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By Root 1835 0

threatened to break into a riot, he had hustled to the airport. King’s loyalists were terrified of Mississippi. “We tried to warn SNCC,” Andrew Young noted. “We were all Southerners and we knew the depth of the depravity of southern racism. We knew better than to try to take on Mississippi.” In the thirteen months since he had fled Jackson, King had seen his fame soar. He had shared his dream with a quarter million people on the Washington mall and was about to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He had the highest approval ratings of any Negro in America. Yet to whites in Mississippi, he was “Martin Luther Coon.” Billboards along Mississippi highways showed King at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, the caption reading “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School.” Mississippi newspapers wrote of “the unspeakable Martin Luther King,” and “The Reverend Dr. Extremist Agitator Martin Luther King Junior.”

King knew the risks in going to Mississippi. All that weekend before his departure, he wrestled with thoughts of dying. “I want to live a normal life,” he told an aide. After pleading with King not to go, his associates enlisted one of his former professors to tell him it would be “just suicidal for you to go there.” King accepted Bob Moses’ invitation anyway. He did not know that SNCCs sometimes mocked him as “de Lawd.” He had been warned that a “guerilla group” would try to kill him in Mississippi, but he considered SNCC’s summer project “the most creative thing happening today in civil rights.” And he knew the Freedom Democratic Party deserved his support. His first stop would be Greenwood.

Blacks in the volatile cotton capital could scarcely believe the news. The man whose photo graced so many walls in so many shacks was coming to be among them. Where would Dr. King speak in Greenwood? Where would he stay? On the day before King’s arrival, homes were dusted, mopped, swept. Women spent the afternoon in hot kitchens, pumping out fried chicken and cornbread, pies and cakes. Preachers argued over whose church the reverend should grace. The following morning, reporters swarmed all over the quarters. Arriving in Jackson on a flight from Atlanta, King spoke on the shimmering tarmac, saying he had come “to demonstrate the absolute support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for this summer project . . . [and] support the tremendous quest for the right to vote on the part of the people of the state of Mississippi in the midst of bombings, murders, and many other difficult experiences.” When King finished, an FBI agent stepped up, introduced himself, and remained with him, waiting while he met with SNCC and COFO leaders, then boarding his connecting flight.

Charcoal clouds loomed above the Delta as King, escorted by four FBI agents, began his stroll past the shakedown hovels, along the gravel roads, through the heart of the raw poverty and rising anger of black Greenwood. Trailing admirers and reporters, King stopped traffic, turned heads, and astonished those who had never heard him in person. As rain began to pelt down, his spine-tingling baritone rolled across streets lined with pool halls and juke joints. Standing on a bench outside the Savoy Café, he waved his arms above the crowd. “You must not allow anybody to make you feel you are not significant,” he said. “Every Negro has worth and dignity. Mississippi has treated the Negro as if he is a thing instead of a person.” King delighted followers by stepping inside a pool hall and interrupting a game. “Gentlemen, I will be brief,” he said. While young men stood, cue sticks in hand, King spoke about the need to “make it clear to everybody in the world that Negroes desire to be free and to be a registered voter.” Moving back to the street, King urged people to sign Freedom Democratic Party papers, papers volunteers handed out in his wake.

That evening, King spoke at a small church, then headed for the Elks Hall. Waiting in the audience were Chris Williams, who had come with other Batesville volunteers, and Greenwood’s Freedom Day picketers, just released