Southern Christian Leadership Conference

===Grenada Freedom Movement===
When the [[March Against Fear|Meredith Mississippi March Against Fear]] passed through [[Grenada, Mississippi]] on June 15, 1966, it sparked months of civil rights activity on the part of Grenada blacks. They formed the Grenada County Freedom Movement (GCFM) as an SCLC affiliate, and within days 1,300 blacks registered to vote.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.crmvet.org/info/grenada.htm|title=Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement -- Grenada Mississippi—Chronology of a Movement|website=www.crmvet.org|access-date=2019-05-31}}</ref>
 
Though the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]]<ref name=cra64/> had outlawed segregation of public facilities, the law had not been applied in Grenada which still maintained rigid segregation. After black students were arrested for trying to sit downstairs in the "white" section of the movie theater, SCLC and the GCFM demanded that all forms of segregation be eliminated, and called for a boycott of white merchants. Over the summer, the number of protests increased and many demonstrators and SCLC organizers were arrested as police enforced the old [[Jim Crow]] social order. In July and August, large mobs of white segregationists mobilized by the [[Ku Klux Klan|KKK]] violently attacked nonviolent marchers and news reporters with rocks, bottles, baseball bats and steel pipes.

When the new school year began in September, SCLC and the GCFM encouraged more than 450 black students to register at the formerly white schools under a court desegregation order. This was by far the largest school integration attempt in Mississippi since the ''[[Brown v. Board of Education]]'' ruling in 1954. The all-white school board resisted fiercely, whites threatened black parents with economic retaliation if they did not withdraw their children, and by the first day of school the number of black children registered in the white schools had dropped to approximately 250. On the first day of class, September 12, a furious white mob organized by the Klan attacked the black children and their parents with clubs, chains, whips, and pipes as they walked to school, injuring many and hospitalizing several with broken bones. Police and Mississippi State Troopers made no effort to halt or deter the mob violence.<ref>{{cite web|title=Negroes Beaten in Grenada School Integration|url=http://digital.library.pitt.edu/u/ulsmanuscripts/pdf/31735061655571.pdf|work=The New York Times|access-date=10 September 2013}}</ref>

Over the following days, white mobs continued to attack the black children until public pressure and a Federal court order finally forced Mississippi lawmen to intervene. By the end of the first week, many black parents had withdrawn their children from the white schools out of fear for their safety, but approximately 150 black students continued to attend, still the largest school integration in state history at that point in time.

Inside the schools, blacks were harassed by white teachers, threatened and attacked by white students, and many blacks were expelled on flimsy pretexts by school officials. By mid-October, the number of blacks attending the white schools had dropped to roughly 70. When school officials refused to meet with a delegation of black parents, black students began boycotting both the white and black schools in protest. Many children, parents, GCFM activists, and SCLC organizers were arrested for protesting the school situation. By the end of October, almost all of the 2600 black students in Grenada County were boycotting school. The boycott was not ended until early November when SCLC attorneys won a Federal court order that the school system treat everyone equal regardless of race and meet with black parents.