Buch lesen: «The March Against Fear: The Last Great Walk of the Civil Rights Movement and the Emergence of Black Power»

CHAPTER 1
WILD IDEAS

JAMES MEREDITH was already famous before he got shot on June 6, 1966. Indeed, his fame probably made him a target for attack, and his fame certainly accounted for why his shooting made the national news. Otherwise he would have been just the latest overlooked victim of white-on-black violence in a state where whites had used violence—and fear of violence—to secure their supremacy since the era of slavery.

At the time of his birth in 1933, Meredith’s parents chose to name him simply J. H., using initials in place of a first and middle name. His family lived on a farm outside Kosciusko, Mississippi, and his parents’ decision represented both an act of courage and an acknowledgment of the challenges their son would face growing up in the segregated world of the Deep South.

Even names held power then.

Social custom during that era dictated that blacks address whites by adding titles of respect to their names, such as Mr., Mrs., and Miss. This gesture emphasized the place of whites at the top of a race-based social order. Whites reinforced the subservient stature of African Americans by routinely addressing them by first name only. Whites also often converted the given names of blacks into childish nicknames that might last a lifetime. Meredith’s parents chose not to give him a proper name, such as James, which could have become a source of humiliation if whites called him Jimmy instead.

DATES WALKED: June 5–6 MILES WALKED: 28 ROUTE: Memphis, Tennessee, to south of Hernando, Mississippi

Despite his exposure to this world of white supremacy, Meredith emerged from his childhood with a remarkable sense of his potential and self-worth. Maybe it was the pride he felt because his great-grandfather had been the last leader of the region’s Choctaw Nation. Maybe it was the power of those childhood initials. Maybe it was the security and independence that land ownership brought to his parents as they raised their 11 children. Whatever the causes, the result was that J. H. Meredith had a fierce determination to make something of himself.

And he had complete confidence that he could do it.

When he turned 18, J. H. added names to his initials and became James Howard Meredith; he needed a full name in order to join the Air Force. A few years before, President Harry S. Truman had ordered the integration of the armed forces of the United States, so Meredith was among the first wave of recruits to serve in an integrated Air Force. He spent most of the 1950s in the military, culminating in a three-year posting to Japan. In 1960 he returned to Mississippi, newly married, and in pursuit of further education for both himself and his wife. Initially the couple enrolled at all-black Jackson State University, but, in 1961, Meredith set his sights on transferring to one of the most revered all-white institutions of the South: the University of Mississippi, otherwise known as Ole Miss.

Federal marshals and other U.S. security personnel stood guard to ensure that onlookers remained orderly when Meredith registered for classes at the University of Mississippi on Monday, October 1, 1962. Credit 4

Ever since his teens, Meredith had dreamed of going to his home state’s flagship university. Having served in an integrated military, and having heard newly elected President John F. Kennedy’s call in 1961 to national service, Meredith dared to imagine integrating Ole Miss. Others had tried and failed; perhaps he could succeed. So he applied. And he persisted in claiming his right to be admitted regardless of his race. His audacity triggered a fury among staunch segregationists and led to widespread opposition to his enrollment. Months of legal battles ensued, going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, on September 10, 1962, upheld Meredith’s right to attend the school.

Yet when Meredith appeared on campus to enroll in classes, the state’s governor personally blocked him from doing so. The lieutenant governor performed the same maneuver on a subsequent enrollment attempt. This struggle went on for days, and, at its climax on the last day of September, local segregationists besieged the federal forces that had taken up guard outside the university’s administrative offices. After dark, the mob grew increasingly hostile and began attacking the armed personnel. Two observers died during the ensuing violence in a conflict that some likened to the final battle of the Civil War. News coverage of the unfolding drama ensured that Meredith gained national fame along with his eventual admission to the university. Everyone knew who he was and what he had achieved.

