Medgar Evers

• Born: 2 July 1925
• Birthplace: Decatur, Mississippi
• Died: 12 June 1963 (assassination)
• Best Known As: Assassinated Mississippi civil rights leader

Medgar Wiley Evers was a black civil rights activist murdered in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi. A World War II veteran and a graduate of Alcorn College, Evers began working in 1952 for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). From his home in Jackson, Evers travelled Mississippi trying to encourage voter registration and working to enforce federally-mandated integration laws. On 12 June 1963, hours after President John F. Kennedy gave a televised speech condemning segregation, Evers was shot in the back by a high-powered rifle while returning home. He crawled to the house and collapsed in front of his wife and three children; he died an hour later. The rifle found at the scene belonged to Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the all-white Citizens' Council, a statewide group opposed to racial integration. Beckwith was tried twice, but both trials ended with a hung jury and he was released. Nearly thirty years later, thanks to the persistence of Evers's widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, the case was reopened and Beckwith was tried and convicted in 1994 (the conviction was upheld by the state supreme court in 1997). Evers-Williams published For Us, The Living in 1967, and Beckwith's trial was the basis for the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi (starring Whoopi Goldberg).

Myrlie Evers-Williams was the first woman chair of the NAACP (1995-98)... Evers was interred at Arlington Military Cemetery... In Beckwith's first two trials, the juries were all white; in his last trial, the jury had eight blacks and four whites... For Us, The Livingwas adapted by Ossie Davis and made into a TV movie in 1983, starring Howard Rollins, Jr. as Evers... Beckwith, Evers's killer, died in prison in 2001.

For more information on Medgar Wiley Evers, visit Britannica.com.

Medgar Evers (1925-1963), field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was one of the first martyrs of the civil-rights movement. His death prompted President John Kennedy to ask Congress for a comprehensive civil-rights bill, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the following year.

The Mississippi in which Medgar Evers lived was a place of blatant discrimination where blacks dared not even speak of civil rights, much less actively campaign for them. Evers, a thoughtful and committed member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wanted to change his native state. He paid for his convictions with his life, becoming the first major civil rights leader to be assassinated in the 1960s. He was shot in the back on June 12, 1963, after returning late from a meeting. He was 37 years old.

Evers was featured on a nine-man death list in the deep South as early as 1955. He and his family endured numerous threats and other violent acts, making them well aware of the danger surrounding Evers because of his activism. Still he persisted in his efforts to integrate public facilities, schools, and restaurants. He organized voter registration drives and demonstrations. He spoke eloquently about the plight of his people and pleaded with the all-white government of Mississippi for some sort of progress in race relations. To those people who opposed such things, he was thought to be a very dangerous man. "We both knew he was going to die," Myrlie Evers said of her husband in Esquire. "Medgar didn't want to be a martyr. But if he had to die to get us that far, he was willing to do it."

In some ways, the death of Medgar Evers was a milestone in the hard-fought integration war that rocked America in the 1950s and 1960s. While the assassination of such a prominent black figure foreshadowed the violence to come, it also spurred other civil rights leaders - themselves targets of white supremacists - to new fervor. They, in turn, were able to infuse their followers - both black and white - with a new and expanded sense of purpose, one that replaced apprehension with anger. Esquire contributor Maryanne Vollers wrote: "People who lived through those days will tell you that something shifted in their hearts after Medgar Evers died, something that put them beyond fear…At that point a new motto was born: After Medgar, no more fear."

A Course in Racism

Evers was born in 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi. He was the third of four children of a small farm owner who also worked at a nearby sawmill. Young Medgar grew up fast in Mississippi. His social standing was impressed upon him every day. In The Martyrs: Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice, Jack Mendelsohn quoted Evers at length about his childhood. "I was born in Decatur here in Mississippi, and when we were walking to school in the first grade white kids in their schoolbuses would throw things at us and yell filthy things," the civil rights leader recollected. "This was a mild start. If you're a kid in Mississippi this is the elementary course.

"I graduated pretty quickly. When I was eleven or twelve a close friend of the family got lynched. I guess he was about forty years old, married, and we used to play with his kids. I remember the Saturday night a bunch of white men beat him to death at the Decatur fairgrounds because he sassed back a white woman. They just left him dead on the ground. Everyone in town knew it but never [said] a word in public. I went down and saw his bloody clothes. They left those clothes on a fence for about a year. Every Negro in town was supposed to get the message from those clothes and I can see those clothes now in my mind's eye… But nothing was said in public. No sermons in church. No news. No protest. It was as though this man just dissolved except for the bloody clothes…. Just before I went into the Army I began wondering how long I could stand it. I used to watch the Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down a Negro with their car, or white gangs coming through town to beat up a Negro."

Evers was determined not to cave in under such pressure. He walked twelve miles each way to earn his high school diploma, and then he joined the Army during the Second World War. Perhaps it was during the years of fighting in both France and Germany for his and other countries' freedom that convinced Evers to fight on his own shores for the freedom of blacks. After serving honorably in the war he was discharged in 1946.

