About a year after I arrived in Indianola, I was reading through a book about Civil Rights history in Sunflower County.
There was a small paragraph under a photo of the courthouse that talked about Fannie Lou Hamer’s 1962 trip from Ruleville to the county seat to register to vote.
Beneath that snippet was one sentence about Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on the grounds on June 21, 1966.
Curious, I started to ask people about the event, and I soon learned that not much at the time was known about King’s visit here. I dug around in The Enterprise-Tocsin archives, and I found just a few lines from a June 1966 front page editorial that seemed to allude to the speech, but it did not name King.
This past Saturday, I learned that our June 2024 story, A King’s Speech, won first place for Investigative/In-Depth Coverage at the Mississippi Press Association’s Better Newspaper Contest.
Following that, I was awarded the Bill Minor Prize for Investigative/In-Depth Coverage for the same story.
I was humbled to read the following note from one of the judges, a member of the Oklahoma Press Association, which judged the Mississippi folks this year.
“This piece is skillfully written and well researched. I love that it captures local history while documenting a topic and themes with a much broader impact.”
Following the awards ceremony, I had a chance to discuss the story with a few people.
It was there that I revealed that I had worked for five years to compile all of the information and interviews for the article.
Even when I moved to Georgia for nine months, I continued to research King’s visit.
During that half decade, I scoured the internet, hoping that a photo existed somewhere of King standing atop a mound of dirt on what is now the courthouse grounds.
I did not find a photo, but I did discover that buried in all of those articles that ran the day after King’s speech here was a pretty cool story about Indianola, Mississippi.
More about that in a moment.
The only two people whom I met during my research who actually witnessed the speech were Civil Rights icon Charles McLaurin and Indianola native Jim Pullen.
Come to find out, McLaurin was the very person who was tasked by Hamer to bring King to Indianola during the Meredith March Against Fear that summer.
He proved to be a treasure trove of information, but as COVID-19 took hold of our world the following year, our communication all but halted for a time.
Jim Pullen, now in Texas and a great friend to this publication, gave me an on-camera interview when he visited his hometown one week.
I knew that I had two great primary sources, but there had to be more.
I started doing searches on newspapers.com, hoping someone might have mentioned King’s speech in Indianola.
Turns out, King and Indianola were on the front pages of dozens of newspapers across the country on June 22, 1966.
King’s visit to Indianola followed a volatile visit to Philadelphia on the same day that obviously shook the Civil Rights leader to his core. He came straight from Neshoba County to Sunflower County, and he railed against the federal government, the state government and local officials whom he said stood idly by while white protestors attacked demonstrators there.
For decades, it was thought that King’s visit to Indianola was insignificant and had become a footnote in the Meredith March on Fear narrative.
King left a violent mob in Philadelphia and arrived to a small peaceful crowd here. Indianola allowed him to vent, collect himself and push forward to Yazoo City, where he delivered the third and final speech of the day that evening.
Hopefully, what we showed last year in our article is that King’s stop here nearly 60 years ago was important and impactful.
I did not set out to win two huge awards with the King story, but I am grateful and humble that the judges from Oklahoma read the lengthy piece in its entirety and found too that there was significance in what transpired here six decades ago.
