The March Against Fear: The Last Great Walk of the Civil Rights Movement and the Emergence of Black Power. Ann Bausum
and with equal respect. The widespread use of the word “Negro” in quotations from historical source material should be viewed within the context of the times as a term of respect, too. Racial epithets of that era remain no less offensive today, but they are a part of the historical record and are presented in quotations from the period without censorship.
—Ann Bausum
PROLOGUE
A TREMOR
BLAM!
One minute James Meredith was walking along a rural road in Mississippi, two days into an estimated two-week-long journey to the state capital of Jackson. The next minute a stranger had climbed out of the roadside honeysuckle and started shooting at him.
The first blast from the 16-gauge shotgun spewed tiny balls of ammunition toward the hiker, but the pellets struck the pavement nearby, not Meredith himself.
Undeterred, the gunman fired again.
BLAM!
Some pellets found their mark.
BLAM!
Shotgun pellets from the third blast penetrated Meredith’s scalp, neck, shoulder, back, and legs. His hiking companions seemed frozen in place, transfixed by shock and unable to react to the sudden threat.
Meredith had cried out in surprise when the shooting began. Then he, like those walking with him, began searching for cover. He dragged himself across the pavement, trying to put distance between himself and his attacker. He collapsed on his side, sprawled upon the grassy shoulder of U.S. Highway 51, his blood oozing from multiple wounds into the red soil of Mississippi.
The penetration of countless tiny balls of shot through his skin left Meredith moaning in pain. “Get a car and get me in it,” he implored the others at the scene. An ambulance arrived quickly, and within minutes Meredith was being raced back along his hiking route, bound for a Memphis hospital. Emergency room physicians concluded that his wounds were not life-threatening, although they could have been if the shooter had been closer or his aim more accurate.
James Meredith collapsed in the road after he was ambushed and shot in rural Mississippi on June 6, 1966. Credit 2
Doctors shaved the back of Meredith’s head and dug as many as 70 pellets out of his scalp, back, limbs, even from behind an ear, before they questioned their effort. Although only a fraction of the 450 or so shotgun pellets fired toward Meredith had found their mark, countless balls of shot remained embedded in his flesh. Yet it was so time-consuming—and so painful—to remove them, that doctors decided to leave the rest alone. He wouldn’t be the first person to walk around with bird shot under his skin. Soon after, a local news reporter found a medical resident familiar with the case and asked him about the patient’s condition. The doctor-in-training replied with a candor that, although shocking today, would have seemed unremarkable at that time in the South. “If he had been an ordinary nigger on an ordinary Saturday night,” the man observed, “we’d have swabbed his ass with merthiolate [an antiseptic] and sent him home”
But Meredith was not an ordinary man, black or otherwise, and his shooting would have a seismic influence on the turn of events beyond his own world.
“I wanted to give hope to a barefoot boy. I was a barefoot boy in Mississippi myself for 16 years.”
James Meredith, explaining one of the reasons behind his planned walk through Mississippi
James Howard Meredith graduated from Ole Miss in Oxford amid a sea of white faces on August 18, 1963. He was the first African American to earn a degree from the institution, having integrated it the previous year. Credit 3
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