That picture haunts me. It has a permanent hold on my mind. That’s me, being punched and kicked, knocked to the ground, and kicked and punched again. Seeing it focuses my mind with painful clarity. That moment was captured by Jack Thornell, 25, The Associated Press’ Pulitzer prize-winning photographer who only two months before and one hundred miles to the north had witnessed with his camera the attempted assassination of James Meredith, a brave civil rights pioneer, shot by White supremacist, Aubrey James Norvell, in broad daylight on Highway 51 in Hernando, Mississippi. Meredith, the first African American to attend and graduate from the University of Mississippi, better known as Ole Miss, was staging a one-man march to encourage other Black men to defy the Ku Klux Klan by registering to vote. If enough Black people registered to vote, they could elect local sheriffs to protect them from the Klan and they could help elect members of Congress and presidents. The KKK, America’s oldest and most powerful domestic terrorist organization, was dedicated to keeping Black people from voting.

Looking back at Thornell’s picture of the assault on me through the lens of history more than fifty years later, I see my fingers interlaced behind my head. It was my desperate attempt to protect my skull and my brain from the next blow. I knew to do that with my hands only because I had previously covered a nonviolent civil rights training for interracial volunteers who were going to go out and march into the face of hatred and almost certain furious segregationist violence. At the time, I remember, thinking, well, I hope that does them some good. Fortunately, I’m a reporter, so nobody’s going to want to hit me. I was twenty-two and dumb as a rock growing up and then working in what were very safe places, at least for me.