The Daily History Chronicle

On June 6, 1966, James Meredith was shot by a sniper on the second day of his solo March Against Fear through Mississippi, and within hours, a civil rights movement he had deliberately excluded arrived to continue it in his name. What followed was not just a march but a fracture: the public birth of the phrase “Black Power,” a coalition that could not agree on its own principles, and an outcome that was simultaneously a triumph and a transformation Meredith never wanted. Meredith was never a symbol. He was always a person. And history, as usual, refused to honor the distinction.