Evers returned to Decatur where he was reunited with his brother Charlie, who had also fought in the war. The young men decided they wanted to vote in the next election. They registered to vote without incident, but as the election drew near, whites in the area began to warn and threaten Evers's father. When election day came, the Evers brothers found their polling place blocked by an armed crowd of white Mississippians, estimated by Evers to be 200 strong. "All we wanted to be was ordinary citizens," he declared in Martyrs. "We fought during the war for America and Mississippi was included. Now after the Germans and the Japanese hadn't killed us, it looked as though the white Mississippians would." Evers and his brother did not vote that day.

What they did instead was join the NAACP and become active in its ranks. Evers was already busy with NAACP projects when he was a student at Alcorn A & M College in Lorman, Mississippi. He entered college in 1948, majored in business administration, and graduated in 1952. During his senior year he married a fellow student, Myrlie Beasley. After graduation the young couple moved near Evers's hometown and were able to live comfortably on his earnings as an insurance salesman.

Mandated Change for Mississippi

Still the scars of racism kept accumulating. Evers was astounded by the living conditions of the rural blacks he visited on behalf of his insurance company. Then in 1954 he witnessed yet another attempted lynching. "[My father] was on his deathbed in the hospital in Union [Mississippi]," Evers related in Martyrs. "The Negro ward was in the basement and it was terribly stuffy. My Daddy was dying slowly, in the basement of a hospital and at one point I just had to walk outside so I wouldn't burst. On that very night a Negro had fought with a white man in Union and a white mob had shot the Negro in the leg. The police brought the Negro to the hospital but the mob was outside the hospital, armed with pistols and rifles, yelling for the Negro. I walked out into the middle of it. I just stood there and everything was too much for me…. It seemed that this would never change. It was that way for my Daddy, it was that way for me, and it looked as though it would be that way for my children. I was so mad I just stood there trembling and tears rolled down my cheeks."

Evers quit the insurance business and went to work for the NAACP full-time as a chapter organizer. He applied to the University of Mississippi law school but was denied admission and did not press his case. Within two years he was named state field secretary of the NAACP. Still in his early thirties, he was one of the most vocal and recognizable NAACP members in his state. In his dealings with whites and blacks alike, Evers spoke constantly of the need to overcome hatred, to promote understanding and equality between the races. It was not a message that everyone in Mississippi wanted to hear.

The Evers family - Medgar, Myrlie and their children - moved to the state capital of Jackson, where Evers worked closely with black church leaders and other civil rights activists. Telephone threats were a constant source of anxiety in the home, and at one point Evers taught his children to fall on the floor whenever they heard a strange noise outside. "We lived with death as a constant companion 24 hours a day," Myrlie Evers remembered in Ebony magazine. "Medgar knew what he was doing, and he knew what the risks were. He just decided that he had to do what he had to do. But I knew at some point in time that he would be taken from me."

Evers must have also had a sense that his life would be cut short when what had begun as threats turned increasingly to violence. A few weeks prior to his death, someone threw a firebomb at his home. Afraid that snipers were waiting for her outside, Mrs. Evers put the fire out with the garden hose. The incident did not deter Evers from his rounds of voter registration nor from his strident plea for a biracial committee to address social concerns in Jackson. His days were filled with meetings, economic boycotts, marches, prayer vigils, and picket lines - and with bailing out demonstrators arrested by the all-white police force. It was not uncommon for Evers to work twenty hours a day.

Some weeks before his death, Evers delivered a radio address about the NAACP and its aims in Mississippi. "The NAACP believes that Jackson can change if it wills to do so," he stated, as quoted in Martyrs. "If there should be resistance, how much better to have turbulence to effect improvement, rather than turbulence to maintain a stand-pat policy. We believe that there are white Mississippians who want to go forward on the race question. Their religion tells them there is something wrong with the old system. Their sense of justice and fair play sends them the same message. But whether Jackson and the State choose to change or not, the years of change are upon us. In the racial picture, things will never be as they once were."

Two Fallen Leaders - One Theme

On June 12, 1963, U.S. president John F. Kennedy - who would be assassinated only a few short months later - echoed this sentiment in an address to the nation. Kennedy called the white resistance to civil rights for blacks "a moral crisis" and pledged his support to federal action on integration.

That same night, Evers returned home just after midnight from a series of NAACP functions. As he left his car with a handful of t-shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go," he was shot in the back. His wife and children, who had been waiting up for him, found him bleeding to death on the doorstep. "I opened the door, and there was Medgar at the steps, face down in blood," Myrlie Evers remembered in People magazine. "The children ran out and were shouting, 'Daddy, get up!"'

Evers died fifty minutes later at the hospital. On the day of his funeral in Jackson, even the use of beatings and other strong-arm police tactics could not quell the anger among the thousands of black mourners. The NAACP posthumously awarded its 1963 Spingarn medal to Medgar Evers. It was a fitting tribute to a man who had given so much to the organization and had given his life for its cause.

Rewards were offered by the governor of Mississippi and several all-white newspapers for information about Evers's murderer, but few came forward with information. However, an FBI investigation uncovered a suspect, Byron de la Beckwith, an outspoken opponent of integration and a founding member of Mississippi's White Citizens Council. A gun found 150 feet from the site of the shooting had Beckwith's fingerprint on it. Several witnesses placed Beckwith in Evers's neighborhood that night. On the other hand, Beckwith denied shooting Evers and claimed that his gun had been stolen days before the incident. He too produced witnesses - one of them a policeman - who swore before the court that Beckwith was some 60 miles from Evers's home on the night he was killed.

