Civil Rights Events

Meredith March Against Fear

From Coldwater to Grenada

Access this map to follow the direction of the Meredith March. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mmm_map.htm

First, let us consider a few general observations about the March by historian Aram Goudsouzian, author of Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear, made in a 2016 interview.

It was a great, nonviolent mass demonstration in the vein of Birmingham or Selma, but it also showcased the radicalism that had lain under the movement’s surface.

It featured famous figures and national leaders, but it also highlighted the importance of a wide cast of characters, from the courageous grassroots activists who redefined American democracy, to the white segregationists who employed a variety of strategies to preserve their power, to the black Mississippians who supported the march by walking a few miles, feeding the marchers, or registering to vote. Finally, it is an extraordinary story, full of dramatic moments, both uplifting and chilling—including the shooting of James Meredith, the voter registration of a 106-year-old man who had been born a slave, Stokely Carmichael’s unveiling of the slogan “Black Power,” a mob attack in the town of Philadelphia, soaring oratory from Martin Luther King, a brutal tear gassing in Canton, and a climactic 15,000-person march through the streets of Jackson, the largest civil-rights demonstration in Mississippi history.

James Meredith wanted a “walk” to Jackson, not a “march.” A march involved lots of people, including women and children, engaged in a mass protest. Meredith’s walk was for him and other independent men. He did not wish to endanger or inconvenience black Mississippians. After he was shot, the demonstration grew huge. It also imposed on local communities, veered from his planned route down Highway 51, and featured public debates about black politics. Meredith was furious! From his hospital bed in Memphis, and then while he recuperated in New York, he kept registering his distaste. He returned to Mississippi for the march’s final days, but even then he followed his own course: he abandoned a meeting of march leaders and led his own walk down Highway 51 from Canton to Tougaloo College, following his original plan.

…

Centenary Methodist Church, the Memphis pastorate of James Lawson, served as a hub for all the volunteers flooding in from across the country. Black communities in small Mississippi towns served them food and lent them land, while local leaders helped coordinate voter registration rallies. The improvised response showed the flexibility of the march’s leaders, who worked together despite their ideological differences. More important, it illustrated that the foundation of the civil-rights movement was the “ordinary” black people—men, women, and children—who sacrificed to serve a greater cause (Risen 2-4).

By mid-morning on Wednesday the 8th, marchers are gathering at Centenary Church in Memphis and boarding cars and busses to Coldwater where the trek is to resume. Before departing, King and McKissick visit Meredith in the hospital to inform him of what is underway. He refuses to endorse the new manifesto — not out of opposition to it but rather because he is no longer in day-to-day command of the operation and he doesn't want to take responsibility for something he has no control over.

Though Meredith's attending physician believes he needs to remain hospitalized for at least one more day, hospital administrators are under pressure from hostile whites to discharge Meredith immediately — which they do over the doctor's objection. King, McKissick, and local Memphis leaders decry this as a violation of the wounded man's constitutional rights. Still suffering the effects of his injuries, when Meredith tries to speak to the press from his wheelchair he collapses. He is flown back to New York to recuperate.

It's mid-afternoon by the time the leaders and marchers from Memphis arrive at the Coldwater bridge to join a group of local Black folk who have been waiting for hours in the sweltering heat. McKissick reads the manifesto aloud for benefit of the 120 or so marchers and the press.

McKissick, King and Carmichael lead the march south through Coldwater and on down Highway-51. Roughly 90% of the marchers are Afro-American, the remainder mostly white. In the late afternoon they halt just outside of Senatobia about 5 miles down the road. March organizers have not had time to arrange for a campsite or tents, so the local marchers disperse to their homes and the outsiders are ferried back to Memphis. On the following day, June 9, some 200 march the 11 miles from Senatobia to Como, another small town.

Still without tents for camping, the 75 non-local marchers are driven south to Batesville where they are fed and housed by local Afro-American families. Advance scouts are by now ranging ahead to locate campsites down the road and arrange for local churches to provide meals to hungry marchers, while in Memphis, Jackson, and elsewhere, others attend to the logistic work of renting tents, equipment, trucks and vans.

