Thunder of Freedom: Black Leadership and the Transformation of 1960s Mississippi

10. The Meredith March

173 10 The Meredith March June–July 1966 James Meredith’s 220-mile Memphis-to-Jackson March against Fear started at a bad time for ongoing voter registration and election organizing in Mississippi. He began the march on Sunday, June 5, 1966, two days before the June 7 Mississippi primary elections, which we referred to as the white Democratic primary. The march interrupted the Holmes and state FDP’s intense push. Many of us were upset because his one-man effort diverted attention away from the election efforts. The movement reality of needing to respond to Meredith and participate in the march frustrated, even angered, many of us. Then, surprisingly , the march ultimately enhanced and strengthened our plans for more registration drives in Holmes and around the state. A native of Kosciusko in Attala County, James Meredith started his walk from Memphis, fewer than thirty miles from the Tennessee-Mississippi border. He had not consulted or coordinated his effort with any local, regional, or national movement group. Only a few friends and supporters joined him. A handful of TV, newspaper, and radio media came to observe and record. Four years earlier, in 1962, he had become a civil rights celebrity when he tried to attend the University of Mississippi–Oxford. That was also a solitary action unaffiliated with the organized movement. It took John Kennedy’s three thousand national guardsmen to restore order to the Ole Miss campus and allow Meredith to register as a thirdyear student. He successfully graduated in 1963. On the second day of the march, June 6, Meredith crossed into Mississippi . Just inside the state at Hernando in DeSoto County, his walk was cut short. In front of his supporters, the media, FBI agents, and the 174 BUILDING POLITICAL STRATEGIES Mississippi Highway Patrol, shotgun pellets riddled his head, shoulder, and leg. “Oh my God!” he cried out as he fell. He was injured badly and taken to the hospital. Almost immediately, Guyot, in his role as SNCC organizer and the MFDP chairman, was called by national leaders to come to Memphis for an emergency June 7 planning meeting at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) people often stayed. In addition to the principals of MFDP and SCLC, Floyd McKissick of CORE, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and Stokely Carmichael, Cleve Sellers, and Stanley Wise of SNCC attended. Holmes had direct working contact only with Stokely, who was appointed SNCC field director in Holmes soon after Henry and I arrived. Later, in 1965, he went into Lowndes County, Alabama, as a key SNCC activist working on voter registration aimed at the 1966 local elections. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization was formed under his leadership. Back in Lexington, while waiting for election results, we watched the TV reports of the Memphis meeting. The leaders announced that they would continue James Meredith’s march. They invited anyone from any part of America who loved freedom, to join in. A small planning meeting was called for June 8. Ralthus Hayes, the astute chairman of the Holmes FDP, who had just been defeated in the primary, was invited, and Henry and I drove him to Memphis. King, McKissick, and the other “higher-ups” wanted to hear what we Mississippians needed from the march. In the motel room, a group of only ten or fifteen people sat on the beds, chairs, and floor. At one table Fannie Lou Hamer, of Ruleville in Sunflower County, the impassioned speaker and singer who gave us much to arouse our courage, and the steadfast Annie Devine of Canton in Madison County were present . Hamer and Devine spoke for the MFDP. They succeeded in getting our point across. We needed to engage in actual voter registration drives rather than simply marching. Within the tenets of grassroots organizing, especially those of MFDP, SNCC, and COFO, the local people were essential to defining the needs and the organizing actions, whether in a rural area, a town, a county, a city, or the entire state. The opinions of the Mississippi leaders were indispensable to any planning for actions in their state, and we all wanted a unified response to the shooting. The Meredith March 175 As northern white workers, Henry and I said little. We had worked only in one county, not on the state level. We agreed wholeheartedly that we needed a march focused on our priorities and efforts...