Marching Alone to Jackson: James Meredith, William Moore, and the Solitary Stand Against Segregation

On June 5, 1966, James Meredith started walking in Memphis, Tennessee. He didn’t plan on stopping until he reached Jackson, Mississippi over 200 miles away. But Meredith’s “March Against Fear” was cut short on Highway 51 when a shotgun blast tore into his head, neck, and back just south of Hernando, Mississippi. Meredith survived his injuries, and word of the attack spread fast. When he rejoined his solitary march on June 25, over 15,000 people—including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael—walked alongside him.

Baltimore postal worker William Lewis Moore was not so fortunate. After small marches in the Maryland/D.C. area, Moore decided he would go down to Mississippi and demand that Governor Ross Barnett accept integration. Wearing a sandwich board sign emblazoned with the slogans “Equal rights for all” and “Mississippi or Bust,” Moore departed Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 21. Seventy miles into his journey, a passing motorist discovered his body with two gunshot wounds to the head just outside of Attalla, Alabama on U.S. Highway 11. It wasn’t until 2008 that two activists picked up where Moore fell and delivered his letter to Jackson.

This paper analyzes those marches, within their own time and as the civil rights movement developed. How did Moore and Meredith think about their respective marches? Why did they choose to mount solitary protests without the protections that accompanied mass action campaigns? How did surviving activists talk about and leverage these moments of violence in their ongoing battle for equal rights? This work will serve as a chapter in my dissertation on the instrumentalization of antiblack violence as protest strategy in the American civil rights movement.