“There is nothing

more powerful

to dramatize an injustice

like the

tramp,

tramp,

tramp

of marching feet.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., June 7, 1966, at a rally in

Memphis, Tennessee, during the March Against Fear

THE LAST GREAT WALK OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND THE EMERGENCE OF BLACK POWER

Countless supporters joined James Meredith (center, wearing pith helmet and grasping walking stick) for the final hike of the March Against Fear, June 26, 1966, to the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson, including civil rights movement leaders Martin Luther King, Jr. (left of Meredith, arm linked with wife Coretta), Stokely Carmichael (right of Meredith, wearing overalls), and Floyd McKissick (right of Carmichael). Credit 1

Copyright © 2017 Ann Bausum

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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and Yellow Border

Design are trademarks of the National Geographic Society, used under license.

Cover Design by James Hiscott, Jr.

Text set in Baskerville MT Std, Univers

Display text set in Veneer, Univers

Hardcover ISBN 9781426326653

ISBN 9781426326660

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FOR THE MARCHERS THEN, NOW, AND ALWAYS.

—AB

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

A Note About Language

Prologue A TREMOR

Chapter 1 WILD IDEAS

Chapter 2 REACTIONS

Chapter 3 REVIVED

Chapter 4 DELTA BOUND

Chapter 5 BLACK POWER

Chapter 6 EARTHQUAKE

Chapter 7 WHITE RAGE

Chapter 8 SUPREMACY

Chapter 9 REUNITED

Chapter 10 FINALE

Chapter 11 AFTERSHOCKS

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Photography Credits

Citations

About the Author

A NOTE ABOUT LANGUAGE

Readers will travel through history with this book and encounter examples of language old and new, respectful and hateful. In my text, I use the terms “black” and “African American” interchangeably and with equal respect. The widespread use of the word “Negro” in quotations from historical source material should be viewed within the context of the times as a term of respect, too. Racial epithets of that era remain no less offensive today, but they are a part of the historical record and are presented in quotations from the period without censorship.

—Ann Bausum

PROLOGUE
A TREMOR
BLAM!

One minute James Meredith was walking along a rural road in Mississippi, two days into an estimated two-week-long journey to the state capital of Jackson. The next minute a stranger had climbed out of the roadside honeysuckle and started shooting at him.

The first blast from the 16-gauge shotgun spewed tiny balls of ammunition toward the hiker, but the pellets struck the pavement nearby, not Meredith himself.

Undeterred, the gunman fired again.

BLAM!

Some pellets found their mark.

BLAM!

Shotgun pellets from the third blast penetrated Meredith’s scalp, neck, shoulder, back, and legs. His hiking companions seemed frozen in place, transfixed by shock and unable to react to the sudden threat.

Meredith had cried out in surprise when the shooting began. Then he, like those walking with him, began searching for cover. He dragged himself across the pavement, trying to put distance between himself and his attacker. He collapsed on his side, sprawled upon the grassy shoulder of U.S. Highway 51, his blood oozing from multiple wounds into the red soil of Mississippi.

The penetration of countless tiny balls of shot through his skin left Meredith moaning in pain. “Get a car and get me in it,” he implored the others at the scene. An ambulance arrived quickly, and within minutes Meredith was being raced back along his hiking route, bound for a Memphis hospital. Emergency room physicians concluded that his wounds were not life-threatening, although they could have been if the shooter had been closer or his aim more accurate.

James Meredith collapsed in the road after he was ambushed and shot in rural Mississippi on June 6, 1966. Credit 2

Doctors shaved the back of Meredith’s head and dug as many as 70 pellets out of his scalp, back, limbs, even from behind an ear, before they questioned their effort. Although only a fraction of the 450 or so shotgun pellets fired toward Meredith had found their mark, countless balls of shot remained embedded in his flesh. Yet it was so time-consuming—and so painful—to remove them, that doctors decided to leave the rest alone. He wouldn’t be the first person to walk around with bird shot under his skin. Soon after, a local news reporter found a medical resident familiar with the case and asked him about the patient’s condition. The doctor-in-training replied with a candor that, although shocking today, would have seemed unremarkable at that time in the South. “If he had been an ordinary nigger on an ordinary Saturday night,” the man observed, “we’d have swabbed his ass with merthiolate [an antiseptic] and sent him home”

But Meredith was not an ordinary man, black or otherwise, and his shooting would have a seismic influence on the turn of events beyond his own world.

