Was James Meredith’s greatest achievement his March Against Fear?

James Meredith believes his 1966 March Against Fear was more important than what he is most known for — becoming the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

Meredith, who no longer gives interviews, recently told Mississippi Today through his wife that he agrees with his granddaughter, Janae Knight, who said integrating the university she now attends was more personal. “It was necessary to wage his war against segregation,” Knight said.

But the March Against Fear was more important “because it included the masses gaining citizenship,” she said.

Friday marks the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the March Against Fear. A program commemorating that event is set for 2 p.m. Thursday at Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center in Jackson. 

Two months after the march ended, “Meet the Press” interviewed the Civil Rights Movement’s top leaders: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney M. Young Jr. of the National Urban League, Floyd B. McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality and Meredith, the only one without an organization.

“He’s the last one of the massive figures of the Civil Rights Movement from that generation who is still around,” said Aram Goudsouzian, author of “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.” 

“He is at the heart of two of the biggest stories of the Civil Rights Movement, both driven by his individual actions,” he said. “And both of them spun beyond his control.”

A planned solo trek becomes a mass movement

Wearing a pith helmet, James Meredith started his March Against Fear on June 5, 1966. He designed his solo trek from Memphis, Tennessee, to Mississippi’s capital of Jackson to challenge white supremacy and to inspire other Black Mississippians to vote. 

His 220-mile journey began on a sidewalk outside the Peabody Hotel. 

On the second day of his walk near Hernando, Mississippi, reporters walked with Meredith on a stretch of highway lined with pine trees. A white man yelled out, “I only want Meredith.”

Meredith, a 32-year-old Air Force veteran who had survived the insurrection at Ole Miss when he enrolled there in 1962, spotted the man with the shotgun and ran. Three blasts struck him, and he collapsed on the gravel shoulder of U.S. 51.

Not long after a Memphis hospital admitted him, The Associated Press reported he was dead.The mistake occurred because an AP reporter thought he heard a reporter for the Memphis newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, say  “Meredith has been shot dead.” The words were actually, “Meredith has been shot in the back and the head.” 

AP photographer Jack Thornell, a Mississippi native, later won the Pulitzer Prize for his images of Meredith writhing in pain on the roadside that day.

Meredith survived, but while recovering, movement leaders, including King and Carmichael, flocked to Mississippi to continue the March Against Fear.

Black power movement emerges

One day, King and others detoured from the march and made their way to Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers had been killed two years earlier. King knelt in prayer at the jail where the trio had been held before a deputy released them into the hands of waiting Klansmen.

“In this county, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner were brutally murdered,” King told the crowd. “I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment.”

One white man yelled, “They’re right behind you.”

King responded, “We are not afraid. If they kill three of us, they will have to kill all of us.”

A melee followed, prompting King and the others to leave.

The last week of the march revealed the roots of a new polarization based on race in the South, Goudsouzian said. In Greenwood, Carmichael unveiled the phrase “Black power” to cheers, and the slogan’s popularity grew, foreshadowing the Black Panthers to come.

Meredith rejoined the march, which ended at the state Capitol with 15,000 gathered. King said the march would “go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the state of Mississippi.”

It was the last great march of the Civil Rights Movement, Goudsouzian said, “the last time they would seek a shared goal, despite ideological differences.”

‘You really are a mad genius’

Meredith never stopped marching solo.

“He doesn’t fit in any box of those in the movement,” Goudsouzian said.

Meredith will celebrate his 93rd birthday on June 25, a day before the anniversary of the final day of his famous march.

Mississippi native Phil Noble has written a yet-to-be-published book on Meredith titled, “Mississippi Mystic: The Man who Integrated Ole Miss and Broke White Supremacy.”

He called Meredith “the most misunderstood person of the Civil Rights Movement for a whole bunch of reasons.”

At one point, he said he told Meredith, “You’re mad to think you could do what you tried to do, and you’re a genius because you did. You really are a mad genius.”

Meredith asked, “What’s the difference?”

There was a pause, and before Noble could answer, Meredith answered, “And I ain’t through yet.”