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 compaƱeros 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/
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