Meridian Civil Rights Movement

By 1963, civil rights activists inside and outside Mississippi were preparing for the Freedom Summer Project of 1964. Organizers in Meridian established a Freedom Summer Project headquarters on the second floor of the Fielder Drug Store on Fifth Street, and Michael and Rita Schwerner traveled from New York City, as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had assigned the couple to go to Meridian to become grassroots organizers. Upon arriving, they met two organizers from Meridian, Sue Brown and James Chaney. Chaney, twenty years old at the time, already had experience with the NAACP Youth Council and had become a CORE staff member.

Black citizens in Meridian, including Reverend Charles Johnson, Catherine Crowell, George Smith Jr., Agnes Smith, Polly Heidelberg, A. C. Henderson, and Roscoe Jones, collaborated with organizers from outside the city. In the spring of 1964, demonstrations by Freedom Summer leaders and high school students started at the front doors of the whites-only S. H. Kress & Co. department store and J. J. Newberry five and dime on Fifth Street, with activists waving leaflets that asked Blacks to boycott the establishments. The Ku Klux Klan met those marching with violence, and the police arrested several activists, but the march still led to a Black boycott of the stores.

In the summer of 1964, Meridian developed Mississippi’s largest Freedom School, which taught more than two hundred regular students. The Freedom School took place in the Meridian Baptist Seminary, a three-story building with a large student classroom capacity and sleeping accommodations for a staff of up to about twenty. In addition to academics, Meridian’s Freedom School offered recreation, movies, and a lending library. In early August 1964, Freedom School students helped organize a statewide Freedom School Convention in Meridian, where delegates from across the state held a two-day meeting to discuss issues facing Black Mississippians. Splitting into a series of subcommittees, young Black leaders analyzed and drafted resolutions on issues such as employment, housing, voter registration, and medical care.

In 1967 Reverend Charles Johnson formed the Meridian Action Committee (MAC) to continue protest efforts. MAC’s main function was to secure employment for African Americans throughout the city. MAC negotiated with businesses, urging them to hire Black workers and to integrate their lunch counters. When negotiations failed, the group turned to sit-ins, pickets, and boycotts to achieve its goals. MAC picketed the Kress department store and negotiated with the J. J. Newberry five and dime over their “whites only” counters. MAC’s efforts were ultimately successful. Around the same time, Johnson also put together the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC), which taught life and job skills to young African Americans seeking employment.