HERNANDO, Miss. (AP) - The gentle, gray-bearded figure at the podium seemed to have little in common with the confident young man in the black-and-white photo, sun glasses and pith helmet shading him from the sun as he points the way with a walking stick.
"He was a bad dude," James Meredith, now 83, said to chuckles from the crowd as he looked at the younger version of himself, pictured inside a brochure for a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker dedication where Meredith was shot in 1966.
A pioneer who integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, Meredith spent little time talking about the day he was shot along U.S. 51 just south of Hernando. He preferred instead to poke fun at himself while acknowledging the significance of events leading to Thursday's gathering.
Meredith, 32 at the time, was on the second day of his "March Against Fear" from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, in June 1966 when Aubrey James Norvell, an unemployed hardware salesman from Memphis, stepped from a wooded area, shouted, "I only want Meredith!" and peppered him across the chest with three shots from a 16-gauge shotgun. Norvell served 18 months of a five-year sentence.
Jack Thornell, a 26-year-old photographer for The Associated Press, caught an anguished image of the wounded Meredith lying in the road. The photo won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967.
Michael Lee, a DeSoto County supervisor, was about 6 years old when Meredith was shot during the march, which started out as a 220-mile trek with a handful of companions to call attention to the fear preventing African-Americans from registering to vote in Mississippi.
"My daddy wanted us to go out on the front porch and watch when the march came by," Lee recalled. "We waited and we waited, and it never did come by. And then my daddy called and said, 'Get the boys in the house. Mr. Meredith had been shot.'"
Lee said he's happy he finally got to see Meredith in person.
"This is long coming. It's too long," Lee told Meredith. "I'm sorry I didn't get to see you march by, but I'm glad you're here today where I can see you. And I want to thank you and apologize to you."
Brian Hicks, director of the DeSoto County Museum, said the process leading to the marker unveiling began about 15 years ago, when Japanese tourists visited the county.
"They were going to places throughout America where civil rights events had occurred, and they came to DeSoto County and wanted to see the place where James Meredith was shot," Hicks said. "There was nothing to mark this place. So I decided at that time that we needed a marker, and we started our dialogue. At about that same time, (the state) came up with the idea of a marker trail, so we decided to make it a part of that."
Mary Margaret White, who is with the state tourism office in the Mississippi Development Authority, said the Mississippi Freedom Trail program began about six years ago with plans for 33 markers chronicling the civil rights movement.
The marker, on the property of a Veterans of Foreign Wars post near where Meredith was shot, tells about the march and how civil rights icons, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael and Roy Wilkins, carried on the trek while Meredith recovered in a Memphis hospital.
Despite his troubled relationship with his home state, Meredith has confidence in it. Born in Kosciusko and now living in Jackson, Meredith said Mississippi is fixing its past wrongs.
"Mississippi is the center of the black-white, rich-poor universe," Meredith said. "If Mississippi can't come up with the solution to the problem of the day, it can't be done. I'm very confident it's going to get done."
___
Information from: The Commercial Appeal, http://www.commercialappeal.com