perilous three-week, 220-mile March Against Fear from Memphis,
Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. He insisted that ‘the old order was
passing,’ which permitted blacks to ‘stand up as men’ and vote. Armed with
a Bible, a plastic helmet, and an African walking stick, Meredith hoped to
inspire other blacks by walking alone through the nation’s most racially vio-
lent state. After just ten miles, a 40-year-old unemployed white man from
Memphis ambushed an unarmed Meredith with painful birdshot, causing
him to crumple to the highway and cry out in pain. Civil rights leaders gath-
ered at Meredith’s hospital bed, determined to finish his march. It was the
last time that the leaders of SCLC, CORE, and SNCC would march together.
Old frustrations within the movement bubbled to the surface. SNCC’s
Stokely Carmichael rejected King’s approach altogether as cringingly defer-
ential to whites. After Carmichael shouted, ‘The Negro is going to take what
he deserves from the white man,’ the mood shifted dramatically. Marchers
vowed, ‘White blood will flow,’ and Mississippi blacks chanted, ‘Hey! Hey!
Whattaya know? White folks must go – must go!’ In Greenwood, Carmichael
was arrested for trespassing on public property. He posted bail, jumped on a
flatbed truck, raised his arm in a clenched-fist salute, and wailed to an angry
crowd: ‘This is the 27th time I have been arrested, and I ain’t going to jail no
more!...We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin.’
What we gonna start saying now is “Black Power!” ’ Though the term was not
new, Carmichael’s mantra electrified the crowd, and they screamed back,
‘Black Power! Black Power!! Black Power!!!’ After this outburst, a shaken
King had to accept a paramilitary escort from Louisiana, the Deacons for
Defense and Justice. Near the end of the march, even the escort was helpless
against policemen who fired tear gas, swung rifle butts, and kicked women
on the ground. It was a police riot like the one in Selma.
As the march proceeded, a Klan offshoot in Natchez plotted the murder
of an innocent black man as a way of setting up King. Anticipating that King
would investigate such a murder, the Cottonmouth Moccasin Gang offered
an unsuspecting, elderly handyman named Ben Chester White $2 and a
strawberry soda to help ‘find’ a lost dog. White, a barely literate church dea-
con, was known as a quiet, humble man with a gold tooth, who had never
tried to vote. The gang picked White at random and drove him to a national
forest, where he was pumped full of gunshot and dumped into a creek bed.
The sordid plot failed because King had returned to Chicago to give a sched-
uled speech. Some good did come out of the march, as activists knocked on
doors in every town they passed and helped to register a record 4,000 blacks.
After the Meredith march, the calls for ‘Black Power’ helped define black
America, especially in the North. Because government policy did not materi-
ally uplift blacks, it seemed far less important than group identity and inde-
pendence. Following Malcolm X’s call to ‘unbrainwash’ themselves, many130 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
March Against Fear:
James Meredith’s ill-
fated attempt in 1966 to
defy white violence by
walking alone through
Mississippi.