“I wanted to give hope to a barefoot boy. I was a barefoot boy in Mississippi myself for 16 years.”

James Meredith, explaining one of the reasons behind his planned walk through Mississippi

James Howard Meredith graduated from Ole Miss in Oxford amid a sea of white faces on August 18, 1963. He was the first African American to earn a degree from the institution, having integrated it the previous year. Credit 3

CHAPTER 1
WILD IDEAS

JAMES MEREDITH was already famous before he got shot on June 6, 1966. Indeed, his fame probably made him a target for attack, and his fame certainly accounted for why his shooting made the national news. Otherwise he would have been just the latest overlooked victim of white-on-black violence in a state where whites had used violence—and fear of violence—to secure their supremacy since the era of slavery.

At the time of his birth in 1933, Meredith’s parents chose to name him simply J. H., using initials in place of a first and middle name. His family lived on a farm outside Kosciusko, Mississippi, and his parents’ decision represented both an act of courage and an acknowledgment of the challenges their son would face growing up in the segregated world of the Deep South.

Even names held power then.

Social custom during that era dictated that blacks address whites by adding titles of respect to their names, such as Mr., Mrs., and Miss. This gesture emphasized the place of whites at the top of a race-based social order. Whites reinforced the subservient stature of African Americans by routinely addressing them by first name only. Whites also often converted the given names of blacks into childish nicknames that might last a lifetime. Meredith’s parents chose not to give him a proper name, such as James, which could have become a source of humiliation if whites called him Jimmy instead.

DATES WALKED: June 5–6 MILES WALKED: 28 ROUTE: Memphis, Tennessee, to south of Hernando, Mississippi

Despite his exposure to this world of white supremacy, Meredith emerged from his childhood with a remarkable sense of his potential and self-worth. Maybe it was the pride he felt because his great-grandfather had been the last leader of the region’s Choctaw Nation. Maybe it was the power of those childhood initials. Maybe it was the security and independence that land ownership brought to his parents as they raised their 11 children. Whatever the causes, the result was that J. H. Meredith had a fierce determination to make something of himself.

And he had complete confidence that he could do it.

When he turned 18, J. H. added names to his initials and became James Howard Meredith; he needed a full name in order to join the Air Force. A few years before, President Harry S. Truman had ordered the integration of the armed forces of the United States, so Meredith was among the first wave of recruits to serve in an integrated Air Force. He spent most of the 1950s in the military, culminating in a three-year posting to Japan. In 1960 he returned to Mississippi, newly married, and in pursuit of further education for both himself and his wife. Initially the couple enrolled at all-black Jackson State University, but, in 1961, Meredith set his sights on transferring to one of the most revered all-white institutions of the South: the University of Mississippi, otherwise known as Ole Miss.

Federal marshals and other U.S. security personnel stood guard to ensure that onlookers remained orderly when Meredith registered for classes at the University of Mississippi on Monday, October 1, 1962. Credit 4

Ever since his teens, Meredith had dreamed of going to his home state’s flagship university. Having served in an integrated military, and having heard newly elected President John F. Kennedy’s call in 1961 to national service, Meredith dared to imagine integrating Ole Miss. Others had tried and failed; perhaps he could succeed. So he applied. And he persisted in claiming his right to be admitted regardless of his race. His audacity triggered a fury among staunch segregationists and led to widespread opposition to his enrollment. Months of legal battles ensued, going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, on September 10, 1962, upheld Meredith’s right to attend the school.

Yet when Meredith appeared on campus to enroll in classes, the state’s governor personally blocked him from doing so. The lieutenant governor performed the same maneuver on a subsequent enrollment attempt. This struggle went on for days, and, at its climax on the last day of September, local segregationists besieged the federal forces that had taken up guard outside the university’s administrative offices. After dark, the mob grew increasingly hostile and began attacking the armed personnel. Two observers died during the ensuing violence in a conflict that some likened to the final battle of the Civil War. News coverage of the unfolding drama ensured that Meredith gained national fame along with his eventual admission to the university. Everyone knew who he was and what he had achieved.