Meanwhile, SNCC, CORE, and SCLC organizers have begun traveling the side roads, going door-to-door on the dirt lanes, encouraging local Blacks to attend nightly mass meetings, join the march, and assemble at the Panola County courthouse in Batesville to register.

The three groups — SNCC, CORE, and the SCLC — began to pool our legal resources and contact the people for setting up mass meetings and rallies along the highway. We began to get people involved. The idea of Martin Luther King marching against fear in Mississippi was an idea whose time had come, and many people responded from throughout the state. So we were successful in generating the interest and the crowds that we would not have generated if we had gone the other way and made the calls for a number of people to come in from the North. — Cleve Sellers, SNCC (Marching Through 1-2).

Rev. Martin Luther King was the march’s most visible figure. Black people in Mississippi and throughout the South idolized King and trusted his leadership. King, for his part, was aware of a new anger among young Black people in SNCC and elsewhere, and one could detect in his speeches during the march, attempts to reflect the new racial mood without abandoning the ideals of nonviolence and brotherhood.

Though respecting King, SNCC participants sought opportunities to convey the idea that beyond getting more Black people registered to vote, a more radical approach to change was now necessary (Meredith March 2).

Marchers, organizers, and aspiring voters are all under the quiet — and largely unseen — protection of the Deacons for Defense. Equipped with two-way radios, pistols and shotguns ready to hand, they patrol up and down the march line and along the rural roads that the door-to-door canvassers are trekking. They escort the cars ferrying out-of-town marchers from bus depots and airports, and guard campsites, churches, and homes at night. They don't flaunt their presence or engage in macho posturing, nor do they reveal their numbers or allow strangers to attend their meetings.

…

To marchers and media alike, the courageous men and women who publicly defy white-supremacy are self-evident. But remaining in shadow are many others — the Afro-American farmer who refuses to share a sip of water with marchers and tells them, "Please go away, we don't want no trouble!" The Black woman who refuses to let Dr. King use her phone, "If anyone sees you come into my house, my family will have trouble with the Klan once you have gone. We just can't afford to take chances."

Yet some are willing to take a stand. The summer sun beats down on Highway-51 and the muggy heat is stifling and oppressive. Armistead Phipps, 58, gray-haired and rail-thin, sits with friends beneath the shade of a tree as they wait for the march to resume. He's the son of a Black sharecropper, and a sharecropper himself for all his life, but now heart disease and high blood pressure have forced him to retire from the fields. He lives in a three room shack in the tiny hamlet of West Marks on $110 month (equal to $840 in 2018) from Social Security and state welfare. He no longer has the strength to work cotton but he's a stalwart member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Beatrice, his wife, begs him not to march under the blazing sun. "I've got to go," he tells her. "This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to our people in Mississippi. Now they won't be afraid to vote any more. I'll only march for a little. But I've got to be part of it."

With Alex Shimkin, a white COFO [Council of Federated Organizations was a coalition of the major Civil Rights Movement organizations operating in Mississippi] worker from Illinois, he and others from Marks drive 40 miles to join the march — now 250 strong — as it forms up and heads down Highway-51 towards distant Jackson. He ignores the angry whites waving their Confederate battle flags and yelling, "Niggers, go home!" He is home. But just south of Senatobia he stumbles out of line, falling to the grassy shoulder. Dr. Alvin Poussaint of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) rushes to his side. To no avail, Phipps breathes his last on the side of the road (Marching Through 3-4).

As usual, most of the white-owned, southern mass media is implacably hostile to the march and the Freedom Movement in general, but reaction in the northern media is more complex. In the Movement's early years they responded to bus boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and school integration with cautious approval mixed with ominous fear of Communism, red-subversion, and negative consequences to American foreign policy. After Birmingham in 1963, northern coverage of the Movement became more clearly favorable as young Afro-Americans defied dogs, firehouses, and Klan mobs for their freedom. During 1964's Freedom Summer media interest shifted almost entirely to the northern white students from affluent families coming to South to aid oppressed Blacks, and during 1965's Selma campaign and March to Montgomery their narrative extolled both Afro-Americans struggling for basic American values and President Johnson's "magnanimous" efforts to bestow upon them a Voting Rights Act.

