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-one-james-meredith-and-the-march-against-fear/

“James Meredith Shot during ‘March Against Fear’ in Mississippi.” Eji: A History of Racial Injustice. Web. https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/jun/6

“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.htm#1966mmaf

“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.htm#1966mmaf

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

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/sherwood-ross-former-chicago-daily-news-reporter-james-meredith-march-against-fear-civil-rights-died-85-obituaries/

Waxman, Olivia B. “James Meredith on What Today's Activism Is Missing.” Time. June 6, 2016. Web. http://time.com/4356404/james-meredith-50th-anniversary-march-against-fear/

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