTER 3

REVIVED

JAMES MEREDITH’S WALK became important the minute James Meredith got shot. Before then, it had been a modest effort with only a few supporters. Aubrey Norvell changed that fact the moment he fired his shotgun at Meredith. But Meredith lost influence over his walk when he stopped participating in it, and he further faded in importance after he’d left the region. Even the title of his undertaking began to evolve in his absence.

Meredith had called his journey a Walk Against Fear. To him, a march equaled a protest. He hadn’t seen his effort as a statement of protest; he’d just been trying to exercise his right to walk through his home state. But now Meredith’s walk was becoming a protest. A protest against violence. A protest against racial fears. A protest in support of voter registration. A protest for further equality. As a consequence, Meredith’s walk morphed into a march. The new venture went by many names. Organizers called it the Meredith Mississippi Freedom March in their manifesto. Some people shortened that name to the Meredith March. Others called it the Mississippi March. Over time it came to be known as the Meredith March Against Fear or, simply, the March Against Fear.

Whatever the endeavor’s name, almost 200 miles separated organizers from Meredith’s planned destination of Jackson. Tuesday’s revival by civil rights leaders had been more symbolic than productive. The men had covered just six miles. It would take many days of dedicated hiking to complete the journey, many days and countless volunteers.

DATES WALKED: June 8–11 MILES WALKED: 37 ROUTE: North of Coldwater to north of Pope

By Wednesday, June 8, those volunteers began to materialize. When Martin Luther King, Jr., and others returned to the day’s starting point, they were heartened to find a gathering of hikers on hand to join them. The group numbered about 120 as it headed south on Highway 51 toward the nearby town of Coldwater and beyond. Most of the day’s walkers were African Americans. Some were local residents; others had traveled by chartered bus from Memphis, inspired by the previous night’s rally there.

Few of these participants planned to hike for long, and that was okay. Organizers viewed their endeavor as more of a relay than a marathon. It didn’t matter whether someone walked for days on end or for just a few hours. What mattered was for some group of people to keep walking, over time, until they reached Jackson. Thus the composition of the march evolved day by day, as people hugged the side of the road and trudged south under the summer sun. Sometimes movement leaders marched out front—leading—but on other occasions they mingled with the crowd. While they walked, participants often sang freedom songs or chanted the words “freedom” and its Swahili equivalent, “Uhuru,” showing solidarity with blacks involved in the struggle for racial equality in Africa.

Even though Wednesday’s group had gotten a late start, by 5 p.m. hikers had covered more than six miles and reached the outskirts of the next town, Senatobia. Then everyone dispersed for the night. Some headed to their local residences, but most returned, yet again, to Memphis, where they slept in homes, motel rooms, and even on the floor of James Lawson’s church, which had become the temporary headquarters for the march.

Hosea Williams of the SCLC coordinated an army of volunteers from this makeshift base of operations. His team handled everything from recruitment and meal planning to housing and drafting news bulletins for the media. Organizers raced to arrange the logistics that would eliminate the need for commuting to and from the march site. Not only would it become increasingly impractical as volunteers hiked farther and farther away from Memphis, but it undercut the momentum of the effort.

Participants in the previous year’s march from Selma to Montgomery had camped along the way and shared evening rallies that built camaraderie. Leaders wanted to create that same atmosphere again. Plus they hoped the march through Mississippi would grow in popularity over time, swelling to a crescendo of thousands by its conclusion. The best way to build a sense of unity, to build a bigger crowd, was to add momentum—and people—day by day as they marched toward Jackson. That meant renting tents, finding camping sites, arranging for sanitation facilities, setting daily hiking goals, scouting out picnic spots for lunch breaks, and finding volunteers who could feed marchers and help with transportation.

All the while, as organizers organized, marchers kept walking south, mile by mile.

Thursday, June 9, saw a delayed start, too, but, even so, marchers covered nine miles before stopping at 4 p.m. just beyond the town of Como. More than 200 people had turned out for the hike, including a local man named Armistead Phipps who insisted that he had to take part in the event regardless of his heart condition. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to our people in Mississippi,” Phipps declared. “Now they won’t be afraid to vote anymore.”