Even the use of tear gas failed to disperse a mob of angry whites who rioted at Ole Miss in an effort to prevent the university’s integration. Cars set ablaze by the segregationists still smoldered when Meredith enrolled the next morning, October 1, 1962. Credit 5

Meredith had exhibited unusual courage and determination during his Ole Miss enrollment struggle. He seemed unflappable. Able to endure any insult without being provoked to retaliate. Always restrained under pressure. Focused on some future spot on a horizon that sometimes only he seemed able to see. Meredith maintained that focus for the rest of his studies even though he required constant protection by U.S. marshals and other military personnel. After combining his credits from Jackson State with three semesters of coursework at Ole Miss, he earned his college degree on August 18, 1963.

The battle to integrate Ole Miss took place during the opening years of a growing movement for African-American civil rights. Meredith’s hard-fought success served as one more piece of evidence that change could take place in the Deep South. By the time he graduated, the civil rights movement had grown into a national force for social justice, with multiple organizations working to break down the rule of white supremacy. The same month that Meredith graduated from Ole Miss, for example, movement leaders mounted the historic March on Washington and its culminating “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., who had become a towering figure in the struggle for racial equality.

A cornerstone of this social justice movement became the willingness of people to put their lives on the line in the fight for change, much as Meredith had done during the integration of Ole Miss. Volunteers in the movement countered the violence of segregationists with tremendous acts of courage. They stood their ground peacefully in the midst of racist attacks, confident that love was a more powerful emotion than hate. Year after year, they persevered, whether it meant walking to work instead of riding segregated buses during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956, or braving violent mobs during the freedom rides of 1961, or enduring police attacks with high-pressure fire hoses during the Birmingham campaign of 1963.

Such efforts drew on what movement leaders called the power of nonviolence. Some viewed nonviolence as a strategy, a series of tactics that forced reluctant foes to submit to change; others saw it as a way of life. For nonviolence to work, people had to be willing to remain peaceful, but determined, in the face of any level of violence. They had to outmaneuver their violent oppressors and step in and complete a protest whether their comrades had been arrested, injured, or even killed.

During 1965, after segregationists murdered a black youth who had advocated with others in Selma, Alabama, for equal voting rights, civil rights leaders vowed to carry on the young man’s fight by walking from there to the state capital of Montgomery, 54 miles away. King, other leaders, and their supporters made the march to demonstrate their determination to end the discriminatory practices that had kept blacks from voting in the South for nearly a century. The walk from Selma to Montgomery had become a triumphant procession that spring, lasting five days. The march’s compelling demonstration of the power of nonviolence had helped to secure passage later that year of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal legislation which finally ensured universal access to voting in the South, regardless of race.

Meredith remained on the sidelines during all of these developments. Although he could have joined forces with the civil rights movement after he earned his degree from Ole Miss, Meredith chose to maintain his independence and to focus on his own goals. While others were protesting for civil rights, he obtained further education. First he accepted an invitation from the government of Nigeria to study abroad. Meredith was intrigued by the opportunity to see how blacks lived on a different continent, and in early 1964 he moved to Africa with his wife and young son. The following year he ended his studies as a graduate student at the University of Ibadan and returned to the United States so he could enroll in law school at Columbia University in New York City.

After integrating Ole Miss, Meredith had developed a reputation within the civil rights movement for being a quirky loner. Fiercely independent, he could be feisty and impulsive. He had a tendency to make provocative statements and to seem dismissive of the work of other activists. Movement leaders eyed him cautiously as a result, never sure if they could count on his support. Meredith kept his distance from the movement; it didn’t suit his personality or his mind-set to immerse himself in such a broad campaign. He preferred to be in control.

As a military veteran, Meredith still thought like a soldier. He trusted the power of hierarchy, discipline, and military-style precision more than the power of nonviolence. He embraced the era’s more traditional view of manhood, believing that men proved their worth with courageous behavior. Meredith disliked the civil rights movement’s strategy of including women and children in their protests. He thought that doing so made men weak. The women and children appeared to be shields, protecting the men from attack. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, he thought. Shouldn’t men be brave enough to stand up for their rights on their own, as he had done at Ole Miss?

This visionary man toggled back and forth between two styles of thought. On the one hand, Meredith thought strategically. Join the military. Get an education. Start a family. On the other hand, he had outsize plans for himself, such as integrating an iconic all-white fortress of education. By combining his skills at strategic planning with his ambitious vision, Meredith had accomplished remarkable feats. Few others could have endured his Ole Miss legal battle, student harassment, and threats of bodily harm. But he had. And why?