Beckwith was tried twice in Mississippi for Evers's murder, once in 1964 and again the following year. Both trials ended in hung juries. Sam Baily, an Evers associate, commented in Esquire that during those years "a white man got more time for killing a rabbit out of season than for killing a Negro in Mississippi."

After the second trial, Myrlie Evers took her children and moved to California, where she earned a degree from Pomona College and was eventually named to the Los Angeles Commission of Public Works. However, her conviction that justice was never served in her husband's case kept Mrs. Evers involved in the search for new evidence. As recently as 1991, Byron de la Beckwith was arrested a third time on charges of murdering Medgar Evers. Beckwith was extradited to Mississippi to await trial again, still maintaining his innocence and still committed to the platform of white supremacy.

The Evers Legacy

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of Medgar Evers's story lies in the attitudes of his two sons and one daughter. Though they experienced firsthand the destructive ways of bigotry and hatred, Evers's children appear to be very well-adjusted individuals. "My children turned out to be wonderfully strong and loving adults," Myrlie Evers concluded Ebony. "It has taken time to heal the wounds [from their father's assassination] and I'm not really sure all the wounds are healed. We still hurt, but we can talk about it now and cry about it openly with each other, and the bitterness and anger have gone."

At the same time, Mrs. Evers asserted in People that she hopes for Beckwith's conviction on the murder charges. (He was, indeed, convicted after the third trial.) "People have said, 'Let it go, it's been a long time. Why bring up all the pain and anger again?"' she explained. "But I can't let it go. It's not finished for me, my children or … grandchildren. I walked side by side with Medgar in everything he did. This [new] trial is going the last mile of the way."

Further Reading

Altman, Susan, Extraordinary Black Americans from Colonial to Contemporary Times, Children's Press, 1989.

Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Mendelsohn, Jack, The Martyrs: Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice, Harper, 1966.

Ebony, June 1988.

Esquire, July 1991.

Essence, February 1986.

Newsweek, July 23, 1990.

People, February 11, 1991.

civil rights leader

Personal Information

Born Medgar Riley Evers, 1925, in Decatur, MS; died of internal injuries from a gunshot wound to the back, June 12, 1963; son of a farmer and sawmill employee and a homemaker; married Myrlie Beasley, December 24, 1951; children: Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise, James Van Dyke.
Education: Alcorn A & M College, Lorman, MS, B.A., 1952.
Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Army, 1943-46; served in Europe.

Career

Insurance salesman and chapter organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1952-54; state field secretary for the NAACP, 1954-63.

Life's Work

The Mississippi in which Medgar Evers lived was a place of blatant discrimination where blacks dared not even speak of civil rights much less actively campaign for them. Evers, a thoughtful and committed member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wanted to change his native state. He paid for his convictions with his life, becoming the first major civil rights leader to be assassinated in the 1960s. He was shot in the back on June 12, 1963, after returning late from a meeting. He was 37 years old.

Evers was featured on a nine-man death list in the deep South as early as 1955. He and his family endured numerous threats and other violent acts, making them well aware of the danger surrounding him because of his activism. Still he persisted in his efforts to integrate public facilities, schools, and restaurants. He organized voter registration drives and demonstrations. He spoke eloquently about the plight of his people and pleaded with the all-white government of Mississippi for some sort of progress in race relations. To those people who opposed such things, he was thought to be a very dangerous man. "We both knew he was going to die," Myrlie Evers said of her husband in Esquire. "Medgar didn't want to be a martyr. But if he had to die to get us that far, he was willing to do it."

In some ways, the death of Medgar Evers was a milestone in the hard-fought integration war that rocked America in the 1950s and 1960s. While the assassination of such a prominent black figure foreshadowed the violence to come, it also spurred other civil rights leaders--themselves targets of white supremacists--to new fervor. They, in turn, were able to infuse their followers--both black and white--with a new and expanded sense of purpose, one that replaced apprehension with anger. Esquire contributor Maryanne Vollers wrote: "People who lived through those days will tell you that something shifted in their hearts after Medgar Evers died, something that put them beyond fear.... At that point a new motto was born: After Medgar, no more fear."

Evers was born in 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi. He was the third of four children of a small farm owner who also worked at a nearby sawmill. Young Medgar grew up fast in Mississippi. His social standing was impressed upon him every day. In The Martyrs: Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice, Jack Mendelsohn quoted Evers at length about his childhood. "I was born in Decatur here in Mississippi, and when we were walking to school in the first grade white kids in their schoolbusses would throw things at us and yell filthy things," the civil rights leader recollected. "This was a mild start. If you're a kid in Mississippi this is the elementary course.

"I graduated pretty quickly. When I was eleven or twelve a close friend of the family got lynched. I guess he was about forty years old, married, and we used to play with his kids. I remember the Saturday night a bunch of white men beat him to death at the Decatur fairgrounds because he sassed back a white woman. They just left him dead on the ground. Everyone in town knew it but never [said] a word in public. I went down and saw his bloody clothes. They left those clothes on a fence for about a year. Every Negro in town was supposed to get the message from those clothes and I can see those clothes now in my mind's eye.... But nothing was said in public. No sermons in church. No news. No protest. It was as though this man just dissolved except for the bloody clothes.... Just before I went into the Army I began wondering how long I could stand it. I used to watch the Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down a Negro with their car, or white gangs coming through town to beat up a Negro."

