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THE BIBLE AND THE GUN
Memphis to Hernando
JUNE 5–6, 1966
 
 
It is sometimes said that the Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. For generations, the rich whites who owned the dark soil straddled by the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers came to Memphis, twelve miles north of the state border. Here men traded cotton, secured loans, and indulged in sumptuous feasts, high-stakes poker, and fleshly pleasures. Their wives visited department stores and beauty parlors, and their children caught trains to boarding schools and elite colleges. The hub of this social world was the Peabody lobby, with its elegant splendors: stately columns, a lavish mezzanine, ornate moldings on the ceiling. In the center stood a travertine marble fountain, holding a classical sculpture festooned with flowers. Ducks waddled in the fountain pool. The hotel epitomized a particular kind of southern grace, the kind that excluded someone like James Meredith.1
At 1:45 p.m. on Sunday, June 5, Meredith stood outside the hotel, ready to launch what he called his “second assault on Mississippi.” He was a small, slightly built black man with a thin mustache. He wore a short-sleeved checkered shirt, sunglasses, and a yellow pith helmet. In one hand he brandished an ebony walking stick with an ivory head, a gift from an African village chief. In the other he held a Bible.2
His walk was scheduled to begin at two o’clock, but his publicity man Sherwood Ross figured that whoever was coming was already there. So Meredith started walking. Four people accompanied him. Two were black, the New York record executive Claude Sterrett and the Memphis businessman Joseph Crittenden. The two whites were Ross and a minister from New York, Robert Weeks. It was an unusual spectacle. A few television cameras recorded footage. The New York Times and major wire services sent reporters, but The Commercial Appeal of Memphis did not. A handful of whites watched with curiosity. At first, a man behind them waved a small Confederate flag, but after two policemen requested that he desist, he left.3
Meredith led his cadre across Beale Street, the heart of Memphis blues, where Delta migrants such as Robert Johnson, B.B. King, and Howlin’ Wolf had strummed and picked and moaned and wailed. Proving Ross wrong, some members of the Memphis NAACP arrived just after the marchers left the Peabody, including Maxine and Vasco Smith, the branch’s executive director and vice president. They soon caught up to Meredith. As they weaved through the densely packed black neighborhoods south of Beale, some women and children walked alongside them, enjoying the hullabaloo. Others spilled onto porches and sidewalks, extending good wishes.4
Meredith puzzled Weeks. Meredith dodged deep questions by steering conversations toward trivialities, yet he possessed a spiritual calm. Weeks likened him to Joan of Arc, “a militaristic mystic.” He seemed unfazed by any harassment—when reporters mentioned the man waving the Confederate flag, he just praised General Stonewall Jackson. It bothered him more that only women and children had joined the walk through Memphis. “Negro men are afraid to be men down here,” he grumbled.5
As they walked through South Memphis, they crossed neighborhoods where much of the city’s black population was concentrated. They passed near Stax Records, where Otis Redding and Rufus Thomas were popularizing the funky, soulful, modern Memphis sound. By late afternoon, about eight miles south of downtown in rural Whitehaven, they walked past a white colonial mansion, set back about a hundred yards from Highway 51, bounded by fourteen rural acres. It was Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley.6
As the surroundings got rural, the mood got hostile. Whites drove up and down the highway, snapping photos and yelling insults. Cars whizzed so close to the marchers that the wind whipped their pant legs. “Hurry up, nigger, you’re gonna get killed in Mississippi,” jeered one man. Weeks’s clerical collar branded him a special race traitor. “Hey preacher!” said an old man, leaning out of his car, his face promising violent mischief. “Where are you staying tonight?” Other hecklers waved Confederate battle flags, and in the early evening, two men rode back and forth on horseback, wearing ten-gallon hats and wielding massive flags, whooping the rebel yell.7
A little after 6:30, Meredith’s party stopped a quarter mile north of the state line. About thirty cars filled with whites had gathered to block them, but Tennessee state policemen dispersed the troublemakers before the marchers arrived. Anyway, Meredith had decided that Mississippi could wait until the next morning. Before catching a ride back to Memphis, he shrugged off the possibility of danger. He had seen worse.8
Ross, by contrast, had never tasted such venom. As a radio reporter, he had covered civil rights stories in northern cities, but nothing prepared him for the anger, and even distress, of their detractors along Highway 51. These young whites, he surmised, viewed Meredith as the symbol of a changing order, one that weakened their own status. He feared what would happen in Mississippi, the most notoriously racist state in the Union. They needed federal men, he figured. Ross called Whitney Young, the executive director of the National Urban League.
“Get us some protection, please,” he urged. “We’re going to get shot...