The answer was obvious to Meredith: It was his destiny.

Meredith acted with an unwavering confidence that he was fulfilling some predetermined plan to serve as a leader for the oppressed members of his race. That sense of destiny—what he called his divine responsibility—had inspired him to integrate Ole Miss, and in the spring of 1966 it led him to set a new challenge for himself and for the state of Mississippi. This time he wanted to battle something even bigger than Ole Miss, something even bigger than segregation. This time he wanted to battle fear, the fear that pulsed through so many racial interactions in the South. Meredith, age 32, maintained that he was tired of being afraid of white people. Furthermore, he wanted other blacks in his home state to stop being afraid of whites, too. If Mississippi’s African Americans could just stop being afraid, he suggested, everyone would be better off.

Meredith planned to fight fear with his feet. He’d take a walk, what he called a Walk Against Fear. That summer, after finishing his first year of law school, he would start walking in Memphis, Tennessee, just across the state line from Mississippi, and not stop until he’d reached Jackson, the state’s capital, some 220 miles away. Meredith didn’t see his hike as a protest; he saw it as something ordinary that anyone should be able to do. He credited his mother, Roxie, with inspiring the idea. The year before, she’d confided in him that she considered Meredith’s youngest brother to be in less danger while fighting in the Vietnam War with the U.S. military than he would have been if he’d stayed at home. Her statement had shocked Meredith. Maybe African Americans wouldn’t be so afraid in Mississippi, he’d concluded, if they had more control over the state’s governance.

For nearly a century, southern whites had denied blacks their share of political power by denying them their right to vote. But now, for the first time since the post–Civil War era of Reconstruction, the newly enacted Voting Rights Act of 1965 enforced rights that had been granted in 1870 with the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A year after the latest legislation, though, the majority of the state’s African Americans had not yet registered to vote. The key remaining obstacle on that path, as Meredith saw it, was fear: fear of the consequences blacks might face if they chose to vote. By walking from Memphis to Jackson, Meredith hoped to inspire African Americans in his home state to become a bit less afraid. They, too, could take a walk against fear, a short walk that led to the ballot box.

Meredith speculated that the concerns of his mother and other southern blacks might be unwarranted, might be a lingering habit developed during earlier eras filled with real terror. Was their fear “just operating on its own accord”? Meredith wondered. And what about the white citizens of Mississippi? They were afraid, too, afraid that the advancement of one race meant the inevitable decline of another. That didn’t have to be so, Meredith believed. He’d try to prove his point and conquer his own inherited fears by walking through his home state.

But Meredith had another reason to undertake the endeavor, too, and it came from another one of his outsize goals. Ever since his teen years, he had entertained the idea of campaigning to become the governor of Mississippi. Two decades later, he still wanted to run for governor, but he knew he had no chance for success as long as the people most likely to vote for him were the people least likely to show up at the polls. Thus Meredith hoped his walk through Mississippi could serve two purposes. Not only might it encourage the state’s blacks to become voters. It might inspire them to vote for him in a future political race.

Meredith departed from Memphis, Tennessee, on foot, bound for Jackson, Mississippi, 220 miles away, on June 5, 1966. Friends and onlookers joined him for stretches of the first day’s walk. Credit 6

This time, Meredith wanted his activism to be different from the confrontation at Ole Miss. He wanted no federal troops, no bloodshed, no drama.

No big deal.

That was the plan.

He couldn’t have chosen a tougher place for his undertaking. Mississippi was arguably, in 1966, the most segregated, most oppressive state in the Union when it came to its treatment of African Americans. The Mississippi power structure ensured that whites controlled the governor’s office, the state legislature, and local communities. Whites served as judges, and jurors, and jailers. Whites ran its school boards, elections, and voter registration. Whites controlled the newspapers in the state and ran its most prosperous businesses. Whites dominated the farms that produced the cotton that was synonymous with Mississippi, a crop that for centuries had been picked almost exclusively by slaves and their descendants.

Meredith’s walk seemed guaranteed to provoke controversy. He would be striding into a state where people had threatened his life repeatedly during the Ole Miss fight just four years earlier. The sheer audacity of a black man walking into Mississippi, head held high, afraid of no one, could only spell trouble in an era when such organizations as the terror-based Ku Klux Klan and the less violent but equally racist local White Citizens’ Councils influenced life in Mississippi as much as—or more than—elected officials and the rule of law.

