ABSTRACT
In June 1966, leaders of the major civil rights organizations descended on Mississippi to continue a march across the state begun by activist James Meredith. Meredith had been rushed to the hospital when he was shot by a sniper. Despite the show of unity, tensions among the leaders of the march were near-boiling. Roy Wilkins withdrew the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) after the young activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) recruited an armed black group to provide protection for the marchers. SNCC activists had just deposed their longtime chair John Lewis in favor of the firebrand Stokely Carmichael, and Carmichael used the march to publicly challenge the movement's commitment to interracialism and nonviolence. After being arrested in Greenwood, he told a crowd after his release from jail, “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain't going to jail no more. … The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain't got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power” (quoted in Sellers, 1990: 166-167). The slogan created a national sensation, with commentators predicting black violence and reporters swarming into Mississippi to cover nightly rallies where chants of “Black Power” drowned out the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's chants of “Freedom Now.” A beleaguered Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to hold the contending groups together and to continue to advocate for nonviolence. When marchers were attacked by local police wielding clubs and tear gas, King complained, “The government has got to give me some victories if I'm gonna keep people nonviolent” (quoted in Carson, 1981: 210).