But in times of intense social struggle the political floods run swift and capricious. By the summer of 1966, it is urban uprisings, "Black militancy," and the surging power of a "white backlash" that chiefly concern northern pundits and editors. …

Stokely Carmichael leveled this indictment against the mainstream press after the March had concluded.

I mean it's passing strange how just about everything I've read about the march completely miss the point. ... It's more what they didn't report, what they couldn't see, didn't see, or more likely, didn't want to see. Or equally what they were looking for and what they wanted to see. Hey, we read that the Deacons were there with (oh, horrors) guns. But after Meredith, no one else got shot and nobody was killed on our march. We read that whites were excluded. Not true. The [white] "leaders" weren't invited but quite a few white supporters did march. We read that the numbers were down, meaning that support had "waned," but not that thousands of black folk turned out along the way, and that almost five thousand of them registered to vote in Mississippi for the first time. ...

What we miss in nearly all historical accounts is the most important aspect. The incredible spirit of self-reliance, of taking responsibility, of taking courage, which local people demonstrated. That it really had become for all those local people their real march against fear. Somehow that got missed ... What the press saw, or thought it saw and reported stridently, and what has subsequently been recycled in second and third drafts of history, is that young militants turned on a beleaguered Dr. King. That an ideological struggle took place between SCLC and SNCC, between Dr. King and the "young firebrand" Carmichael. Gimme a break. That's not how it went. No way (March 1-2).

Away from the March, because of the March, one black man was in fact killed.

… down in Adams County 250 miles to the south, Ku Klux Klansmen Ernest Avants, Claude Fuller, and James Jones have a plan. They want to lure Martin Luther King to Natchez where they intend to assassinate him. On June 19th, the three white men go to the home of Ben Chester White, an elderly Afro-American man who has never participated in Freedom Movement activities. They say they want to hire him to help look for a missing dog. They drive him out to the low bridge over Pretty Creek and force him out of the car at gunpoint.

As the three Klansmen fire 17 bullets into him, White cries out, "Oh, Lord. What have I done to deserve this!" They toss his lifeless body into the water.

Their scheme quickly goes awry. It's three days before White's corpse is discovered, and Dr. King is up in Chicago unable to leave the intensifying open housing campaign. And in their orgy of gunfire, the Klansmen had carelessly peppered their own car with bullet holes. To hide the evidence they set the vehicle on fire in a remote spot, but it's soon found and linked to James Jones the registered owner. He's picked up by the police, fails a lie-detector test and then confesses his role, "His brains, his brains. When we shot him, his brains went all over. Fuller shot him with a machine gun, and Avants blowed his head off."

When Jones is put on trial in 1967, his confession and repentance is read to the jury of 9 whites and 3 Blacks. The jury deadlocks, the white jurors vote for acquittal, the Black jurors vote for conviction. Though Avants had told the FBI, "Yeah, I shot that nigger. I blew his head off with a shotgun," he is acquitted outright in his trial because his lawyer argues that it was Fuller who fired the fatal shot. State authorities decide not to try Fuller because he has arthritis and ulcers and trying a sick man would be quite unkind (Murder 1).

150 marchers continue south from Como on the 10th. Five miles down the road is the tiny town of Sardis where 100 local Blacks join the trek towards Batesville 10 miles further on.

…

The stores and businesses around the Batesville town square are owned by whites and all of them are closed, locked, and guarded by helmeted police as some 500 marchers turn off Highway-51 to proudly defy the hostile glares of more than a thousand antagonistic whites. They cross the broad square and continue on to Coleman Chapel AME Zion Church. There a feast of barbecue sandwiches, fried chicken, vegetables, cornbread, and cake await them, cooked up by Black women working in hot kitchens as their community's contribution to the Freedom Movement. A large tent has finally been acquired for the marchers, and after a spirited mass meeting they bed down for the night, curtains discreetly dividing the tent into separate men's and women's sections.

