Thousands End Negro March

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31097, 28 June 1966, Page 17

Thousands End Negro March

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright)

JACKSON (Mississippi), June 27. Thousands of singing, shouting marchers brought the long civil rights march through Mississippi to an end yesterday by crowding around the state capital and demanding immediate and widespread reforms in the treatment of Negroes, reports the “New York Times.”

The last eight-mile leg of the march started slowly but picked up momentum along the way as thousands of Mississippi Negroes in their “Sunday best” clothes flocked into the marching column from street corners, churches and front lawns.

They argued with policemen, stepped to the tune of a jazz band playing “When the saints go marching in” and cheered when, at the end of it all, a member of the student non-violent co-ordin-ating committee burned a confederate flag on the capital grounds. Hundreds of national guardsmen, state highway patrol and other law enforcement officers —many of them carrying tear gas and riot guns—watched stonily as the demonstrators passed by. King’s Dream The marchers cheered the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King when, in a variation of his “I have a dream” speech that he used during the march on Washington three years ago, he declared that his dream “had turned into a nightmare.”

He said he had seen too many Negroes perish from poverty “in a vast ocean of prosperity” and too much “injustice” in the administration -of laws toward Negroes. But he still has a dream, he said, “that even here in Mississippi justice will come to all of God’s children.” The marchers also cheered Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the student non-violent coordinating committee, when he declared that Negroes “must build a power base in this country so strong that we will bring them (whites) to their knees every time they mess with us.” Three Things Lawrence Guyot, head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, also was cheered when he said Negroes should learn three thirigs at birth: white supremacy, neocolonialism, and black power.

Applause rang out again and again for James Meredith, the Negro who started the march on June 5 for Memphis, and then watched it grow after he was wounded from ambush along a Mississippi roadside 20 miles south of Memphis the next day. “From what you have seen on television and from what you have read in the newspapers,” Meredith said, “you might assume that I had been shot by a Negro, since all you have been hearing is about the Negroes being divided. Freedom Issue “But from this day on,” he added, “our focus is going to be on the issue: freedom.” ■ Meredith broke the colour bar at the University of Mississippi in .1962. Meredith, who returned to the road on Saturday—his 33rd birthday—still suffering from wounds in the back of his head and one leg addressed the rally from a lorry platform. He said Negroes must fight

the white supremacy ruling the whole of the United States.

“There is a thing In Mississippi that is preventing white people from being decent. That thing is white supremacy,” he said. “The purpose of this march that I started three weeks ago today was to point up and challenge the thing at the base of the whole system—fear, a fear that grips the Negro in America to his very bones.” This fear must be erased If civil rights are to be won, he said. Adding that the rally would let President Johnson and the State Governor, Mr Paul Johnson, know that “we are not going to let it (white supremacy) live on, being blamed on a few whites in Mississippi.” More than 1500 whites, some of them waving Confederate flags and jeering, watched the marchers at the capitol, but police kept them away from the marchers and the marchers 75 yards away from the capitol building.