The March Against Fear: The Last Great Walk of the Civil Rights Movement and the Emergence of Black Power

by Ann Bausum

James Meredith's 1966 march in Mississippi began as one man's peaceful protest for voter registration and became one of the South's most important demonstrations of the civil rights movement. It brought together leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, who formed an unlikely alliance that resulted in the Black Power movement, which ushered in a new era in the fight for equality.
 
The retelling of Meredith's story opens on the day of his assassination attempt and goes back in time to recount the moments leading up to that event and its aftermath. Readers learn about the powerful figures and emerging leaders who joined the over 200-mile walk that became known as the "March Against Fear."
 
Thoughtfully presented by award-winning author Ann Bausum, this book helps readers understand the complex issues of fear, injustice, and the challenges of change. It is a history lesson that's as important and relevant today as it was 50 years ago.


From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, African American, Historical, Social Justice, Teen, Activism

141 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 3, 2017

About the author

Ann Bausum writes about history for readers of all ages from her home in southern Wisconsin. Her works often focus on under-told stories from the past, and she frequently explores issues of social justice.

Her newest title, The March Against Fear (National Geographic: 2017), is her third work to examine the civil rights movement in the American South. In the case of these and other books, Bausum strives to bring the nation’s social justice history to life in ways that empower and inspire readers young and old alike. Her previous title, Stonewall (Viking: 2015), is among the first nonfiction books to introduce teens to gay rights history. Previous works have explored voting rights, immigration, and free speech, among other topics.

The almost-forgotten story of Stubby lured Bausum away from social justice history temporarily. She wrote twin titles about the stray dog smuggled to Europe during World War I who returned to a hero’s welcome. Both books were published in 2014 by National Geographic: Sergeant Stubby (for adult readers) and Stubby the War Dog (for children).

In the spring of 2017, the Children’s Book Guild of Washington, D.C., will honor the body of Bausum’s work by presenting her with its venerable Nonfiction Award. This award recognizes the consistent commendation earned by her individual titles through the years. Bausum’s books have appeared consistently on lists of recommended and notable titles and have earned numerous literary awards including a Sibert Honor Award, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Carter G. Woodson Award (on two occasions), and the SCBWI Golden Kite Award. In 2015, she was named the year’s Notable Wisconsin Children’s Author by the Wisconsin Library Association.

You may follow Bausum on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/AnnBausum) and Twitter (@AnnBausum) or visit her online at www.AnnBausum.com

Reviews

[Kris (My Novelesque Life) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating: 5 Stars
2017; National Geographic Children's Books/National Geographic Books
(Review Not on Blog)

I really enjoyed this book. This book concentrates on the last walk of the civil rights movement which I did not know much about. After finishing the book I realize I have SO much more to learn about the civil rights movement. Everything I know I have seen on television, movies, and from a lot of historical fiction novels. While this book is aimed at young adults, I think it is a great place to start learning about civil rights. I am a firm believer that we can learn much from history and past loss and wins. I recommend this book to anyone, especially for schools and libraries.

***I received an eARC from EDELWEISS***

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every teen should read this book to learn about the fairly unknown (in today's education) march that basically signaled the end of the Civil Rights Movement as it had been. Readers will witness ugly racism in America and the power of protest.

Aside story: Last night during a game night at the library I was playing a game called 5 Second Rule with the teens where you have 5 seconds to give 3 answers to a question on a card like "What are 3 college mascots?" One of the cards was "Name 3 leaders of the Civil Rights Movement" and my teens that were in grades 6-12 couldn't name anyone but MLK Jr. So yeah, teens should read this book and others like it because our education system clearly isn't cutting it.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this history of the March, which I thought gave me a good sense of the atmosphere and people involved with each step of the way, from the start to the violent interruption and the broader continuation, and then the lasting effects for both blacks and the greater civil rights movement. It was many information new to me.

The tiny font size was a constant reminder that this book was not aimed at the middle-aged!

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely a YA book with more details & description, this is a masterful telling of this forgotten march. I admit I didn't know much about it except the bare outlines & was intrigued to learn more about it & why it's been pushed aside in our history. Great graphics & period photos really make the story come alive.

