The 1966 civil rights demonstration James Meredith began across Mississippi was the March Against Fear.
Meredith, who had integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, announced the march to encourage Black Mississippians to register to vote. He planned to walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, beginning on June 5, 1966. On the second day, a white gunman shot and wounded him near Hernando, Mississippi.
Civil rights organizations continued the march after Meredith’s shooting. Martin Luther King Jr., Floyd McKissick, and Stokely Carmichael were among the leaders who joined the route. The march reached Jackson on June 26, with thousands of participants.
The event is sometimes confused with Freedom Summer, which was a 1964 Mississippi voter-registration campaign. The March Against Fear was especially significant because it exposed tensions between nonviolent integrationist organizing and the increasingly prominent call for Black Power.