Despite the dangers, Meredith made the barest of plans for his trip, although he later claimed to have purchased a sizable life insurance policy to provide for his family in case someone killed him. He debated whether to arm himself. Months before his departure, Meredith had alerted local authorities of his intentions and requested law enforcement protection during his walk; perhaps he should trust he would be secure. Although Meredith had not seen himself as being devoted to the power of nonviolence, he wasn’t an advocate for violence either. In the end, he dismissed the idea of bringing a weapon and decided to arm himself with a Bible instead.

Meredith set off on the afternoon of Sunday, June 5, 1966, with $11.35 in his pockets. He carried no backpack, or bedroll, or food. “There are a million Negroes in Mississippi, and I think they’ll take care of me,” he told the cadre of reporters on hand to accompany him. A handful of local black supporters came along, too, as did several allies who had traveled from northern cities to take part in the effort. Memphis officials didn’t want to invite criticism for failing to protect Meredith if something went wrong, so a police escort joined the group, too.

The entourage departed from the historic Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis, crossed through the city’s segregated neighborhoods, and passed the gates of Elvis Presley’s Graceland home, bound for the Mississippi state line. Most people along the route were friendly. Blacks waved. Whites generally stared or ignored him. A few people expressed their objections by jeering, making threatening comments, or waving the Confederate battle flag, a Civil War–period symbol that segregationists had resurrected during the civil rights era.

Meredith hiked with his own symbols, including a walking stick made from ebony and ivory that a Sudanese village chief had given him during his stay in Africa. “We shall arrive,” the chief had told his American friend at the time; Meredith hoped the memory would serve him well on his new journey. Meredith wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt, gray slacks, and hiking boots on that hot, sunny afternoon. He shaded his face with a yellow pith helmet, another symbol of his connection to Africa. After covering 12 miles in fewer than five hours, Meredith reached his objective for the day: Mississippi. The state line lay just ahead and could wait until tomorrow.

He and his companions resumed their walk the next morning, Monday, June 6, accompanied once again by members of a press corps that, at the time, was predominately composed of white men. Mississippi law enforcement officers took the place of those from Tennessee as they crossed the boundary. The high point for Meredith on the second day’s hike came when they reached Hernando, the first town south of the state line. Some 150 local blacks turned out to greet him, offer encouragement, and give him assistance—everything from a free hamburger to a dollar bill.

“I was ecstatic,” Meredith recalled, decades later. He hadn’t been sure if his walk would inspire others to be brave. Just gathering to meet him took real nerve during an era when any demonstration of support for racial equality in the Deep South could trigger retaliation from whites who controlled the region’s jobs and jails. When he’d set out on his walk, Meredith had believed, as he would later state, that the “day for Negro men being cowards is over,” and here was evidence that he was right.

Then 90 minutes later a gunman literally stopped James Meredith in his tracks.

“With this announcement black people across the country began crossing Meredith’s name from the list of those in the land of the living…

They were black and they knew.

Mr. Meredith had announced his death.”

Julius Lester, civil rights activist and author, recalling reactions to James Meredith’s announcement for his walk through Mississippi

“I don’t think it’s going to amount to much.”

Nicholas Katzenbach, attorney general of the United States, commenting on James Meredith’s plan to walk from Memphis to Jackson

“I think the entire incident is God’s gift to the civil rights movement. We can do with it what we will. If we accept it and build on it, who knows what might come of it?”

James Lawson’s thoughts for Martin Luther King, Jr., about the attack on James Meredith and his survival

After being ambushed on June 6, James Meredith fell beside a row of cars where witnesses to his attack had sought shelter. Credit 7

CHAPTER 2
REACTIONS

NOTHING ABOUT Aubrey Norvell’s life appeared particularly noteworthy until Monday, June 6, 1966, when he started firing a shotgun at an icon of the civil rights era. Norvell and his wife lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. They had no children. They’d married shortly after World War II, a conflict in which Norvell had served with distinction. He and his father had owned and run a local hardware store together until 1963; in recent months he had been unemployed. No one could recall him commenting for or against racial equality, nor did he have any known connections to white supremacy groups.