Even the use of tear gas failed to disperse a mob of angry whites who rioted at Ole Miss in an effort to prevent the university’s integration. Cars set ablaze by the segregationists still smoldered when Meredith enrolled the next morning, October 1, 1962. Credit 5

Meredith had exhibited unusual courage and determination during his Ole Miss enrollment struggle. He seemed unflappable. Able to endure any insult without being provoked to retaliate. Always restrained under pressure. Focused on some future spot on a horizon that sometimes only he seemed able to see. Meredith maintained that focus for the rest of his studies even though he required constant protection by U.S. marshals and other military personnel. After combining his credits from Jackson State with three semesters of coursework at Ole Miss, he earned his college degree on August 18, 1963.

The battle to integrate Ole Miss took place during the opening years of a growing movement for African-American civil rights. Meredith’s hard-fought success served as one more piece of evidence that change could take place in the Deep South. By the time he graduated, the civil rights movement had grown into a national force for social justice, with multiple organizations working to break down the rule of white supremacy. The same month that Meredith graduated from Ole Miss, for example, movement leaders mounted the historic March on Washington and its culminating “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., who had become a towering figure in the struggle for racial equality.

A cornerstone of this social justice movement became the willingness of people to put their lives on the line in the fight for change, much as Meredith had done during the integration of Ole Miss. Volunteers in the movement countered the violence of segregationists with tremendous acts of courage. They stood their ground peacefully in the midst of racist attacks, confident that love was a more powerful emotion than hate. Year after year, they persevered, whether it meant walking to work instead of riding segregated buses during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956, or braving violent mobs during the freedom rides of 1961, or enduring police attacks with high-pressure fire hoses during the Birmingham campaign of 1963.

Such efforts drew on what movement leaders called the power of nonviolence. Some viewed nonviolence as a strategy, a series of tactics that forced reluctant foes to submit to change; others saw it as a way of life. For nonviolence to work, people had to be willing to remain peaceful, but determined, in the face of any level of violence. They had to outmaneuver their violent oppressors and step in and complete a protest whether their comrades had been arrested, injured, or even killed.

During 1965, after segregationists murdered a black youth who had advocated with others in Selma, Alabama, for equal voting rights, civil rights leaders vowed to carry on the young man’s fight by walking from there to the state capital of Montgomery, 54 miles away. King, other leaders, and their supporters made the march to demonstrate their determination to end the discriminatory practices that had kept blacks from voting in the South for nearly a century. The walk from Selma to Montgomery had become a triumphant procession that spring, lasting five days. The march’s compelling demonstration of the power of nonviolence had helped to secure passage later that year of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal legislation which finally ensured universal access to voting in the South, regardless of race.

Meredith remained on the sidelines during all of these developments. Although he could have joined forces with the civil rights movement after he earned his degree from Ole Miss, Meredith chose to maintain his independence and to focus on his own goals. While others were protesting for civil rights, he obtained further education. First he accepted an invitation from the government of Nigeria to study abroad. Meredith was intrigued by the opportunity to see how blacks lived on a different continent, and in early 1964 he moved to Africa with his wife and young son. The following year he ended his studies as a graduate student at the University of Ibadan and returned to the United States so he could enroll in law school at Columbia University in New York City.

After integrating Ole Miss, Meredith had developed a reputation within the civil rights movement for being a quirky loner. Fiercely independent, he could be feisty and impulsive. He had a tendency to make provocative statements and to seem dismissive of the work of other activists. Movement leaders eyed him cautiously as a result, never sure if they could count on his support. Meredith kept his distance from the movement; it didn’t suit his personality or his mind-set to immerse himself in such a broad campaign. He preferred to be in control.

As a military veteran, Meredith still thought like a soldier. He trusted the power of hierarchy, discipline, and military-style precision more than the power of nonviolence. He embraced the era’s more traditional view of manhood, believing that men proved their worth with courageous behavior. Meredith disliked the civil rights movement’s strategy of including women and children in their protests. He thought that doing so made men weak. The women and children appeared to be shields, protecting the men from attack. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, he thought. Shouldn’t men be brave enough to stand up for their rights on their own, as he had done at Ole Miss?

This visionary man toggled back and forth between two styles of thought. On the one hand, Meredith thought strategically. Join the military. Get an education. Start a family. On the other hand, he had outsize plans for himself, such as integrating an iconic all-white fortress of education. By combining his skills at strategic planning with his ambitious vision, Meredith had accomplished remarkable feats. Few others could have endured his Ole Miss legal battle, student harassment, and threats of bodily harm. But he had. And why?

