Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear

As James Meredith walked along Highway 51 on day two of the titular June 1966 march, a white Mississippian named Aubrey Norvell shot him three times. Initial news reports erroneously declared Meredith’s wounds fatal. Less than two months earlier, President Lyndon Johnson had submitted a new civil rights bill to Congress, and in early June he sponsored the White House Conference on Civil Rights. There, Meredith, an African-American Air Force veteran who integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, announced his plan to walk on his own, unaffiliated with any particular organization, from Memphis, Tenn., to Jackson, Miss., to call attention to the pervasive fears of discrimination and racially motivated violence against African-Americans and to the continuing need for voter registration. Meredith left the hospital two days after the shooting, returning home to New York City to recuperate. In this riveting, well-told story, historian Goudsouzian (King of the Court) crisply describes how other spokesmen for civil rights jockeyed to make good use of the subsequent sympathetic publicity. The author also fleshes out the motivations of CORE national director Floyd McKissick, Martin Luther King Jr., and SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael in pledging to carry on the march in Meredith’s name. Illus. (Feb.)