Word: highway
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Save for the road signs and the scrawny pine trees lining the road, the men who took up lames Meredith's protest march (TIME, June 17) could have been anywhere but in Mississippi. State highway patrolmen - from the same force that had walked off the job as mobs howled their hatred for Meredith at the University of Mississippi in 1962 - hovered around like mother hens; highway crews even mowed the high grass on the road shoulders to smooth the marchers' path. For veteran civil rights demonstrators, the atmosphere could hardly have seemed more unreal if the Ku Klux...
Sudden Passivity. The red carpet soon ran out when the march switched off Highway 51 into the Delta, where Negroes often outnumber white residents. Governor Johnson lost some of his own cool and decided to withdraw more than half of the protecting state convoy. In Greenwood police at first refused to let the marchers pitch their tents on school property, arresting three, including S.N.C.C. Leader Stokely Carmichael, when they tried. Most militant of all civil rights leaders, Carmichael, free on bond, shouted his anger: "We want black power! Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down...
Last week Meredith, 32, put his conviction to the test, though the effort seemed neither divinely inspired nor notably responsible. Striding out of Memphis along U.S. Highway 51, with a Bible in one hand and in the other an ivory-headed ebony cane that he had acquired during a 1964 trip to Africa, Meredith was bound for Jackson, Miss., 213 miles to the south. The announced purpose of the hike was to encourage Mississippi Negroes to register as voters, to challenge, as he put it, "the all-pervasive and overriding fear that dominates the day-to-day life...
...miles beyond Hernando, Miss., Meredith was plodding doggedly up a small hill when a white man popped up from the brush along the highway. "Ja-ames Meredith! Ja-ames Meredith!" he cried. "I only want Ja-ames Meredith!" Meredith's companions scrambled for cover, stumbling over one another. "Look out, Jim, he's got a gun!" cried one. "Hit the dirt!" called an other. Startled, Meredith hesitated. A 16-gauge shotgun roared once, and a spray of bird shot blasted into Meredith's right side. He fell to his knees and began to wriggle across the highway...
...reform-minded state attorney general, defeated Incumbent Miriam ("Ma") Ferguson, a housewife like Lurleen Wallace merely fronting for her husband, impeached Governor James Ferguson, after which Moody served two terms cleaning up the mess in the Statehouse and starting construction of Texas' top-rated highway system, then retired to a highly successful law practice; of heart disease; in Austin...