You know there was a lot of civil rights activity, a lot of things that happened in Greenwood during the civil rights movement. “Well, there was an important civil rights speech made here. Who would tell a stranger that he was illiterate? I was not prepared, in the moment, to respond to such raw vulnerability, or even to fully acknowledge the assertion being made. “I’m about to do the same thing,” I said. Was he playing me? I answered him straight. “What does it say? Because I can’t read.” “Why do people stop here to read that sign?” he asked. One of the men wanted to ask me a question. I will admit to a certain anxiety, of feeling vulnerably white and female, as I parked the car and got out. Three young Black men were standing in the pavilion. Nearby, at the corner, stood the historical marker.
I began to circle the block toward a small open-air pavilion. The massive voter education and registration drives culminating in the Freedom Summer of 1964 were based here, launching Carmichael’s career as a community organizer.Īs I followed a self-guided civil rights driving tour to the site of his speech one summer day, a half century after it was delivered, it took some time to realize that what looked like an abandoned lot was indeed the park. In 1955, just miles north of Greenwood, Emmett Till’s body was dredged up from the Tallahatchie River, three days after his murder, a cotton gin fan around his neck.
In 1886, 50 or more white men set out on horseback from Greenwood to the courthouse in neighboring Carroll County, where they lynched at least 20 Black men for having the audacity to believe the justice system belonged to them, too. In this picturesque town at the head of the Yazoo River, once a major cotton-shipping port, some of the long freedom movement’s most turbulent episodes had played out. It is also lost to history, this forlorn block of overgrown grass in the storied Black neighborhood of Baptist Town, where the soulful music of blues legend Robert Johnson once stirred the air. Without question, the park bears historical importance, as noted by a marker commemorating the speech that changed the course of the civil rights movement. Its name-Broad Street Historical Park, announced on wooden boards between stone columns-speaks in two registers. The site in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood where, in 1966, Stokely Carmichael electrified a crowd with shouts of “We want Black Power!” lies untended and unwelcoming. (Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Department Of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries) Stokely Carmichael speaking in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1966, on the night he first invoked the term Black Power.
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