Catholics and the Meredith March in Mississippi

On June 16, 1966, civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), told a rally after his release from jail in Greenwood, Mississippi: “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we get to start saying now is Black Power!” Spoken during the Meredith Mississippi Freedom March, Carmichael’s oft-repeated call ensured the march’s lasting association with Black Power, which many white journalists, who seized on Carmichael’s more sensational comments about burning down Mississippi courthouses rather than his emphasis on black voter registration and collective political mobilization, typically associated with anti-white racism and violence. Black Power and the Meredith March seemed in stark contrast to the Selma, Alabama, protests of a year earlier for voting rights that had helped achieve the Voting Rights Act.