"March against Fear"(1966)

On June 6, 1966,James Meredith started a solitary March Against Fear for 220 miles from Memphis,Tennessee,to Jackson, Mississippi ,to protest against racism.Soon after racism.Soon after starting his march he was shot by a sniper with a bird shot,injuring him.When they heard the news,other civil rights campaigners, including SCLC'S Martin Luther King, SNCC'S  Stokey Carmichael,Cleveland Sellers,and Floyd Mckissick,as the Human Rights Medical Committee and other civil rights organizations decided to continue the march in Meredith's name. The NAACP were originally involved but pulled out on learning that the Deacons for Defense and Justice were going to be protecting the march.Ordinarily both black and white came from the South and all parts of the country to participate.The marchers slept on the ground outside or in large tents,and were fed mainly by locally committees.On the early evening of Thursday June 16,1966,when the marchers arrived in Greenwood, Mississippi, and tried to set up at Stone Street Negro Elementary,Stokey was arrested for trespassing on public property.He was held for several hours and then rejoined he marchers at a local park where they had set up camp and were beginning a night time-rally.According to civil rights historian David J.Garrow's Pulitzer Prize winning Bearing the Cross  an angry Stokey took speaker's platform and delivered his famous" Black Power"speech.Martin who ha flown to Chicago on Wednesday to help organize the open housing marches,returned to Mississippi on Friday to find that the civil rights movements' internal divisions between the old guard and new guard had gone public.SNCC's "Black Power"slogan was now competing with SCLC's "Freedom now" slogan.In Canton, Mississippi the march was attacked and tear-gased by the Mississippi State Police,who were joined by other police agencies.Several marchers were wounded,one severely.Human rights Medical Committee members conduct a house-to-house search that night looking for wounded marchers.The nuns of the Catholic School extended their help and hospitality to the marchers,especially to the wounded.When the march stopped  at Tougaloo College before entering Jackson,it was entertained by James Brown  and other musicians.By June 26,when march entered Jackson,it was estimated to be 15,000 strong.Its passage was warmly in the black neighborhoods and some whites.Many whites jeered and threatended the marchers;Others simply stayed indoors.After hospital Treatment rejoined the March Against Fear on June 25,1966.The following day,the march arrived in Jackson.In 2010,C.D. Wright,a Macarthur grant winner,published "One with Others"a book-length poem about another March Against Fear across Eastern Arkansas in 1969 that includes a profile of Margaret Kaelin Mchugh, a white woman from a small town.Margaret joined the march,and for her trouble,was run out of her town, and practically disowned by her husband,with whom she had seven children.She wound up in a fleebag motel in Memphis,and was rescued by C.D. and others from Memphis State College,who moved her into their student duplex.