On Saturday morning June 11, the Meredith marchers form up at Coleman Chapel and then march down Panola Ave to the old Illinois Central railroad depot near the courthouse on the square. There they join hundreds of local Blacks for a voter registration rally — old men and women, working adults, and enthusiastic teenagers. For days SNCC & CORE organizers have been canvassing door-to-door and up and down the dusty dirt roads in rural areas encouraging unregistered Blacks to use the presence of the marchers to defy intimidation by registering. The rally is large, enthusiastic, and filled with spirited singing.

Saturday is shopping day in the South, and hostile whites in the town square observe the protesting Blacks with grim faces. The KKK distributes hate literature, teenagers heckle and wave Confederate battle flags, and riot equipped State Troopers glower.

With the attention of the national press and Justice Department observers now focused on Panola County, the power-structure refrains from halting either the march or the rally — though normally Black protests are quickly and brutally suppressed with clubs, arrests and police dogs. Nor do they impede or harass the Afro-Americans lining up to register. Their strategy is to ease the marchers out of town without publicity or drawing federal scrutiny — and then return immediately to business as usual (Batesville 1-2).

That Saturday afternoon, the march continues down Highway-51, covering seven miles from Batesville to Pope, then on Sunday 10 miles from Pope to Enid Dam. By now, the basic pattern has been set — protesters marching down Highway-51 from town to town, organizers working the surrounding area, evening mass meetings wherever the march halts for the night, and voter registration rallies in the courthouse towns.

MCHR [Medical Committee for Human Rights, a group of American health care professionals that initially organized in June 1964 to provide medical care for civil rights workers, community activists, and summer volunteers working in Mississippi during the "Freedom Summer" project] nurses and health workers accompany the marchers — some in vehicles, others walking the line with tan first-aid satchels slung over their shoulders. They urge marchers to stay hydrated and distribute salt tablets, tend to blisters, heat rash and insect bites, wrap sprains, and respond to the multi-varied psychosomatic symptoms of intense and pervasive fear. They also watch for sunstroke and try to dissuade ailing and infirm marchers from hiking in the hot sun — usually with little success. MCHR is a sponsoring organization of the march and from its New York headquarters it mobilizes donations, supplies and volunteer medical professional from its dozen or more chapters. Former Tougaloo activist Joyce Ladner and white nurse Phyllis Cunningham coordinate from the MCHR office in Jackson, sending gauze, bandages, sunscreen, and antiseptic north up Highway-51.

A hard core of activists are committed to marching all the way to the Mississippi Capitol building in Jackson. On any given day they are joined by local Afro-Americans and out-of-town supporters who march for a few hours or a few days. On some days, march numbers might vary between 100-150, on others it might grow to 350-400 or so. Numbers are higher on weekends after supporters with workaday jobs drive in from distant areas on Friday night. On weekdays the proportion of whites on the line is usually somewhere between 10-15%, when weekend bus loads from the north arrive that might increase to as high as 30% on Saturdays and Sundays.

On Monday June 13, 200 marchers head south from Enid Dam. This is Klan country as messages scrawled on walls and pavement attest. …

On most days, the distance marched is determined more by where a campsite and church for the mass meeting can be found than by the endurance and speed of the marchers. No campsite has been found for this stretch, so marchers make about half the distance to Grenada before being ferried back to the tents at Enid Dam. On Tuesday they resume the march from where they [had] stopped in the wilderness of Yalabousha County.

