CHAPTER 3

      REVIVED

      JAMES MEREDITH’S WALK became important the minute James Meredith got shot. Before then, it had been a modest effort with only a few supporters. Aubrey Norvell changed that fact the moment he fired his shotgun at Meredith. But Meredith lost influence over his walk when he stopped participating in it, and he further faded in importance after he’d left the region. Even the title of his undertaking began to evolve in his absence.

      Meredith had called his journey a Walk Against Fear. To him, a march equaled a protest. He hadn’t seen his effort as a statement of protest; he’d just been trying to exercise his right to walk through his home state. But now Meredith’s walk was becoming a protest. A protest against violence. A protest against racial fears. A protest in support of voter registration. A protest for further equality. As a consequence, Meredith’s walk morphed into a march. The new venture went by many names. Organizers called it the Meredith Mississippi Freedom March in their manifesto. Some people shortened that name to the Meredith March. Others called it the Mississippi March. Over time it came to be known as the Meredith March Against Fear or, simply, the March Against Fear.

      Whatever the endeavor’s name, almost 200 miles separated organizers from Meredith’s planned destination of Jackson. Tuesday’s revival by civil rights leaders had been more symbolic than productive. The men had covered just six miles. It would take many days of dedicated hiking to complete the journey, many days and countless volunteers.

      DATES WALKED: June 8–11 MILES WALKED: 37 ROUTE: North of Coldwater to north of Pope

      By Wednesday, June 8, those volunteers began to materialize. When Martin Luther King, Jr., and others returned to the day’s starting point, they were heartened to find a gathering of hikers on hand to join them. The group numbered about 120 as it headed south on Highway 51 toward the nearby town of Coldwater and beyond. Most of the day’s walkers were African Americans. Some were local residents; others had traveled by chartered bus from Memphis, inspired by the previous night’s rally there.

      Few of these participants planned to hike for long, and that was okay. Organizers viewed their endeavor as more of a relay than a marathon. It didn’t matter whether someone walked for days on end or for just a few hours. What mattered was for some group of people to keep walking, over time, until they reached Jackson. Thus the composition of the march evolved day by day, as people hugged the side of the road and trudged south under the summer sun. Sometimes movement leaders marched out front—leading—but on other occasions they mingled with the crowd. While they walked, participants often sang freedom songs or chanted the words “freedom” and its Swahili equivalent, “Uhuru,” showing solidarity with blacks involved in the struggle for racial equality in Africa.

      Even though Wednesday’s group had gotten a late start, by 5 p.m. hikers had covered more than six miles and reached the outskirts of the next town, Senatobia. Then everyone dispersed for the night. Some headed to their local residences, but most returned, yet again, to Memphis, where they slept in homes, motel rooms, and even on the floor of James Lawson’s church, which had become the temporary headquarters for the march.

      Hosea Williams of the SCLC coordinated an army of volunteers from this makeshift base of operations. His team handled everything from recruitment and meal planning to housing and drafting news bulletins for the media. Organizers raced to arrange the logistics that would eliminate the need for commuting to and from the march site. Not only would it become increasingly impractical as volunteers hiked farther and farther away from Memphis, but it undercut the momentum of the effort.

      Participants in the previous year’s march from Selma to Montgomery had camped along the way and shared evening rallies that built camaraderie. Leaders wanted to create that same atmosphere again. Plus they hoped the march through Mississippi would grow in popularity over time, swelling to a crescendo of thousands by its conclusion. The best way to build a sense of unity, to build a bigger crowd, was to add momentum—and people—day by day as they marched toward Jackson. That meant renting tents, finding camping sites, arranging for sanitation facilities, setting daily hiking goals, scouting out picnic spots for lunch breaks, and finding volunteers who could feed marchers and help with transportation.

      All the while, as organizers organized, marchers kept walking south, mile by mile.

      Thursday, June 9, saw a delayed start, too, but, even so, marchers covered nine miles before stopping at 4 p.m. just beyond the town of Como. More than 200 people had turned out for the hike, including a local man named Armistead Phipps who insisted that he had to take part in the event regardless of his heart condition. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to our people in Mississippi,” Phipps declared. “Now they won’t be afraid to vote anymore.”

      That morning the 58-year-old man had headed for the starting point near Senatobia and waited patiently for King’s arrival from Memphis. But after walking for a short while, Phipps stumbled and collapsed. Despite medical attention, he died soon after. His passing was both distressing and problematic. The pool of news reporters that was shadowing the revived hike often swelled to a hundred or more, and any of them could have blamed this fatality on the march, creating coverage that undercut the entire endeavor. King deflected criticism from the march to Mississippi itself by connecting the Phipps death to the trials of living under segregation in the state. “His death means that he was probably underfed, overworked and underpaid,” King observed. Phipps hadn’t died because he’d walked for freedom; he had died because of his lack of freedom during his lifetime as a black man in the Deep South.

      King had a point.

      Mississippi ranked as the poorest state in the nation in 1966, and racism contributed extensively to that status. The impoverishment of the state was almost inevitable given that nearly half its residents were African American and that whites had constructed a segregated society that worked to disadvantage them. The vast majority of the state’s black residents were descendants of slaves who had been freed with no assets into a post–Civil War world that offered few opportunities. Poverty became one’s inheritance, passed down, generation by generation, as an invisible chain of bondage. The places that many of them called home looked like shacks, not houses. Cardboard and tarpaper often filled in for siding. Few houses had indoor plumbing. Generation after generation of African Americans tried to turn nothing into something, but that’s hard to do when one’s world is rigged to give the advantage to people with white skin.

      An older woman watched through her screen door as marchers passed her rural Mississippi home. Undated photo. Скачать книгу