That morning the 58-year-old man had headed for the starting point near Senatobia and waited patiently for King’s arrival from Memphis. But after walking for a short while, Phipps stumbled and collapsed. Despite medical attention, he died soon after. His passing was both distressing and problematic. The pool of news reporters that was shadowing the revived hike often swelled to a hundred or more, and any of them could have blamed this fatality on the march, creating coverage that undercut the entire endeavor. King deflected criticism from the march to Mississippi itself by connecting the Phipps death to the trials of living under segregation in the state. “His death means that he was probably underfed, overworked and underpaid,” King observed. Phipps hadn’t died because he’d walked for freedom; he had died because of his lack of freedom during his lifetime as a black man in the Deep South.

King had a point.

Mississippi ranked as the poorest state in the nation in 1966, and racism contributed extensively to that status. The impoverishment of the state was almost inevitable given that nearly half its residents were African American and that whites had constructed a segregated society that worked to disadvantage them. The vast majority of the state’s black residents were descendants of slaves who had been freed with no assets into a post–Civil War world that offered few opportunities. Poverty became one’s inheritance, passed down, generation by generation, as an invisible chain of bondage. The places that many of them called home looked like shacks, not houses. Cardboard and tarpaper often filled in for siding. Few houses had indoor plumbing. Generation after generation of African Americans tried to turn nothing into something, but that’s hard to do when one’s world is rigged to give the advantage to people with white skin.

An older woman watched through her screen door as marchers passed her rural Mississippi home. Undated photo. Credit 12

When the federal government tried to intervene on behalf of blacks, local whites resisted. After the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the integration of public schools in 1954, Mississippi legislators considered abolishing their public schools. In the end, they continued the state’s education system but provided publicly funded vouchers to help white families send their children to segregated private schools. When the federal government offered vital food supplies and provided free services such as health care and preschool education to Mississippi’s poor, many whites criticized the programs as an alarming imposition of federal will on one of its 50 states. Such criticism was hypocritical because many whites benefited from federal aid, too. But, whites tended to view their own government support, such as a generous crop subsidy program for cotton farmers, as valid even as they dismissed federal handouts for poor people, who were so often black.

The few whites who expressed their disagreement with segregationists risked condemnation, loss of business support, and more. Even when only a minority of whites in a community joined supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and local White Citizens’ Councils, their voices and actions came, by default, to represent the white majority.

As a result, it took outsiders and mass action to break down a system nurtured by centuries of slavery and 100 years of post–Civil War segregation. Mississippi had become so segregated that whites might not even realize the depths of its racial oppression. They saw blacks on their terms—as maids, as field hands, as customers. Whites were far more likely to attribute the lag in the advancement of such folks to some inherent lack of ability or to an innate dislike of hard work rather than acknowledge the yoke of impoverishment and hopelessness that was the legacy of slavery.

Civil rights leaders wanted to peel back the veneer that made segregation seem okay. They’d made progress in Alabama. They’d made progress in other states in the South. But civil rights leaders had found Mississippi to be tough territory in the past, and no one could be sure that this time would be different.

Still, they marched.

On Friday, June 10, the fourth day of the revived march, 155 people set off on a 15-mile route, heading toward Sardis and points beyond. Locals welcomed the marchers to their town with a homemade picnic lunch; then some 100 residents from the area joined hikers for the day’s remaining 10 miles. Even more people joined the procession as it neared its stopping point in Batesville, allowing the day’s march to conclude with a crowd of more than 500 participants. Local blacks once again fed the marchers, offering up a feast that included barbecue, fried chicken, fresh vegetables, corn bread, and desserts.

Perhaps best of all, the first tent had arrived. Three more would follow in the coming days. For the first time, hikers had the option to sleep along the route. No more commuting. Volunteers erected the rented circus tent on the grounds of a local church, and some 300 people bedded down for the night, intent on resuming their hike the next morning.

By sleeping on-site, the marchers were able to make an earlier departure than on previous days. On Saturday morning, June 11, hundreds of them paraded into Batesville bound for their first stop at a county courthouse. The courthouses of Mississippi served as the hubs for voter registration in the state, and the Panola County courthouse offered organizers a prime spot to test their influence on voter registration. Some marchers literally danced into town, singing freedom songs, clapping, and swaying in time to an irresistible beat. Courage, freedom, justice, the rhythm seemed to say. Have courage. Seek freedom. Find justice

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