The answer was obvious to Meredith: It was his destiny.

Meredith acted with an unwavering confidence that he was fulfilling some predetermined plan to serve as a leader for the oppressed members of his race. That sense of destiny—what he called his divine responsibility—had inspired him to integrate Ole Miss, and in the spring of 1966 it led him to set a new challenge for himself and for the state of Mississippi. This time he wanted to battle something even bigger than Ole Miss, something even bigger than segregation. This time he wanted to battle fear, the fear that pulsed through so many racial interactions in the South. Meredith, age 32, maintained that he was tired of being afraid of white people. Furthermore, he wanted other blacks in his home state to stop being afraid of whites, too. If Mississippi’s African Americans could just stop being afraid, he suggested, everyone would be better off.

Meredith planned to fight fear with his feet. He’d take a walk, what he called a Walk Against Fear. That summer, after finishing his first year of law school, he would start walking in Memphis, Tennessee, just across the state line from Mississippi, and not stop until he’d reached Jackson, the state’s capital, some 220 miles away. Meredith didn’t see his hike as a protest; he saw it as something ordinary that anyone should be able to do. He credited his mother, Roxie, with inspiring the idea. The year before, she’d confided in him that she considered Meredith’s youngest brother to be in less danger while fighting in the Vietnam War with the U.S. military than he would have been if he’d stayed at home. Her statement had shocked Meredith. Maybe African Americans wouldn’t be so afraid in Mississippi, he’d concluded, if they had more control over the state’s governance.

For nearly a century, southern whites had denied blacks their share of political power by denying them their right to vote. But now, for the first time since the post–Civil War era of Reconstruction, the newly enacted Voting Rights Act of 1965 enforced rights that had been granted in 1870 with the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A year after the latest legislation, though, the majority of the state’s African Americans had not yet registered to vote. The key remaining obstacle on that path, as Meredith saw it, was fear: fear of the consequences blacks might face if they chose to vote. By walking from Memphis to Jackson, Meredith hoped to inspire African Americans in his home state to become a bit less afraid. They, too, could take a walk against fear, a short walk that led to the ballot box.

Meredith speculated that the concerns of his mother and other southern blacks might be unwarranted, might be a lingering habit developed during earlier eras filled with real terror. Was their fear “just operating on its own accord”? Meredith wondered. And what about the white citizens of Mississippi? They were afraid, too, afraid that the advancement of one race meant the inevitable decline of another. That didn’t have to be so, Meredith believed. He’d try to prove his point and conquer his own inherited fears by walking through his home state.

But Meredith had another reason to undertake the endeavor, too, and it came from another one of his outsize goals. Ever since his teen years, he had entertained the idea of campaigning to become the governor of Mississippi. Two decades later, he still wanted to run for governor, but he knew he had no chance for success as long as the people most likely to vote for him were the people least likely to show up at the polls. Thus Meredith hoped his walk through Mississippi could serve two purposes. Not only might it encourage the state’s blacks to become voters. It might inspire them to vote for him in a future political race.

Meredith departed from Memphis, Tennessee, on foot, bound for Jackson, Mississippi, 220 miles away, on June 5, 1966. Friends and onlookers joined him for stretches of the first day’s walk. Credit 6

This time, Meredith wanted his activism to be different from the confrontation at Ole Miss. He wanted no federal troops, no bloodshed, no drama.

No big deal.

That was the plan.

He couldn’t have chosen a tougher place for his undertaking. Mississippi was arguably, in 1966, the most segregated, most oppressive state in the Union when it came to its treatment of African Americans. The Mississippi power structure ensured that whites controlled the governor’s office, the state legislature, and local communities. Whites served as judges, and jurors, and jailers. Whites ran its school boards, elections, and voter registration. Whites controlled the newspapers in the state and ran its most prosperous businesses. Whites dominated the farms that produced the cotton that was synonymous with Mississippi, a crop that for centuries had been picked almost exclusively by slaves and their descendants.