Each evening the march leaders meet to plan (and argue) tactics, strategy and politics. King, McKissick, Carmichael, plus a shifting miscellany of other organizational leaders and local activists participate. Among them is a spy for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (SovCom) known to them as "Informant X" …

The SovCom is the state's secretive political-police agency. Charged with destroying the Freedom Movement and maintaining segregation, it gathers information on civil rights activists and organizations and passes it on to the State Troopers, local law enforcement, the White Citizens Council, and from them to the Ku Klux Klan. It also spreads disinformation and disruption. …

Freedom Movement leaders and organizers, however, are well accustomed to living and working under close scrutiny. If there were no "Informant X" there would be an "Informant Y," along with bugs and taps and other forms of surveillance. So the main victims of such snitches are local folk who are identified to SovCom and then targeted by the White Citizens Council for economic retaliation — firings, evictions, foreclosures, boycotts and in some cases violent KKK terrorism.

Some of Informant X's reports describe the ongoing disputes and rivalry between SNCC & CORE field workers and SCLC staff — particularly SCLC's Executive Staff. Mostly young, all passionately committed to both the Freedom Movement and their respective organizations, SNCC, CORE, and SCLC folk verbally jostle and debate, challenge and disparage each other.

In part, this represents the sort of group-solidarity and competition so typical of young men. But the activists are also genuinely divided by real and substantive issues. SNCC and CORE are egalitarian, SCLC is hierarchical. Some SNCC members mock and disparage Dr. King, referring to him as "De Lawd," a snide disrespect that infuriates some in SCLC (though King himself does not take offense).

…

SNCC and CORE are focused on deep community organizing while SCLC's primary strategy is influencing public opinion and government policy through nonviolent protest — which CORE & SNCC workers see as disruptive to their organizing. In Alabama and elsewhere, SNCC is organizing independent political parties separate from, and opposed to, the Democratic Party, while SCLC is supporting Afro-American participation in and support for the Democrats — which means that SNCC and SCLC are supporting rival Black candidates running for the same offices.

Yet respect toward rival activists does exist.

I remember a great deal about that march with great satisfaction and pride. But the one thing that absolutely stands out about that campaign is the way our relationship with Dr. King deepened during the days we spent together on that march. In fact, the fondest memories I cherish of Dr. King come from that time. We'd always respected him, but this is when I, and a lot of other SNCC folk, came to really know him. I know Cleve [Sellers], Ralph [Featherstone], Stanley [Wise], and others felt that way too. — Stokely Carmichael, SNCC

Though the SovCom and the mass media make much of these internal divisions — and in fact exacerbate them — the March's internal tensions are trivial compared to the hostility, antagonism, threats, and violence from Mississippi whites.

Again, Stokely Carmichael narrates.

By day and by night the harassment never stopped, ceaseless. And, of course, the state troopers were a joke. They intervened only when some of our people were about to retaliate. All day, man, passing pickup trucks and cars would veer over, speed up, and zoom by, inches from where our people were walking. Folks had to jump off the highway. Not once did the troopers issue a ticket or a warning, not once. ... Then at night when we pitched the tents, crowds of armed whites would gather close as they could get and shout insults and threats. The [March] leaders would ask the cops to disperse them or move them back. That never happened.

Add to that, every night when the voter registration teams reported in, more harassment. In these little towns they were stoned with rocks, bottles, what have you. They be followed by groups with guns and clubs swearing to kill them. Cars veering over at them, chasing them down the highway. Those teams went through hell, man, yet they registered a lot of folks. But it was nerve-racking and you'd have folks saying the teams should be allowed to carry weapons. Before someone got killed. But the leadership counseled restraint, nonviolent discipline. But the debate went on ... inside the tents every night. (Marching Down 1-4).

Grenada is the halfway point between Memphis and Jackson and at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 14, the Meredith Mississippi March Against Fear — and with it, the 20th Century — comes striding down Highway-51 into Grenada. No one knows what to expect (Grenada 2).

Works cited:

“Batesville Mississippi, June 10-11.” 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.” History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.htm#1966mmaf

“The March and the Media.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.htm#1966mmaf

“Marching Down Highway-51, June 10-13.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.htm#1966mmaf

“Marching through Mississippi, June 8-9.” 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/

“Murder of Ben Chester White, June 10.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.htm#1966mmaf

Risen, Clay. “The Birth of Black Power.” Chapter 16: A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby. June 2, 2016. Web. https://chapter16.org/the-birth-of-black-power/