Evers was determined not to cave in under such pressure. He walked twelve miles each way to earn his high school diploma, and then he joined the Army during the Second World War. Perhaps it was during the years of fighting in both France and Germany for his and other countries' freedom that convinced Evers to fight on his own shores for the freedom of blacks. After serving honorably in the war he was discharged in 1946.

Evers returned to Decatur where he was reunited with his brother Charlie, who had also fought in the war. The young men decided they wanted to vote in the next election. They registered to vote without incident, but as the election drew near, whites in the area began to warn and threaten Evers's father. When election day came, the Evers brothers found their polling place blocked by an armed crowd of white Mississippians, estimated by Evers to be 200 strong. "All we wanted to be was ordinary citizens," he declared in Martyrs. "We fought during the war for America and Mississippi was included. Now after the Germans and the Japanese hadn't killed us, it looked as though the white Mississippians would." Evers and his brother did not vote that day.

What they did instead was join the NAACP and become active in its ranks. Evers was already busy with NAACP projects when he was a student at Alcorn A & M College in Lorman, Mississippi. He entered college in 1948, majored in business administration, and graduated in 1952. During his senior year he married a fellow student, Myrlie Beasley. After graduation the young couple moved near Evers's hometown and were able to live comfortably on his earnings as an insurance salesman.

Still the scars of racism kept accumulating. Evers was astounded by the living conditions of the rural blacks he visited on behalf of his insurance company. Then in 1954 he witnessed yet another attempted lynching. "[My father] was on his deathbed in the hospital in Union [Mississippi]," Evers related in Martyrs. "The Negro ward was in the basement and it was terribly stuffy. My Daddy was dying slowly, in the basement of a hospital and at one point I just had to walk outside so I wouldn't burst. On that very night a Negro had fought with a white man in Union and a white mob had shot the Negro in the leg. The police brought the Negro to the hospital but the mob was outside the hospital, armed with pistols and rifles, yelling for the Negro. I walked out into the middle of it. I just stood there and everything was too much for me.... It seemed that this would never change. It was that way for my Daddy, it was that way for me, and it looked as though it would be that way for my children. I was so mad I just stood there trembling and tears rolled down my cheeks."

Evers quit the insurance business and went to work for the NAACP full-time as a chapter organizer. He applied to the University of Mississippi law school but was denied admission and did not press his case. Within two years he was named state field secretary of the NAACP. Still in his early thirties, he was one of the most vocal and recognizable NAACP members in his state. In his dealings with whites and blacks alike, Evers spoke constantly of the need to overcome hatred, to promote understanding and equality between the races. It was not a message that everyone in Mississippi wanted to hear.

The Evers family--Medgar, Myrlie and their children--moved to the state capital of Jackson, where Evers worked closely with black church leaders and other civil rights activists. Telephone threats were a constant source of anxiety in the home, and at one point Evers taught his children to fall on the floor whenever they heard a strange noise outside. "We lived with death as a constant companion 24 hours a day," Myrlie Evers remembered in Ebony magazine. "Medgar knew what he was doing, and he knew what the risks were. He just decided that he had to do what he had to do. But I knew at some point in time that he would be taken from me."

Evers must have also had a sense that his life would be cut short when what had begun as threats turned increasingly to violence. A few weeks prior to his death, someone threw a firebomb at his home. Afraid that snipers were waiting for her outside, Mrs. Evers put the fire out with the garden hose. The incident did not deter Evers from his rounds of voter registration nor from his strident plea for a biracial committee to address social concerns in Jackson. His days were filled with meetings, economic boycotts, marches, prayer vigils, and picket lines--and with bailing out demonstrators arrested by the all-white police force. It was not uncommon for Evers to work twenty hours a day.

Some weeks before his death, Evers delivered a radio address about the NAACP and its aims in Mississippi. "The NAACP believes that Jackson can change if it wills to do so," he stated, as quoted in Martyrs. "If there should be resistance, how much better to have turbulence to effect improvement, rather than turbulence to maintain a stand-pat policy. We believe that there are white Mississippians who want to go forward on the race question. Their religion tells them there is something wrong with the old system. Their sense of justice and fair play sends them the same message. But whether Jackson and the State choose to change or not, the years of change are upon us. In the racial picture, things will never be as they once were."

On June 11, 1963, U.S. president John F. Kennedy--who would be assassinated only a few short months later--echoed this sentiment in an address to the nation. Kennedy called the white resistance to civil rights for blacks "a moral crisis" and pledged his support to federal action on integration.

That same night, Evers returned home just after midnight from a series of NAACP functions. As he left his car with a handful of t-shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go," he was shot in the back. His wife and children, who had been waiting up for him, found him bleeding to death on the doorstep. "I opened the door, and there was Medgar at the steps, face down in blood," Myrlie Evers remembered in People magazine. "The children ran out and were shouting, 'Daddy, get up!'"

