March Against Fear

The march's most famous words came in Leflore County, in Greenwood on June 16, 1966. Stokely Carmichael was arrested trying to pitch the marchers' tents near a Black elementary school. Released, he reached a rally in Broad Street Park, in the heart of the Black district, where SNCC organizers such as Willie Ricks had primed the crowd. When he asked what they wanted, the audience shouted Black Power. The press read the slogan as violent and vengeful; many Black listeners heard political autonomy, pride and the right to self-defense. Martin Luther King did not use it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bryant's Grocery — 13 mi
  The ruin of the Money store where Emmett Till was accused in August 1955, on private land beside the railroad, with a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at the corner.
• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 19 mi
  A museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 21 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 23 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.

More markers nearby

• Itta Bena ("Home in the Woods") — 0.5 mi
• B.B. King Birthplace — 4.5 mi
• Guitar Slim — 7.0 mi
• Hubert Sumlin — 7.2 mi