After firing three shots at James Meredith, Norvell had turned to reenter the roadside underbrush alongside Highway 51. Only then had law enforcement officers recovered from their shock at his sudden attack and arrested the gunman. Norvell offered no explanation for his actions, and his motivations remained a mystery. Perhaps due to Meredith’s prominence, the local judge set a steep bail for the attacker’s release, $25,000, a sum equivalent to more than $180,000 today. This was more than double the typical rate for such offenses, and it exceeded the value of the Norvell home. Unless someone helped to secure his bail, Norvell would remain behind bars until his trial, which was set for November.

Norvell’s silence, his unremarkable past, and his ability to attack Meredith despite the presence of law enforcement prompted widespread speculation. Many people shared a feeling of outrage: How could officials have just stood by and done nothing to stop the shooting? Others seemed annoyed: Mississippi is getting blamed even though the shooter is from Tennessee! Still others appeared bewildered: Why hadn’t Norvell—an experienced hunter with wartime commendation for marksmanship—used deadlier ammunition or aimed to kill?

DATE WALKED: June 7 MILES WALKED: 6 ROUTE: South of Hernando to north of Coldwater

In the absence of a more logical narrative, people began to invent explanations for what had occurred. Maybe Norvell had acted on behalf of a white supremacy effort and the police were in on the plan, some speculated. Or maybe someone sympathetic to the civil rights movement had hired Norvell to shoot Meredith and make Mississippi look bad, others suggested. Those who avoided conspiracy theories were left to conclude that Norvell must have been a confused man during confusing times, acting alone for no apparent reason. Initial press coverage of the shooting compounded the chaos, for some of the earliest and most prominent reports mistakenly claimed that Meredith had been shot dead.

Local law enforcement officers apprehended Aubrey Norvell at the scene of Meredith’s roadside shooting south of Hernando on June 6. Credit 8

Martin Luther King, Jr., had followed the breaking news from his home base in Atlanta, Georgia, two states east of Mississippi. Even after it became clear that Meredith had survived, King and his allies in the civil rights movement prepared to respond. Words of sympathy and concern would not be enough, leaders agreed during phone calls and staff meetings. The movement’s commitment to nonviolence required action, as well. Advocates for racial equality had to resume Meredith’s effort—with or without him—and continue until they reached his objective of Jackson. To do otherwise would allow violence to have the last word. Not acting would embolden those who opposed change.

Reaching that determination was easy; deciding how to execute the plan was not. The dimensions of the undertaking were staggering. Activists viewed the previous year’s walk from Selma to Montgomery as an unprecedented achievement, but the logistical challenges of completing Meredith’s hike dwarfed that undertaking by every measure. Distance. Time. Summer heat. Endless meals. Perpetual housing. Enormous costs. It would be a monumental challenge.

Movement leaders turned almost immediately to the Reverend James Lawson in Memphis for help. This veteran activist had joined the civil rights movement after meeting King in 1957. The two men shared a deep confidence in the power of nonviolence to bring about social change. Lawson had personally trained countless movement volunteers in the principles and practice of nonviolence, and many of his students had become essential activists in the struggle for equal rights. In 1962, Lawson had assumed leadership of Centenary United Methodist Church in Memphis, the region’s largest congregation of black Methodists. His prominence in the movement, his leadership role in the local area, his experience with nonviolent protests, his organizational skills—all these factors and more made him an ideal ally in making plans for a renewed walk.

Movement leaders (from left) Floyd McKissick, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael converged on Meredith’s hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 7, one day after he’d been shot. Soon after the trio announced plans to revive his walk. Credit 9

National leaders mobilized overnight, and by Tuesday, June 7, Lawson was welcoming them to Memphis. By day’s end, leaders from all five of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations—the so-called Big Five—would be in town. The first to arrive were King, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Floyd McKissick, the newly appointed national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They and some key associates piled into Lawson’s family car and headed to the hospital to see Meredith.

Stokely Carmichael, the newly elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) arrived soon after, accompanied by additional representatives of his group. Leaders of two other organizations visited Meredith later that day, as well, Whitney Young of the National Urban League and Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, spoken as “N-double-A-C-P”).

While Meredith, of course, knew all of the Big Five leaders by reputation, he found himself meeting some of them, such as King, for the first time. The arrival of such dignitaries at his bedside reinforced Meredith’s sense of his own importance. King, McKissick, Lawson, and Carmichael offered Meredith their concern and presented him with a proposal. It was clear that he faced a lengthy recovery. He had dozens of open wounds that needed to heal, and he was in no condition to resume marching. While he recuperated, they asked, would he let them organize an effort to continue his walk? If he made a speedy recovery, he could rejoin them later on.