Evers died fifty minutes later at the hospital. On the day of his funeral in Jackson, even the use of beatings and other strong-arm police tactics could not quell the anger among the thousands of black mourners. The NAACP posthumously awarded its 1963 Spingarn medal to Medgar Evers. It was a fitting tribute to a man who had given so much to the organization and had given his life for its cause.

Rewards were offered by the governor of Mississippi and several all-white newspapers for information about Evers's murderer, but few came forward with information. However, an FBI investigation uncovered a suspect, Byron de la Beckwith, an outspoken opponent of integration and a founding member of Mississippi's White Citizens Council. A gun found 150 feet from the site of the shooting had Beckwith's fingerprint on it. Several witnesses placed Beckwith in Evers's neighborhood that night. On the other hand, Beckwith denied shooting Evers and claimed that his gun had been stolen days before the incident. He too produced witnesses--one of them a policeman--who swore before the court that Beckwith was some 60 miles from Evers's home on the night he was killed.

Beckwith was tried twice in Mississippi for Evers's murder, once in 1964 and again the following year. Both trials ended in hung juries. Sam Baily, an Evers associate, commented in Esquire that during those years "a white man got more time for killing a rabbit out of season than for killing a Negro in Mississippi."

After the second trial, Myrlie Evers took her children and moved to California, where she earned a degree from Pomona College and was eventually named to the Los Angeles Commission of Public Works. However, her conviction that justice was never served in her husband's case kept Mrs. Evers involved in the search for new evidence. As recently as 1991, Byron de la Beckwith was arrested a third time on charges of murdering Medgar Evers. Beckwith was extradited to Mississippi to await trial again, still maintaining his innocence and still committed to the platform of white supremacy.

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of Medgar Evers's story lies in the attitudes of his two sons and one daughter. Though they experienced firsthand the destructive ways of bigotry and hatred, Evers's children appear to be very well-adjusted individuals. "My children turned out to be wonderfully strong and loving adults," Myrlie Evers concluded in Ebony. "It has taken time to heal the wounds [from their father's assassination] and I'm not really sure all the wounds are healed. We still hurt, but we can talk about it now and cry about it openly with each other, and the bitterness and anger have gone."

At the same time, Mrs. Evers asserted in People that she hopes for Beckwith's conviction on the murder charges. "People have said, 'Let it go, it's been a long time. Why bring up all the pain and anger again?'" she explained. "But I can't let it go. It's not finished for me, my children or ... grandchildren. I walked side by side with Medgar in everything he did. This [new] trial is going the last mile of the way."

Awards

Spingarn medal, NAACP, 1963 (posthumous).

Further Reading

Books

• Altman, Susan, Extraordinary Black Americans from Colonial to Contemporary Times, Children's Press, 1989.
• Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, Simon & Schuster, 1988.
• Mendelsohn, Jack, The Martyrs: Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice, Harper, 1966.

• Ebony, June 1988.
• Esquire, July 1991.
• Essence, February 1986.
• Newsweek, July 23, 1990.
• People, February 11, 1991.

— Mark Kram

Shortly before his death, civil rights activist Medgar Wiley Evers was described in the New York Times as the movement's "quiet integrationist." Although his contemporary Martin Luther King, Jr., achieved greater fame for organizing nonviolent demonstrations and boycotts, Evers was an equally dedicated reformer, whose reports of civil rights abuses in Mississippi helped force social and political changes in the Deep South.

From 1954 to 1963, Evers was state field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Courageous, methodical, and devoted to his work, Evers sought to dismantle a decades-old system of segregation. His approach was to create public outrage over the treatment of African Americans by documenting cases of brutality and injustice. Although Evers fought tirelessly against discriminatory laws and conduct, he rejected violence as a means of improving the plight of his people.

By antagonizing powerful white supremacists, Evers put himself in constant danger in his home state. When he was shot and killed by a sniper on June 12, 1963, many Mississippians were not surprised. At his death, Evers became an early martyr in the African American struggle for equal rights. More than thirty years later, when Byron de la Beckwith finally was convicted of his assassination, Evers became a symbol of U.S. justice—delayed, but not denied.

Evers was born July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, the younger of two sons born to James Evers, a sawmill worker, and Jessie Evers, a devout Christian who encouraged young Evers to succeed. The Evers family was hardworking but poor. Townspeople remember Evers as an upright, sympathetic young man who chafed under the inequities of segregation.

During World War II, Evers served in an all-African American unit of the U.S. Army. Although the military's racial policies infuriated him, he fought with distinction and was decorated for his bravery in the Normandy Invasion. During his tour of duty, Evers experienced in Europe a more tolerant, racially integrated society, which inspired hope for changes in his native Mississippi.

After the war, Evers attended Mississippi's Alcorn A&M College, where he participated in football, track, debate, and choir. He also met his wife, Myrlie Evers, with whom he had three children. After graduation, Evers worked as a sales agent for Magnolia Mutual, an African American-owned life insurance company. Assigned a rural territory, Evers witnessed African American poverty and debasement on such a large scale that he could no longer abide Mississippi's racial discrimination. He took a job with the NAACP in 1954, determined to make a difference.

As an NAACP field representative, Evers handled routine administrative duties such as setting up chapters, recruiting new members, and collecting dues. But more important, Evers filed detailed public reports of lynchings, beatings, and other race-related atrocities in Mississippi. His work attracted national attention. Evers also encouraged voter registration for African Americans and, in some instances, boycotts.

