JACKSON, Miss.—Sixty years ago this month, James Meredith began walking alone from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, as he began his March Against Fear. He was heading toward the Mississippi Delta to counter the swelling racism that had followed the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and to galvanize Black residents to register to vote.
Though he began his journey alone on June 5, 1966, some 15,000 people would join the March before it reached its final destination in Jackson, Mississippi—the largest demonstration in state history.
Several dozen community members gathered at the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center in Jackson on June 5, 2026, to commemorate the anniversary of the start of Meredith’s march. The speakers—who included Meredith’s relatives, veteran civil rights activists, historians and politicians—all agreed that the story of the March Against Fear remains vital and that the lessons of that moment are more relevant than ever.
Meredith Coleman McGee, James Meredith’s niece and biographer, recalled a phrase her uncle would often repeat in their interviews: “Let no excuse stand in your way.” Meredith, now 92, did not attend last Thursday’s commemoration.
‘It Began With the One-Man Walk’
James Meredith was already well-known for becoming the first Black student enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1962, where he faced down a governor and throngs of white rioters whose violence resulted in the deployment of 30,000 federal troops to Oxford.
When he set out from the hotel in Memphis in June 1966, Meredith planned to walk the 220 miles to Jackson, and he had two goals: first, to register roughly 450,000 Black Mississippians. At the time, less than a year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi was beginning to see an uptick in voter registration, Aram Goudsouzian, author of “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear,” said at the June 5 event. Meredith also wanted to “challenge the all-pervasive and overriding fear that dominates the day-to-day life of the Negro in the United States—especially in the South and particularly in Mississippi,” he said at the time.
In that 1966 interview with the Associated Press, he recalled the fear his mother described when his youngest brother, Arthur, was sent to fight the Vietnam War.
“My mother said to me that although she hated to see her son go off to fight in the war in Vietnam, she would rather have him go to Vietnam than to have him come home to Mississippi and ‘have these white folks kill him,’” he said. “We Americans are going to have to rid this nation of any and all conditions where a mother will feel more secure with her son fighting in a jungle 10,000 miles away than have him walking on the streets in his own hometown.”
Goudsouzian said that Meredith “was probably, among white people, the most hated man in Mississippi, and if he could walk the roads of Mississippi, then he would show that others could use that same courage.”
Meredith saw his walk as a largely personal endeavor, intended to prove that the constitutional right to travel freely applied to every citizen.
“It began with the one-man walk, not a march,” Flonzie Brown Wright, a longtime civil rights activist, said at the June 5 commemoration. He had initially invited only a group of Black men to join him once he reached Mississippi, intentionally leaving out large civil rights organizations in an attempt to avoid making his walk a large media spectacle.
Just one day into his 1966 journey, however, in Hernando, Mississippi, Aubrey James Norvell, a white man from Tennessee, shot Meredith. Severely wounded, he was unable to continue his journey to Jackson. But an Associated Press photograph by Jack Thornell of the activist splayed on Highway 51, which became an enduring image of the Civil Rights Movement and won a Pulitzer Prize, was splashed across the front pages of major newspapers and attracted national attention.
Civil-rights leaders and thousands of activists descended upon Mississippi to continue the March Against Fear in Meredith’s name.
“It was not just that they were rallying behind the fact that Mr. Meredith got shot, but they were saying, ‘Look, this is my opportunity to stand up and be a man,’” Roslind McCoy Sibley, daughter of a former Mississippi NAACP president and community leader, said.
The attack, Goudsouzian said in his June 5 remarks, “transformed what would have been one person’s walk into a civil rights extravaganza.” Sibley agreed, explaining that it “turned a personal pilgrimage, walk, into a march, into a movement.”
‘This Is Today’s History’
Flonzie Wright, who was the branch director of the Madison County NAACP in 1966, recalled the phone call she received weeks after Meredith’s shooting in June 1966 from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We will be in Canton in two days, and I need you to find housing and food for 3,000 people.”
Eventually, as the procession reached the outskirts of Jackson, Meredith had recovered enough to rejoin. At a rally at Tougaloo College, he was joined by King, Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick and celebrities like Sammy Davis Jr., Marlon Brando and James Brown.
“An integrated mass of humanity was filling up the campus, and it was a scene unlike anything that had been conceived of,” said Sibley, who attended the Tougaloo rally at 12 years old. “It was true solidarity as we dared (and) envisioned a brighter future for blacks in Mississippi.”
The next day, an estimated 15,000 people marched with Meredith to the Mississippi Capitol Building.
Speaking at Thursday’s commemoration, Mississippi Sen. Hillman Frazier, D-Jackson, pointed to efforts to redistrict Mississippi and said that “we must make sure we all continue to make sure that his walk was not in vain—that we’re walking forward as opposed to going backwards.”
“Right now, there is a movement afoot to sanitize the Legislature, to make it all white again,” he said, referring to redistricting proposals that would leave fewer Black districts on the state and national level in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais ruling that gutted a key section of the Voting Rights Act. “They’re trying to take us back to pre-1965. What they’re doing, they’re taking a page out of the paper that their fathers used in 1890.” He was referring to Mississippi’s 1890 Jim Crow constitution, which white lawmakers designed to disenfranchise Black residents and to undo other gains Black Mississippians had made during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period.
“We have to do what we did back in the old days,” Frazier added. “We have to organize, we have to register, we have to vote. We have to talk about this every day because this is clear-and-present danger. This is happening right now.”
The March Against Fear, Frazier added in a June 5 interview with the Mississippi Free Press, is “not something in the past; This is today’s history.”
Meredith Coleman McGee said in an interview with the Mississippi Free Press on June 5 that her uncle’s story makes her think of “new struggles for us as a people,” from voter suppression to poor infrastructure.
Wright—who just two years after marching with Meredith became the first Black woman elected to public office in Mississippi since the Reconstruction Era—said in an interview that Meredith’s “engagement challenged a lot of people to look at themselves and to do what they could do to make things better.”
“There’s still a need for advocacy,” said Wright, whom voters chose to be an election commissioner in Canton, Mississippi, in 1968. “That’s why I say, let’s don’t get engaged, let’s stay engaged.”
For Roslind Sibley, though, while Meredith is well-known as the first Black student to attend the University of Mississippi, the story of the March Against Fear is “not remembered enough.” That is why events like Thursday’s celebration are so important, she said.
Meredith was presented with a key to the City of Jackson earlier last week, and Mayor John Horhn said at a commemoration dinner that June 25, Meredith’s birthday, would be celebrated as James Meredith Day.
Meredith—who will turn 93 in just a few weeks—may be more ambivalent about his own legacy.
Meredith was, in many respects, a conservative whose bedrock principles were “independence and manhood,” Goudsouzian said at last Thursday’s event. Though Meredith allowed the March Against Fear to continue in his name, he disliked that it became a mass demonstration, Goudsouzian, the historian, added.
And he rejects his association with the Civil Rights Movement, and the label itself.
“Civil rights is an insult to citizenship,” Meredith said in a 2020 Smithsonian documentary. “Every citizen in the United States is entitled to every one of those rights.”
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