Mississippi state troopers ordered marchers off the pavement when they began walking in honor of James Meredith on June 7. When King objected, an officer shoved him toward the roadside. Credit 10

Overall the concept appealed to Meredith; he appreciated their endorsement of his effort and liked the idea of seeing it completed. But Meredith also realized that letting others carry on without him meant the walk would likely stray from his goals: Gone would be his plan for a small walk under his control from which he could exclude women and children. Meredith weighed the trade-offs and gave his visitors permission to proceed. The three leaders promised to seek his input while he recuperated and to keep Meredith updated as the walk progressed. Everyone agreed they needed to move fast.

Not even 24 hours had passed since Meredith’s shooting, and the news was still hot. By acting quickly, organizers would receive vital media coverage that would boost the flow of volunteers and donations for their effort. Details would have to fall into place as they went. The first priority was to return to Highway 51. By doing so, the leaders would demonstrate the movement’s determination to revive a campaign interrupted by violence. They made plans to start walking that very day from the spot where Meredith’s blood had stained the highway. Before nightfall, more than a dozen men—including King, McKissick, Carmichael, and Lawson—had covered some six miles of new ground. Then they returned to their temporary base in Memphis to regroup.

That evening hundreds of people joined the day’s marchers for a rally at Lawson’s church. They sang freedom songs and listened to a parade of speakers. Representatives from each of the Big Five civil rights organizations shared their outrage over the shooting, their intention to complete the walk to Jackson, and their impatience with the pace of change. Wilkins, of the NAACP, spoke at the rally about how the residents of Meredith’s home state seemed to be living in “another country” that followed a different set of laws and standards. He promised the crowd, “We are going to show the people of Mississippi that they are part of the 50 states,” and therefore they must follow its laws. Speakers outlined the motivation for the effort, including their determination to answer a violent act with nonviolent solidarity.

But there were other reasons to act, as well. Like Meredith, they wanted to encourage blacks to become registered voters. And they hoped that their walk toward Jackson, when combined with shock over Meredith’s shooting, would prompt members of Congress to pass the civil rights bill of 1966, the latest proposal in a series of such legislation. If approved, the bill would make it illegal to discriminate in housing and jury selection; extend federal protection to civil rights workers; and expand the integration of public schools. The march from Selma to Montgomery had influenced the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; perhaps another great march—the Meredith march—would inspire lawmakers to act again.

Even as they fired up the local base and sent appeals for support to allies around the country, movement leaders still needed to determine how to pull off their plans. That night, after the public meeting at Lawson’s church, representatives from the Big Five crammed into one of the guest rooms at the Lorraine Motel to establish the fundamentals. Slowly, over the course of a long and contentious discussion, civil rights leaders and their associates debated what to do.

Would voter registration be the focus of the march? Or passage of the civil rights bill? Both, if possible. They considered what roles whites should play in the protest. Some asked if whites should even be included at all: Wasn’t it time for blacks to stand up on their own? Organizers compromised. Whites would be welcome to participate, but the effort would depend on African-American leadership and support.

Leaders debated the role of nonviolence versus the need for security. Could the Mississippi police be trusted to keep the marchers safe? Or should armed guards help protect participants? They finally agreed that the power of nonviolence would guide the effort; therefore, marchers would be unarmed. But, adopting a strategy already employed for other SNCC and CORE projects in the Deep South, members of a southern organization called the Deacons for Defense and Justice would accompany them as bodyguards, ready to defend the marchers from attacks by Klan members and other white supremacists.

Three of the Big Five groups had already expressed their support for a renewed march, and each brought its own strengths to the effort. McKissick’s CORE could recruit plenty of volunteers but had little money. Carmichael’s SNCC had the best sense of the territory they would cross, having done fieldwork in rural Mississippi since 1962. The SCLC, led by King, had access to donors. Furthermore, King’s presence automatically guaranteed increased media coverage, funding, and participation. By joining forces, they might truly make a difference to the local people through voter registration drives while continuing the momentum of the national fight for civil rights. Maybe, as Carmichael hoped, their successes could “really make this the last march” for the movement.

