Martin Luther King, Jr. and Andrew Young

@ National Portrait Gallery

Description

Martin Luther King Jr. and Andrew Young, March Against Fear, Grenada, MississippiOn June 7, 1966, King hurried to Memphis, Tennessee, to huddle with fellow civil rights leaders Floyd McKissick (new national director of the Congress of Racial Equality) and Stokely Carmichael (new chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) after activist James Meredith was wounded by a shotgun blast on the second day of his planned one-man march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. Despite increasing rivalries among their respective organizations, King, McKissick, and Carmichael vowed to carry on Meredith’s 220-mile March Against Fear under the co-sponsorship of SCLC, CORE, and SNCC. Intended to serve in part as a black voter registration drive, the march resumed and gathered strength as it moved through the countryside along Highway 51. When the marchers reached Grenada, Mississippi—described by Time magazine as "a white supremacist stronghold"—they staged an evening rally at the town’s Jefferson Davis memorial, where King and other leaders addressed the crowd.

Type:

Image

Format:

Gelatin Silver Print On Paper

Rights:

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

View Original At:

http://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?q=record_ID=npg_NPG.2004.53&repo=DPLA