[Alex Baugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

By the time James Meredith planned his one man Walk Against Fear in 1966, he was already an accomplished African American man. yet he had remained on the sidelines during the early days of the civil rights movement. Although he certainly would have been an asset to it, Meredith was a strongly independent man. He was among the first recruits to serve in the newly integrated Air Force in the 1950s, and after returning home in 1960, Meredith decided to realize his lifelong dream of attending the University of Mississippi. Ole Miss was still a segregated school but it was Meredith who integrated, it thanks to a Supreme Court ruling. So why avoid the Civil Rights movement?

Meredith had a vision of his own for African Americans. It was his dream to conquer fear, “the fear that pushed through so many racial interactions in the south.” (pg14) And so he planned his one man 22o mile Walk Against Fear, starting from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi. It wasn’t a protest, it was simply to show other blacks something he thought anyone should be able to do. Meredith began his walk on June 5, 1966. On June 6, 1966, not long after crossing the state line into Mississippi, James Meredith was shot in an assassination attempt by Aubrey Norvell, a white man.

Meredith survived the shooting, but was not be able to resume his walk. Which meant that all the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr., an advocate of non-violence protests, and Stokely Carmichael, leader of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), whose use of the words “black power” on this march would usher in a more radical thinking. These men knew they have to continue Meredith’s walk for him - “To do otherwise would allow violence to have the last word. Not acting would embolden those who opposed change.” (pg 23) What they didn’t know that this lesser known event would splinter the Civil Rights Movement from within and steer it in different directions.

The March Against Fear clearly and succinctly follows James Meredith’s one-man Walk Against Fear as it morphed into a march that included 15,000 people from around the country with a focus on voter registration. And although thousands of previously disenfranchised African Americans were registered, the march also showed how divided the leaders were. Added to this disunity, when Carmichael introduced the concept of ‘black power’ a lot of young people quickly embraced the term black are a racial identifier of choice, while many whites were clearly uncomfortable with the term, as were the mainstream media. In a movement with conflicting leaders, goals and ideas, everyone wondered if those who aligned themselves with the “black power” faction bring about a social revolution.

I remember reading about James Meredith and his March Against Fear when I was in school, but I never really knew the details of the march until I read this book. And this is where Ann Bausum really shines when it comes to presenting and explaining the time line, the meaning and the participants of a movement. She did it so well in Stonewall, giving just enough background and history for readers, without overwhelming them and all done in a very accessible style.

Given what is happening on the political front in this country these days, it becomes even more important to look back and know the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the legislation that was passed because of it. These laws were meant to provide some measure of equality, political, and social freedoms for citizens of color, but now they are beginning to be slowly chipped away by those who would like to return to an earlier time.

The March Against Fear includes an abundant of archival photographs, so a bit graphic, as well as an extensive Bibliography. It is, without a doubt, a book I recommend highly for today’s young readers.

This book is recommended for readers age 12+
This book was sent to me by the publisher, National Geographic

This review was originally posted at Randomly Reading

[Mrs Mommy Booknerd http://mrsmommybooknerd.blogspot.com · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fantastic. I think that the topics of fear, injustice and difficult to explain history is hard to teach to younger children, but this book captures all it complexities and details beautifully. This book is packed with factual information that engages the reader and that amazing text is accompanied by pictures and quotes that deepen the reading experience. It is brilliant and important reading for children and their parents. A must read for today's time, which allows us to learn from past mistakes, to highlight those that changed history and to find ways to make the world a better place. A beautifully and thoughtful book.

[Kyle Pucciarello · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good job of giving enough background and detail without retreading too much. Very few know of Meredith's march in 1966, but it was extremely important and sparked a new wave of protest, as well as the emergence of the Black Power movement. Photos and narrative text aid in this well-written non-fiction exploration.

[Cara Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent count of the last greatest march and pretty accurate portrayal of the man who started it all.

[Nisse · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easily digestible account of the complexities of the civil rights movement and this final unified protest that turned one man’s quest to inspire voter registration into a multifaceted campaign.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very informative, very detailed and very eye opening. I think I would have liked it better as a documentary. My only problem was that (for me--so many of my colleagues LOVED it) it read too much like a dry textbook. I wanted to like this book so much. But it took me several tries to get through it. Had this not been for a program at work, I probably wouldn't have finished it on my own.

