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.htm#1966mmaf

Garrow, David J. “Bearing the Cross.” “The False Memories of Haley Barbour.” Daily Kos.” February 28, 2011. Web. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/2/28/951269/-

“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.htm#1966mmaf

“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.htm#1966mmaf

“Interview with Cleveland Sellers.” Eyes on the Prize Interviews. October 21, 1988. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eii/eiiweb/sel5427.0215.148clevelandsellers.html

“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.htm#1966mmaf

Sibley, Roslind McCoy. “James Meredith March Route: 50th Anniversary Review.” 50^th Anniversary Commemoration of the March Against Fear Saturday 6.25.66. July 22, 2016. Web. https://mscivilrightsveterans.com/uploads/3/5/1/2/35128753/dr_roslind_sibley-james_meredith_march_route.pdf