Because he signaled the end of the era of white power, Evers was despised by southern bigots. He bravely endured their taunts and death threats. Organizations opposed to integration, such as the White Citizens Council, branded Evers an enemy. Ironically, as African Americans became impatient with the slow pace of social change, Evers's work was overshadowed by more militant civil rights strategies.

On the night of his murder, Evers attended a local rally. Around midnight, he returned to his Jackson, Mississippi, home, where an assassin waited for him in nearby honeysuckle bushes. Evers got out of his car and walked up the driveway, carrying shirts that read Jim Crow Must Go, a reference to laws conferring second-class citizenship on African Americans. The assassin shot him in the back with an Enfield 30.06 rifle. Evers's wife and their young children, Darrell, Reena, and James, heard the gunshot and rushed to his side. Evers could not be saved.

As news of Evers's death spread, riots erupted in Jackson. The United States was stunned by the killing. President John F. Kennedy denounced the assassination, sending Evers's wife his condolences and praising Evers's devotion to civil rights. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was called in to conduct a criminal investigation. Evers was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, in Washington, D.C.

The trail of the FBI's investigation led quickly to white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith, a fertilizer sales representative affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. Charged with murder, de la Beckwith appeared guilty to most observers, but the racial climate in Mississippi prevented a sure conviction. During his trial, de la Beckwith acted clownish and unrepentant. At one point, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett entered the courtroom and hugged the defendant in full view of the all-white jury. Despite compelling evidence from the prosecution—de la Beckwith's public boasting about the murder, his fingerprints on the rifle scope, his well-known ability as a marksman, and reports that his white Valiant was parked near Evers's home at the time of the killing—the trial resulted in a hung jury. Astonishingly, a second trial also ended in a hung jury.

Evers's widow, who had remarried, refused to let the matter drop. Myrlie Evers-Williams lobbied long and hard to have de la Beckwith tried for a third time for Evers's death. A third prosecution was possible in this case for two reasons. First, there is no statute of limitations for murder, so the passage of time was not a consideration. Second, de la Beckwith had not been exonerated (with a hung jury, the defendant is neither acquitted nor convicted), so double jeopardy, the constitutional guarantee against multiple prosecutions, was not an issue. Evers-Williams's determination to see justice done, as well as a change in Mississippi politics, made a third trial of de la Beckwith possible.

Facing testimony from new and former witnesses, de la Beckwith was reindicted in 1990. A trial was conducted by District Attorney Ed Peters. On February 21, 1994, a jury of eight African Americans and four whites in Hinds County, Mississippi, found de la Beckwith, now seventy-three years old, guilty of the 1963 murder of Evers. Although the third trial was a painful experience for Evers-Williams, she was relieved that the Mississippi criminal justice system had finally brought closure to a personal and public tragedy.

In life and death, Evers played an important role in the fight for racial equality. He inspired in others, including his family, a commitment to the same social, political, and economic goals for African Americans. Evers's brother, Charles Evers, was elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, in 1969, and ran unsuccessfully for governor of the state in 1971. In 1995, Evers-Williams was elected to head the NAACP, the organization to which Evers had dedicated his life.

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Medgar Evers
Born	July 2, 1925(1925-07-02) Decatur, Mississippi, U.S.
Died	June 12, 1963 (aged 37) Jackson, Mississippi, U.S.
Occupation	activist
Spouse(s)	Myrlie Evers-Williams 1951–1963 (his death)
Children	Three
Parents	James Evers father[1]

Medgar Wiley Evers (July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963) was an African American civil rights activist from Mississippi who was murdered by Byron De La Beckwith.^[2]

Contents 1 Early life 2 Activism 2.1 NAACP Field Secretary 3 Assassination 4 Legacy 5 Audio material 6 References 7 External links

Early life

Medgar Evers was born on July 2, 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi. His parents were Jessie, a devout Christian, and James Evers, the owner of a small farm and a sawmill worker. Evers' father, also known as "Crazy Jim," and his maternal great-grandfather were two men that also fought for their freedom. Evers was the third of four children, Charles, Elizabeth, and Mary Ruth being the youngest.^[3] There was also Eva Lee and Gene (which were Jessie’s children from a prior marriage). He was determined to get the education he deserved, and he did just that as quickly as possible. After the lynching of a family friend, Evers walked twelve miles to and from school to earn his high school diploma.^[4] In 1943 was inducted into the army with his older brother Charlie.^[5] Evers fought in France, the European Theatre of WWII and was honorably discharged in 1945 as a Sergeant. In 1946, Evers, along with his brother and four friends, returned to his hometown.

In 1948, Evers enrolled at Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University), majoring in business administration. In college, he was on the debate team, played football and ran track, sang in the school choir and served as president of his junior class. It was here that he was listed in Who’s Who in American Colleges for his many accomplishments.^[6]

He married classmate Myrlie Beasley on December 24, 1951, and received his BA degree the following year. Myrlie Beasley and Medgar Evers had three children, two boys and a girl.

