Author Aram Goudsouzian explores the march which changed the
direction of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Up until the “March Against
Fear” in Mississippi in 1966, African-Americans were patiently protesting, in a
non-violent fashion, the injustices of the past 100 years since the end of the
Civil War and slavery.
But when a lone white man shot and wounded James Meredith;
the first African-American to enter the University of Mississippi in 1962, he
set off a chain reaction which brought everyone under the umbrella of the Civil
Rights Movement to descend on Mississippi in a show of unity. At the time some
whites even accused the “movement” of having orchestrated the shooting to drum
up national support. I’m not kidding. They actually said that; even as far away
as New York.
James Meredith had begun what was essentially a one man
march from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi when he was shot on the 2nd
day, just after entering Mississippi. The assailant merely stood in the road
waiting for him and announced that he was looking for James Meredith and didn't
want any trouble with anyone else. When Meredith stepped forward and identified
himself, he was shot.
The whole spectacle was bizarre. They say that a picture is
worth a thousand words, but the iconic photograph of Mr. Meredith being shot
does not do justice to what had just happened. Meredith, being trailed by the
media and the State Police, was walking along in broad daylight when he was
shot by a man who did not even try to get away after the shooting. His only
concern was to ask if Meredith was dead. He was visibly disappointed when he
was informed that Meredith was still alive. I have never seen such hatred,
either before this incident, or since.
In the town of Greenwood the police station boasted a plague
dedicated to “Tiger” the police dog who had taken a bite out of several
demonstrators in 1963. The animal was a local celebrity.
The main point of this book is to chronicle the change that
the attempted assassin’s bullet had upon the Civil Rights Movement as a whole.
Within hours of the shooting, members from every sect of the Movement came
forward to lend a hand in completing the March which Mr. Meredith had begun. This
was also the march which brought the Vietnam War to the forefront of the Civil
Rights Movement. With African-Americans dying in disproportionate numbers in
that conflict, they had a big stake. As remarked by Vincent Young, a bus driver
from Brooklyn, “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.”
Joined by Martin Luther King and his troupe, the march also
attracted Stokely Carmichael and his group, SNCC. This was the birth of the
Black Power movement; within just a few days that slogan would become a
household word. And, who you were and where you lived would come to inform the
meaning of those words.
To the marchers in Mississippi it meant getting the vote and
respect; to the people living in the ghettos it meant exactly what it said;
Black Power. They would begin to exert economic power in their neighborhoods,
buying from African-American merchants only. This kind of puzzled white people
because to them it represented nothing short of the discrimination which
African-Americans were fighting against themselves.
Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael were not the
bitter rivals that history would have us believe. The older man saw in
Carmichael something of himself 10 years earlier during the Montgomery Bus
Boycott. His only real concern was that the rhetoric of Black Power would do
harm to everything which had been accomplished up until that point. For
Carmichael’s part, he didn’t want to distance himself too far from King, since
doing so would mean losing the support of the press, which was solidly behind
the older man.
Local Mississippians lamented the march as the work of
outsiders coming to foment trouble. This ignores the fact that people had to
come from all over the country precisely because the locals were afraid to
march. They stood to lose their jobs, their homes, and even their lives. The
African-American was so cowed by fear that in the town of Grenada the local
blacks turned in anyone who even spoke of civil rights, ensuring their own
continued inequality. Can you even imagine being that “beat down” in spirit? I
can’t. Can you imagine doing that to someone else? (Fill in your own response
here.)
During the march a local man named Ben Chester White was
shot and killed by 3 local men whom he knew well. They called themselves the
Cottonmouth Gang, and simply went by his house and asked him to help them look
for their dog. He came willingly, as he had always obeyed white men without
question. They drove him to a nearby bridge and shot him with 2 shotguns
multiple times, disposing of his tattered corpse in the river.
Mr. Goudsouzian has left no stone unturned in this riveting portrait
of the march itself, as well as the movement as a whole. He carefully
chronicles the changes which were taking place in the movement at the time, as
African-Americans began to act on their unwillingness to wait patiently any
longer for something that was theirs to begin with.
The March against Fear was a pivotal moment in a time filled
with moments which would all add up to a big change in America as regards Civil
Rights. Although almost 50 years have gone by since the passage of the Voting
Rights Act in 1965, the job is not done. Even as I write this; in a country
with an African-American President; there are still people who want to roll
back that historic law, along with all of the gains made by the Civil Rights
Movement in all of its diverse forms.
From the NAACP to SNCC and even the Black Panthers Party,
all of these groups have contributed to change. Without any one of them in the
mix it is doubtful that the Movement would have remained cohesive after 1968,
when Martin Luther King was murdered. It’s important to remember that.
Diversity within the Movement is precisely what saved it in the long run.
One of the most ironic moments in the book occurs when Mississippi
Highway Patrolman Fred Ogg remarks; at the end of a long day; “I’m just about
overcome.”
