Skip to main content

1966 Twenty-five Years Ago

March 2023
1min read


On June 13, by a 5 to 4 majority, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Miranda v. State of Arizona that “the individual is accorded his privilege under the Fifth Amendment” against self-incrimination and that confessions obtained under “custodial interrogation” were invalid if not preceded by a legal warning of the defendant’s rights. “He has a right to remain silent,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the majority, in language that would soon be echoed by Miranda warnings used nationwide; ”… any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and … he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed.”

The decision ended decades of reliance on a vague “voluntariness” test and warned against incommunicado detention and other ways of coercing confessions. Miranda could not guarantee fair play, but it became a minimum standard for police procedure.

Three and a half years after five thousand federal troops had stood guard as he became the first black student at the University of Mississippi, James Meredith on June 5 began a one-man march to encourage black voter registration in the Deep South. He made a conspicuous figure setting out from Memphis, Tennessee, with a carved African walking stick and yellow pith helmet. The trek he planned would take him through two hundred-odd miles of rural Mississippi, past Oxford, where he had attended Ole Miss, past his native Kosciusko, and on to Jackson. Some 450,000 eligible black voters were unregistered in the state, said Meredith, and “if I can do it, maybe they can, too.” On his second day out, as he made his way along U.S. Highway 51, an ambusher near Hernando, Mississippi, shot Meredith in the back. He had walked only twenty-eight miles. The initial Associated Press report pronounced him dead at 6:33 P.M. Radio and television programming across the country was interrupted to give the news of his death. In fact, his wounds were not critical; seventy shotgun pellets scattered across his shoulders, neck, and legs were removed at a nearby hospital. Aubrey James Norvell, an unemployed hardware contractor, confessed to the shooting but was unable to tell police why he had done it.

Civil rights workers continued the march without Meredith until June 26, when he joined them for the final leg of the walk. A crowd of twelve thousand rallied at Jackson to mark the journey’s end.

Meredith had originally planned a lone march because he distrusted civil rights organizations; by the time his registration effort was finished it had turned into a debate over the new concept of “Black Power.” The rally in Jackson gave the term its first national attention. Meredith’s shooting also produced one of the Supreme Court’s important free-speech cases: Street v. New York . Sidney Street heard the mistaken report that Meredith had been shot and presumably killed, took his forty-eight-star flag to a Brooklyn street corner, and burned it, shouting to the crowd that gathered, “If they let that happen to Meredith we don’t need an American flag.” Street was convicted of defacing the American flag; his conviction was overturned by the Court in 1969.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "May/June 1991"

Authored by: The Editors

1799

Authored by: The Editors

1695 THROUGH 1869

Authored by: The Editors

The American Family, 1750-1870

Authored by: The Editors

The American Revolution Through British Eyes

Authored by: Fredric Smoler

Those who believe America’s power is on the wane look to the example of Britain’s shockingly quick collapse. But the similarities may be less alarming than they seem.

Authored by: Stephen W. Sears

How to know the unknowable man

Authored by: Lamar Herrin

Wherein the general moves against the author and occupies his book

Authored by: The Editors

The general’s favorite horse

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.