James Meredith began his Memphis-to-Jackson March Against Fear on June 4, 1966, to challenge the fear that kept black Mississippians from registering to vote and to encourage African Americans in Mississippi to register, while also drawing attention as he considered a run for governor or lieutenant governor in the 1967 election. After leaving Memphis with a small, unprotected group and facing hecklers and an attempted roadblock, he entered Mississippi on June 6 accompanied by law officers and FBI agents. In Hernando he was welcomed by about 150 African Americans, but south of town an armed white man emerged from roadside woods, called out to Meredith, and shot him three times with a shotgun loaded with birdshot. He was taken by Hernando ambulance to a Memphis hospital, and an erroneous Associated Press report briefly announced his death before being corrected. The shooter, Aubrey James Norvell of Memphis, was apprehended three minutes after the assault, and firearms experts said Meredith survived only because of Norvell's bad aim. In response, Dick Gregory staged a reverse walk from Hernando to Memphis, and major civil rights leaders including Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, Jr., Floyd McKissick, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young converged in Hernando to continue the march to Jackson. Their march included rallies in Greenwood, Philadelphia, and Canton that had lasting effects on the movement and culminated in the largest civil rights rally at the State Capitol in the state's history. Meredith, who had integrated the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962, recovered sufficiently to rejoin the marchers at Tougaloo College and at the Capitol rally in Jackson, and by June 26 he joined the rally there.