[Tanish · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a good Civil Rights non-fiction book.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gripping account of the last great Civil Rights march from Memphis TN to Jackson MS in 1966. Bausum tells this well-written and suspenseful story chronologically, and fills with of documented quotations, photographs, and informative details. This is timely, too, in the way she explains the climate of that time, noting the "layer of distance" between blacks and whites. "That layer of distance made it easier for southern whites to define African Americans as outsiders, as others. When people are viewed as others, they stop being seen as fellow human beings and are judged by their differences instead of their commonalities. Those differences can become threatening, can become something to be afraid of, something to oppress. Othering breeds a curious loop of fear." [40-41]. Another excellent non-fiction book by an author who has written notably about civil rights marches before.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't tell if the book was a little dry, or if it was just hard to read because of the tiny font.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I've ever read. I had never heard of this 22 days, 305 miles, 1966 march through Mississippi. They went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, not once, but twice. MLK, Jr and Stokely Carmichael were both on this march.
"When the federal government offered vital food supplies and provided free services such as health care and preschool education to Mississippi poor, many whites criticized the program as an alarming imposition of federal will on one of its 50 states. such criticism was hypocritical because many whites benefited from federal aid, too. But, whites tended to view their government support, such as a generous crop subsidy program for cotton farmers, as valid even as they dismissed federal handouts for poor people, who were often black" (pp.34-35).

"When people are viewed as others, they stop being seen as fellow human beings and are judged by their differences instead of their commonalities. The differences can become threatening, can become something to be afraid of, something to oppress. Othering breeds a curious loop of fear. One group becomes afraid of another and asserts its superiority by instilling terror in the second group. The fear caused by this terror is so gripping that it's easy to overlook the fear that motivates the attackers. Yet southern whites were full of fears about the people they oppressed. Whites feared they would lose their subservient labor force. Or that they would lose their own jobs if blacks had equal access to work. Or that they would end up having to take orders from blacks. They feared that blacks would advance ahead of whites up the social ladder. Or that African Americans would take revenge on them for past mistreatments. Or black activists were somehow tied to Soviet -style Communism. They feared that if they, as whites , spoke out against segregation, they could be shunned or attacked by other whites. So segregation persisted, as did the cycle of fear." (pp. 40-41)

"Such monuments reinforced a twisted interpretation of the historical record that portrayed the Confederate side of the conflict in noble and flattering terms. Proponents called the account the Lost Cause , and its fiction had morphed into accepted fact in the South and beyond, through generations of countless repetitions with families and schools. The Lost Cause story relived whites of the guilt they might otherwise have felt about past ties to slavery and rebellion. It spun tales of slaves and masters living in harmony and caring about each other, almost as if they were family members. It minimized the injustices of slavery, the way that slave owners divided husband from wife and parent from child, the system of terror and cruelty that drove slaves into forced labor, the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by their masters. The narrative maintained that the slavery hadn't been the basis for the Civil War. Rather than fighting for the right to won slaves, the South had fought for the right of states to disagree with the federal government. Confederate soldiers who had fought valiantly to defend their homelands against invasion. It presented Union generals as cruel conquerors and reconstructions as corrupt occupation by northern carpetbaggers. The Lost Cause proclaimed the inferiority of former slaves and asserted their need for continued supervision under the leadership and controlling care of ruling whites." pp.52-53

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ann Bausum has told a powerful story about an event I knew next to nothing about, the 1966 March Against Fear, begun by James Meredith and his followers, finished by Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and other heavyweights of the Civil Rights Era. But unlike the second march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, this march did not go off without a hitch. There were a lot of problems, including disagreements between the leaders, local Mississippi police who were reluctant to provide protection and cities that refused to let the marchers use public land in any way. James Meredith's original intent: demonstrating that a black man could legally walk from the north part of the state all the way to the state capital, Jackson, was soon left by the wayside, as the march instead became an opportunity to get people registered to vote. And Stokely Carmichael used it as a chance to introduce the term 'black power'.

Whatever Carmichael's intent, the term 'black power' did not go over so well with the media and many whites. Unfortunately for Carmichael, the term seemed to conjure visions of riots and blacks wresting power from whites, which scared a lot of people. King and others did their best to soften Carmichael's rhetoric, but the damage had already been done and a lot of the good will that the march had generated fizzled away. This book provides not only a look at a specific series of events, including the sometimes violent response, but it also looks at the changes that the Civil Rights Movement was experiencing along the way. I learned a lot from this book. The book shows that history is rarely smooth sailing, but full of bumps and storms with a few calm patches mixed in. I appreciate Bausum's efforts to share this important event with young readers, the opportunities presented here for discussion and teaching are numerous.