Meredith’s walk seemed guaranteed to provoke controversy. He would be striding into a state where people had threatened his life repeatedly during the Ole Miss fight just four years earlier. The sheer audacity of a black man walking into Mississippi, head held high, afraid of no one, could only spell trouble in an era when such organizations as the terror-based Ku Klux Klan and the less violent but equally racist local White Citizens’ Councils influenced life in Mississippi as much as—or more than—elected officials and the rule of law.

Despite the dangers, Meredith made the barest of plans for his trip, although he later claimed to have purchased a sizable life insurance policy to provide for his family in case someone killed him. He debated whether to arm himself. Months before his departure, Meredith had alerted local authorities of his intentions and requested law enforcement protection during his walk; perhaps he should trust he would be secure. Although Meredith had not seen himself as being devoted to the power of nonviolence, he wasn’t an advocate for violence either. In the end, he dismissed the idea of bringing a weapon and decided to arm himself with a Bible instead.

Meredith set off on the afternoon of Sunday, June 5, 1966, with $11.35 in his pockets. He carried no backpack, or bedroll, or food. “There are a million Negroes in Mississippi, and I think they’ll take care of me,” he told the cadre of reporters on hand to accompany him. A handful of local black supporters came along, too, as did several allies who had traveled from northern cities to take part in the effort. Memphis officials didn’t want to invite criticism for failing to protect Meredith if something went wrong, so a police escort joined the group, too.

The entourage departed from the historic Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis, crossed through the city’s segregated neighborhoods, and passed the gates of Elvis Presley’s Graceland home, bound for the Mississippi state line. Most people along the route were friendly. Blacks waved. Whites generally stared or ignored him. A few people expressed their objections by jeering, making threatening comments, or waving the Confederate battle flag, a Civil War–period symbol that segregationists had resurrected during the civil rights era.

Meredith hiked with his own symbols, including a walking stick made from ebony and ivory that a Sudanese village chief had given him during his stay in Africa. “We shall arrive,” the chief had told his American friend at the time; Meredith hoped the memory would serve him well on his new journey. Meredith wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt, gray slacks, and hiking boots on that hot, sunny afternoon. He shaded his face with a yellow pith helmet, another symbol of his connection to Africa. After covering 12 miles in fewer than five hours, Meredith reached his objective for the day: Mississippi. The state line lay just ahead and could wait until tomorrow.

He and his companions resumed their walk the next morning, Monday, June 6, accompanied once again by members of a press corps that, at the time, was predominately composed of white men. Mississippi law enforcement officers took the place of those from Tennessee as they crossed the boundary. The high point for Meredith on the second day’s hike came when they reached Hernando, the first town south of the state line. Some 150 local blacks turned out to greet him, offer encouragement, and give him assistance—everything from a free hamburger to a dollar bill.

“I was ecstatic,” Meredith recalled, decades later. He hadn’t been sure if his walk would inspire others to be brave. Just gathering to meet him took real nerve during an era when any demonstration of support for racial equality in the Deep South could trigger retaliation from whites who controlled the region’s jobs and jails. When he’d set out on his walk, Meredith had believed, as he would later state, that the “day for Negro men being cowards is over,” and here was evidence that he was right.

Then 90 minutes later a gunman literally stopped James Meredith in his tracks.

“With this announcement black people across the country began crossing Meredith’s name from the list of those in the land of the living…

They were black and they knew.

Mr. Meredith had announced his death.”

Julius Lester, civil rights activist and author, recalling reactions to James Meredith’s announcement for his walk through Mississippi

“I don’t think it’s going to amount to much.”

Nicholas Katzenbach, attorney general of the United States, commenting on James Meredith’s plan to walk from Memphis to Jackson

“I think the entire incident is God’s gift to the civil rights movement. We can do with it what we will. If we accept it and build on it, who knows what might come of it?”

James Lawson’s thoughts for Martin Luther King, Jr., about the attack on James Meredith and his survival

After being ambushed on June 6, James Meredith fell beside a row of cars where witnesses to his attack had sought shelter. Credit 7