January 1966

NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, offered to pay poll taxes for Black residents unable to afford them. KKK members firebombed his home early January 10. Dahmer died later that day from severe burns sustained while returning fire to allow his family to escape. KKK Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers was convicted in 1998 of ordering the murder.

By 1966, the Chicago Housing Authority had constructed nearly all high-rise public housing — including the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green — in existing Black neighborhoods, deliberately refusing sites in white areas. A federal court (Gautreaux v. CHA, 1966) found the CHA and HUD had maintained a racially segregated system since the 1950s as a matter of deliberate policy.

SNCC's Stokely Carmichael helped organize the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama — an all-Black independent political party with a leaping black panther as its symbol. In Lowndes County, no Black person had voted in the 20th century despite an 80% Black population.

Navy veteran and Tuskegee Institute student Samuel Younge Jr. was shot and killed by white gas station attendant Marvin Segrest in Tuskegee, Alabama, after an argument over use of a segregated restroom. Younge was an active SNCC worker. Segrest was acquitted by an all-white jury in December 1966. SNCC called Younge's death the first murder of a civil rights worker in 1966.

SNCC's Stokely Carmichael helped organize the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama — an all-Black independent political party with a leaping black panther as its symbol. In Lowndes County, where no Black person had been registered to vote in the 20th century despite a 80% Black population, the LCFO ran candidates for sheriff and other offices.

King takes the movement North to fight housing segregation in Chicago, meeting some of its fiercest white resistance.