NEXT WEEK: THAT’S WHY THEY CALL IT THE BLUES... BB KING, BEALE & THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA

He received more death threats during his visit, prompting that eerie forewarning that he might not get to the Promised Land.

And he didn’t – shot down the following day at the Lorraine Motel, now incorporated in the Civil Rights Museum, where we choke back the tears, not for the last time on this journey.

Myrlie Evers-Williams did get to the Promised Land, but not her husband Medgar, Mississippi’s leading civil rights activist, who was shot down in his carport in 1963 as he took T-shirts out of the boot, Myrlie having to duck for cover inside and usher the kids to hide in the bath.

She is there for the opening of the museums in Jackson, as are the Evers children, here to tell it on the mountain top.

She admits that she has wept and has felt the blows. But she has also felt the hope and is still prepared, even at 85, to carry on the fight.

Fannie Lou Hamer was a fellow foot soldier on the march to freedom, taking her message for African-American voter rights all the way to the Democratic Convention in Chicago and to the television screens of America.

She was ‘sick and tired’ of being ‘sick and tired’.

THE road to Chicago was a well-trodden one for African-Americans, or slaves, as they used to be known. You can follow their story here in Mississippi along the famous Highway 61, immortalised in song by Bob Dylan. There is a Freedom Trail, where you can visit Fannie Lou Hamer’s statue at Ruleville (think Jim Larkin’s on O’Connell Street) and grave and Blues Trail (music is where the movement found its expression).

And you can follow their journey too in Memphis, where you can pick up the track of the Underground Railroad at Slave Haven, where blacks were spirited to freedom along the Mississippi and up to the North, sometimes by wellmeaning white masters, often at great risk to themselves. We did both. Waking up on the coach journey going from Memphis, Tennessee to Cleveland, Mississippi, to a blanket of snow covering the fields of Mississippi, conjured up images of a different time, a different season – of cotton fields and thousands of slaves out a-pickin’ in the fields in the 90-degrees-plus heat