Activism

The couple moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where T. R. M. Howard had hired him to sell insurance for his Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company. Howard was also the president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), a civil rights and pro self-help organization. Involvement in the RCNL gave Evers crucial training in activism. He helped to organize the RCNL's boycott of service stations that denied blacks use of their restrooms. The boycotters distributed bumper stickers with the slogan "Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom." Along with his brother, Charles Evers, Medgar also attended the RCNL's annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954 which drew crowds of ten thousand or more. ^[7]

Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in February 1954. When his application was rejected, Evers filed a lawsuit against the university, and became the focus of a NAACP campaign to desegregate the school, a case aided by the United States Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 that segregation was unconstitutional. That same year, due to his involvement, the NAACP's National Office suggested he become Mississippi’s first field secretary for the NAACP.

NAACP Field Secretary

On November 24, 1954, Evers was appointed Mississippi’s first field secretary. President of the NAACP Mississippi State Conference and civil rights activist, E.J. Stringer, helped him gain this position.^[8]

Evers was involved in a boycott campaign against white merchants and was instrumental in eventually desegregating the University of Mississippi when that institution was finally forced to enroll James Meredith in 1962.

The admission of Meredith led to a riot on campus that left two people dead. Evers’ involvement and investigative work brought about hatred in many white supremacists. In the weeks leading up to his death, Evers found himself even more of a target. His public investigations into the murder of Emmett Till and his vocal support of Clyde Kennard made him a prominent black leader and therefore vulnerable to attack. On May 28, 1963, a molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home. Five days before his death, Evers was nearly run down by a car after he emerged from the Jackson NAACP office.

Assassination

On June 12, 1963, Evers pulled into his driveway after just returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go," Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Enfield 1917 .303 rifle that ricocheted into his Jackson, Mississippi home. He staggered 30 feet before collapsing. He died at a local hospital 50 minutes later, just hours after President John F. Kennedy's speech on national television in support of civil rights.^[9]

The house where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway.

Mourned nationally, Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery, where he received full military honors in front of a crowd of more than three thousand people.

Medgar Evers' grave in Arlington National Cemetery in 2007.

On June 23, 1964, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens' Council and Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for Evers' murder. During the course of his first trial in 1964, De La Beckwith was visited by former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and one time Army Major General Edwin A. Walker.

All-white juries twice that year deadlocked on De La Beckwith's guilt.

The murder and subsequent trials caused an uproar. Musician Bob Dylan wrote his 1963 song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about Evers and his assassin. The song's lyrics included: "Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught/They lowered him down as a king." Nina Simone took up the topic in her song "Mississippi Goddam". Phil Ochs wrote the songs "Too Many Martyrs" and "Another Country" in response to the killing. Matthew Jones and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers paid tribute to Evers in the haunting "Ballad of Medgar Evers." Eudora Welty's short story "Where is the Voice Coming From," in which the speaker is the imagined assassin of Medgar Evers, was published in The New Yorker. Even Rex Stout used the event as a plot device in his civil rights themed mystery A Right to Die.

Malvina Reynolds mentioned "the shot in Evers' back" in her 1964 song "It Isn't Nice", and in 1965, Jackson C. Frank included the lyrics "But there aren't words to bring back Evers" in his tribute to the civil rights movement, "Don't Look Back," on his only, self-titled, album.

In 1994, 30 years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, De La Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence, and Bobby DeLaughter took on the job as the prosecutor. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly good state of preservation as a result of embalming.^[2] De La Beckwith was convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after having lived as a free man for the three decades following the killing. De La Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January 2001. In 2009, DeLaughter plead guilty to a five charged federal indictment [1].

Legacy

Evers' legacy has been kept alive in a variety of ways. Minrose Gwin notes that after his death, Medgar Evers was memorialized by the authors Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Margaret Walker and Anne Moody. In 1969, Medgar Evers College was established in Brooklyn, New York as part of the City University of New York. In 1983, a made-for-television movie, For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story starring Howard Rollins, Jr. and Irene Cara as Medgar and Myrlie Evers aired on PBS, celebrating the life and career of Medgar Evers. On June 28, 1992, the city of Jackson, MS erected a statue in honor of Evers. All of Delta Drive (part of U.S. Highway 49) in Jackson was renamed in Evers' honor. In December 2004, the Jackson City Council changed the name of the city's airport to Jackson-Evers International Airport in honor of Evers.

40 years after his death, hundreds gathered around the grave site of Medgar Evers at Arlington National Cemetery to celebrate his life and legacy. Three students - Sharmistha Dev, Jajah Wu and Debra Siegel, and their teacher, Barry Bradford of Adlai E. Stevenson High School, which is located just outside of Chicago, held the commemoration in his honor. Evers was the subject of the students' research project. ^[10]

The 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi directed by Rob Reiner tells the story of the 1994 retrial of Beckwith, in which prosecutor Robert DeLaughter of the District Attorney's office secured a conviction. Beckwith and DeLaughter were played by James Woods and Alec Baldwin, respectively; Whoopi Goldberg played Myrlie Evers. Phil Ochs tells his story in the song "Too Many Martyrs." Robert DeLaughter wrote a first person narrative article titled "Mississippi Justice" published in Reader's Digest and a book "Never Too Late".

Evers's widow, Myrlie, became a noted activist in her own right later in life, eventually serving as chair of the NAACP. Medgar's brother Charles returned to Jackson in July 1963 and served briefly in his slain brother's place. Charles Evers remained involved in Mississippi Civil Rights for years to come. He resides in Jackson.