[Sunday · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life was not hunky dory after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. It's not like African Americans ran to register and started to vote. In Mississippi many feared for their jobs and their lives if they registered to vote. It was harder to move this mountain than we might realize. It was more complicated than "if we do X, then Y will happen as a result" That's what struck me as I read Bausum's book. She draws a picture that reveals how complex human beings are. And not just about whites' hatred of blacks.
There was the discord amongst civil rights organizations over whether to continue with the "nonviolence" approach (the old guard) or to explore what "black power" might mean (the younger activists). And if you're a white marcher, how should you respond to calls for "black power"? There was the difficulty of such a long march - sustaining the media's & nation's focus and the marchers' will and enthusiasm, finding safe spaces to sleep, rounding up enough food. There were the towns biding their time until the marchers moved on and the town could return to old racist habits.

Bausum creates a picture of the complexity of this last great march of the civil rights era that leaves you mourning the end of an era, but also understanding it so much better. I also couldn't help but think about current events and issues related to poverty, institutional racism, etc and how we still have a long ways to go.

This would be a fantastic read for high school or college students who are exploring issues like the role of institutions in peoples' lives and themes related to power, authority and governance.

[Marti · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very interesting narrative about the March Against Fear, the longest Civil Rights march but the least well-known. It marked a turning point in the Civil Rights movement, namely the fracturing of the various organizations behind the Civil Rights movement, due to one group's creation of the "Black Power" motto, which conflicted with Martin Luther King's call for non-violence. Lots of pictures and little-known facts. This is a must-read for anyone interested in African-American History and/or Civil Rights.

[Bonnie Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ann Bausum has visited my school twice, and we're getting ready to have her as a virtual visiting author. This book tells a little known story of a major civil rights event that started in Memphis and ended in Jackson, Mississippi. I highly recommend both reading and listening to this book; I enjoyed hearing the narrator of the audio version, but the illustrations add context in the print version. Either way, check out this story about James Meredith's walk which began small and finished with 15,000 people who had come together to drive away fear.

[Anne Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about the last march in the Civil Rights era when the term Black Power was born. I had never heard of this march before and was fascinated by the details I learned. Bausum is a talented writer and capable of giving information without coming across as biased. I will recommend this book to anyone who will listen, especially teen readers.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a hard book for me to finish. I'm really interested in the topic of Civil Rights, and I've read a lot of children's and young adult titles on the subject. This volume was incredibly informative, but really tough to get through and I doubt whether many students will make it. The level of detail is impressive, but will probably intimidate all but the most passionate readers.

[Rebecca]

I really liked this book, and I learned something new. It was short, but I had never heard of this march before so I enjoyed learning about something new. This book encourages me to explore more about the Civil Rights Movement, and look at some of the smaller but still significant events in our country.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Excellent information about the end of the great Civil Rights marches and the very beginnings of the Black Power movement, but the typesetting was a real downer. It was tiny and hard to read, made this book more cumbersome than it needed to be.

[Stuart Levy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot about this little-known march from 1966, the last big civil rights march of the 60s. It really was the beginning of the end of the great coalition of the different groups (SNCC, SCLC) and the beginning of Black Power.

[MaryLibrarianOH · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read quite a bit about Civil Rights but I don't think I've read any on this particular March.

Found the writing to be good and the story well researched. All the photos with captions made it all too real.

Very timely.

[Edie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that sheds light on a march that is often overlooked in the history of the civil rights movement. And the revelations show the problems/tensions within the civil rights movement as some groups want more action (and the slogan power to the people begins here) and others want to stick with the non-violence approach. James Meredith, the originator of this march, is seen as a much more complex man than the "hero" who integrated Ole Miss and that too is the importance of this book. This march was messy with internal disagreements and external hostility and violence (that did not receive the media coverage that other outrageous actions did). And the sense of the country (and the President) moving to other concerns, especially Vietnam, is also presented. The time was complex, so was the movement, so were the people who had many differing "agendas". This skillful author, who clearly invested a lot of time in research, helps us to clarify this particular march and its importance/influence in the history of civil rights in America.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book--especially for middle school students to read. Provided so much information about the March Against Fear. Discussed strategy, conflicts, language issues, etc.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent content but not the best package. Very word dense for even teen readers. Loved all the photos and quotes.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important contribution to our history.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. I didn't know anything about this.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This would make an excellent read for a high school American history course, if only a little dry at times.