The other Big Five leaders—Whitney Young of the National Urban League and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP—thought the goals for the revived walk were too fragmented. They wanted to focus only on passing the civil rights bill, not voter registration, too. And they regarded the militant tone of SNCC leaders as both counterproductive and offensive. Hearing the youthful Carmichael refer to Lyndon B. Johnson, the president of the United States, with street slang as “that cat Johnson,” helped to send them packing. Their departure deprived the march of extra financial support and the appearance of Big Five unity, but it strengthened the ability of the participating trio of organizations to focus on their shared goals for the undertaking.

The remaining leaders crafted a document to summarize their motivations for the march, which they called their manifesto. This statement called on President Johnson to increase the nation’s investment in the country’s African-American citizens in four ways: enforcement of legal rights, increased economic opportunity, improved voting access, and greater representation by blacks on juries and police forces. Some of these concerns would be addressed by the proposed civil rights bill, but not all of them. Leaders of the revived march asked for broader action.

It was one o’clock in the morning by the conclusion of the meeting. Movement leaders settled down for a few hours of rest, knowing they’d be back on the road after daylight, traveling to the spot where they’d left off walking the day before. Until they could make more permanent arrangements, they planned to sleep in Memphis by night and walk in Mississippi by day, with each new hike extending their commute between the two locations.

Meredith remained in Memphis, too. Doctors had recommended he stay under observation at the hospital until he flew home to New York on Thursday. Those plans changed unexpectedly, though, on Wednesday, June 8. That morning, King and McKissick had stopped by Meredith’s room to secure his support of their newly created manifesto. A hospital administrator interrupted their meeting to inform Meredith that he was to be discharged a day early. Regardless of his condition, hospital personnel had grown tired of the security concerns, news media attention, and high-profile visitors that accompanied his stay.

Meredith, King, and McKissick protested this unexpected eviction, but the hospital staff held firm. He had to leave that day. When Meredith tried to speak to reporters as he departed, he fainted from the sudden exertion and stress. Medical personnel revived him then ferried him to the curb in a wheelchair. Meredith flew home later that day. June Meredith had remained in New York with their six-year-old son, John, during her husband’s walk and hospitalization. That evening she met his flight, joined by a throng of reporters. “I shall return to my divine responsibility,” a weakened Meredith told the journalists, “and we shall reach our destination.”

Despite his injuries—or, really, because of them—Meredith felt angry. He had entrusted his safety to local law enforcement officers, and they had failed him. Meredith, the military veteran who liked to plan with precision, wondered if he’d made a mistake when he’d brought a Bible to Mississippi instead of a gun. The day after his attack he had conveyed his frustration with dramatic language in a written statement for the press: “I could have knocked this intended killer off with one shot had I been prepared.” Journalists knew the idea of anyone taking the law into his own hands, even in self-defense, could be seen as inflammatory and controversial. Thus, when reporters had the chance to question Meredith in New York, they pressed him on his comment and asked if he would arm himself should he be able to rejoin the campaign.

Meredith noted that he had turned to state officials for protection originally, and it hadn’t worked; deputies had been present, but they had just stood by while Norvell took shots at him. Could he be confident they’d behave any differently the next time? Meredith told the reporters that if he could not count on receiving protection from local law enforcement personnel, then he had the right to consider arming himself in self-defense when he rejoined the march. When someone asked how he squared such a thought with the doctrine of nonviolence, Meredith replied, “Who the hell ever said I was nonviolent? I spent eight years in the military and the rest of my life in Mississippi.”

Nonviolent protest or not, James Meredith didn’t plan to get shot again.

“The shooting of James Meredith is further savage proof that brutality is still the white American way of life in Mississippi.”

Floyd McKissick, national director for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), June 6, 1966

“Mississippi is emotionally and socially many miles from that point at which a person can work openly and honestly and even moderately for racial justice without some risk of verbal or physical attack.”

Russell H. Barrett, professor at the University of Mississippi, speaking February 1, 1966

“Marching feet announce that time has come for a given idea. When the idea is a sound one, the cause a just one, and the demonstration a righteous one, change will be forthcoming.

But if any of these conditions are not present, the power for change is missing also.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., reflecting on the March Against Fear, October 1966

As marchers headed south through Mississippi on June 9, bystanders declared their support for segregation by waving the Confederate battle flag and performing the Confederacy’s unofficial anthem, “Dixie.” Credit 11

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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