Carmichael had returned to Greenwood that night in June 1966 to help activist James Meredith send a message about fear in Mississippi. Two years had elapsed since passage of the Civil Rights Act, one year since the Voting Rights Act, and little had changed in the state. On June 5, Meredith had set out on foot from Memphis toward Jackson, with the goal of inspiring Blacks to register to vote and to transform their fears into positive action. When, on June 6, he was ambushed and wounded by shotgun fire, everything changed. Meredith’s single-minded “March Against Fear” became a rallying point for the movement. The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Martin Luther King Jr.), SNCC (Carmichael), and the Congress of Racial Equality (Floyd McKissick) pledged to keep the march alive as Meredith recovered in a hospital.
The marchers arrived in Greenwood on June 16. Carmichael’s fiery invocation of Black Power that night was born of frustrations, immediate and long-term. The immediate problem was that local white officials had denied the marchers permission to set up camp on the lawn of a Black elementary school—contradicting the word of local Black leaders. Arrested and jailed for trespassing, Carmichael posted bail just in time to make the rally that evening.
The longer-term, more fundamental concern for Carmichael was that the movement’s strategies of nonviolence seemed to have reached some kind of limit. During the previous summer, less than a week after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles erupted. The conflict in Vietnam had divided the nation since the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, which resulted in the dramatic escalation of a war that would claim proportionally more Black American lives than white.
A legislative battle was unfolding over equal access to housing—a prospect that threatened the integrity of white neighborhoods and challenged white wealth. This and other demands for reform in such areas as criminal justice and labor were structural, beyond easy concessions like access to lunch counters and even to voting booths. “White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse degradation,” King wrote in what turned out to be his last book, Where Do We Go From Here (1967), “but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination.” As this next phase of the civil rights revolution unfolded, nonviolent direct action seemed to belong to a vanishing era.