The goal was to counter the continuing racism in the Mississippi Delta after passage of federal civil rights legislation in the previous two years and to encourage African Americans in the state to register to vote.

[3] He invited only individual black men to join him and did not want it to be a large media event dominated by major civil rights organizations.

On the second day of his walk, June 6, 1966,[4] Meredith was shot and wounded by James Aubrey Norvell, a white sniper, and was hospitalized for treatment.

[5] Thornton Davi Johnson suggests that Meredith was a target for such rituals of attack because he had made highly publicized challenges to Mississippi's racial order, and had framed his walk as a confident repudiation of custom.

[7] Some people marched for a short time, others stayed through all the events; some national leaders took part in intermittent fashion, as they already had commitments in other cities.

In addition, labor leader Walter Reuther, along with his wife May, had traveled from Chicago to march and brought 10 buses full of union supporters.

Martin Luther King Jr. participated and continued to attract admiring crowds; his leadership and reputation brought numerous people out to see him, inspiring some to join the march.

Finally, an estimated 15,000 marchers, mostly black, entered the capital of Jackson on June 26, making it the largest civil rights march in the history of the state.

The NAACP were originally involved but Roy Wilkins pulled out on learning that the armed Deacons for Defense and Justice were going to be protecting the march.

Along the way, the different civil rights groups struggled to reconcile their goals and to enhance the meaning of the march to promote black freedoms.

Although overt violence was generally limited, marchers from out of state were shocked and horrified by the virulence of hate expressed in some communities, particularly Philadelphia, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 and Canton.

On the early evening of Thursday, June 16, 1966, when the marchers arrived in Greenwood, Mississippi, and tried to set up camp at Stone Street Negro Elementary School, Carmichael was arrested for trespassing on public property.

He was held for several hours by police before rejoining the marchers at a local park, where they had set up camp and were beginning a night-time rally.

The growing crowd was entertained by James Brown, Dick Gregory, Sammy Davis Jr., Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando.

The next day, June 26, marchers entered the city of Jackson from several different streams and were estimated to number 15,000 strong, the largest civil rights march in Mississippi history.