Meridian ran Freedom Summer for this part of Mississippi, and the city's civil rights trail, made in 2014 by the tourism bureau and local residents, maps it in eighteen stops. Michael and Rita Schwerner came to Meridian in January 1964 as Congress of Racial Equality organizers and opened an office and community center above Fielder's drugstore on Fifth Street. They worked with James Chaney, a young Meridian man from the NAACP Youth Council. In the spring, activists picketed the whites-only Kress and Newberry stores on Fifth Street, and a Black boycott followed.
The first seven stops are within walking distance downtown. They start at 25th Avenue and 5th Street, once the heart of the Black business district, where Martin Luther King Jr. stayed at the Young Hotel. They include the old bus station where Freedom Riders stopped and the federal courthouse, where James Meredith filed his suit to enter the University of Mississippi in 1961 and where in 1967 an all-white jury convicted white defendants on federal civil rights charges for the first time in the state. McLemore Cemetery, farther out, is where many victims of the 1871 Meridian race riot are believed to lie.
The rest need a car: Wechsler School, the first brick public school built with public funds for Black students in Mississippi; churches that hosted meetings, one with a parsonage firebombed by the Klan in 1968; and the site of Mississippi's largest Freedom School, which taught more than two hundred students in a Baptist seminary building until a fire in 2007. The last stop is James Chaney's grave.
The closest stops worth working into your route