Early in 2007, comedian Chris Rock appeared as a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher. Regarding a recent incident in which comedian Michael Richards had repeatedly called an African-American man in the audience "nigger" during a performance, Bill Maher asked Chris Rock if Rock considered Richards racist. Rock responded "He stood up for two minutes and shouted 'nigger'! What do you have to do? Shoot Medgar Evers?"

More recently, rapper Immortal Technique asks if a diamond is "worth the blood of Malcolm and Medgar Evers?" in the song "Crossing the Boundary". On "I Can't Go to Sleep" by Wu-Tang Clan, RZA raps "Medgar took one to the skull for integrating college." The 2009 album Gutter Tactics by experimental hip-hop group Dälek contains a song titled "Who Medgar Evers Was...".

In October 2009, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former Mississippi governor, announced that USNS Medgar Evers (T-AKE-13), a Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship, will be named after him.^[11]

Audio material

• Audio recording of T.R.M. Howard's eulogy at the memorial service for Medgar Evers, June 15, 1963, Jackson, Mississippi

References

1. ^ per Charles Evers bio "Have no Fear" page 5
2. ^ ^{a b} Baden, M.M. (2006): Chapter III: Time of Death and Changes after Death. Part 4: Exhumation. In: Spitz, W.U. & Spitz, D.J. (eds): Spitz and Fisher’s Medicolegal Investigation of Death. Guideline for the Application of Pathology to Crime Investigations (Fourth edition), Charles C. Thomas, pp.: 174-183; Springfield, Illinois.
3. ^ Williams, Reggie. (2005, July 2). Remembering Medgar. Afro - American Red Star,p. A.1. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from Black Newspapers.
4. ^ Sina. “Freedom Hero: Medgar Wiley Evers.” The My Hero Project. 2005. Accessed: 25 Oct 2009. http://www.myhero.com/myhero/hero.asp?hero=Evers_NW
5. ^ Evers-Williams, Myrlie; Marable, Manning (2005). The Autobiography Of Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches. Basic Civitas Books. ISBN 0465021778. 
6. ^ Padgett, John B. “Medgar Evers.” The Mississippi Writers Page. 2008. Accessed: 24 Oct 2009. http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/evers_medgar/
7. ^ David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 75, 80-81.
8. ^ Williams, Reggie. (2005, July 2). Remembering Medgar. Afro - American Red Star,p. A.1. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from Black Newspapers.
9. ^ Birnbaum, p. 490
10. ^ Lottie L Joiner. (2003, July). The nation remembers Medgar Evers. The Crisis, 110(4), 8. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from Research Library Core.
11. ^ <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/The-Navy-Honors-a-Civil-Rights-Pioneer/">The Navy Honors a Civil Rights Pioneer</a>, Whitehouse blog, October 9th, 2009.

External links

• Gwin, Minrose. "Mourning Medgar: Justice, Aesthetics, and the Local" March 11, 2008. Southern Spaces
• Medgar Evers entry at AfricanAmericans.com
• Medgar Evers in the U.S. Federal Census American Civil Rights Pioneers
• Medgar Evers at the Internet Movie Database
• Medgar Evers at Find a Grave

v • d • e African-American Civil Rights Movement Topics and events (timeline) Albany Movement · Birmingham campaign · Black Power · Brown v. Board of Education · Civil Rights Act of 1964 · Civil Rights Act of 1968 · Emmett Till · Freedom Riders · Freedom Summer · Greensboro sit-ins · Greyhound Bus Station (Montgomery, Alabama) · Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections · Little Rock Nine · March on Washington · Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party · Montgomery Bus Boycott · Nashville sit-ins · Poor People's Campaign · Selma Voting Rights Movement · Twenty-fourth Amendment · Voting Rights Act of 1965 Activists Ralph Abernathy · Victoria Gray Adams · Ella Baker · James Bevel · Stokely Carmichael · Shirley Chisholm · Dorothy Cotton - Claudette Colvin · Vernon Dahmer · Annie Devine · Medgar Evers · James Farmer · James Forman · Marie Foster - Fannie Lou Hamer · Dorothy Height · T. R. M. Howard · Jesse Jackson · Matthew Jones · Clyde Kennard · Coretta Scott King · Martin Luther King, Jr. · Bernard Lafayette · James Lawson · John Lewis · Viola Liuzzo · Joseph Lowery · Clara Luper · Malcolm X · Thurgood Marshall · James Meredith · Bob Moses · William Moyer · Diane Nash · E. D. Nixon - James Orange · James Peck · Rosa Parks · A. Philip Randolph · Amelia Boynton Robinson · Bayard Rustin · Modjeska Monteith Simkins · Fred Shuttlesworth · Kelly Miller Smith · Charles Kenzie Steele · C. T. Vivian · Wyatt Tee Walker · Roy Wilkins · Hosea Williams · Andrew Young · Whitney Young Activist groups Congress of Racial Equality · Leadership Conference on Civil Rights · NAACP · NAACP Youth Council - Operation Breadbasket · Southern Christian Leadership Conference · Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee · Montgomery Improvement Association - National Council of Negro Women · National Urban League · -Women's Political Council

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