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29 December 2008
Medgar Evers
Martyr of the Mississippi Movement
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
By: Philip Dray
The author of Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen, Dray is also the co-author, with Seth Cagin, of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi.
Medgar Evers, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi, was a dynamic leader whose life was cut short by assassination in 1963. His loss at age 37 was a tragic reversal for the civil rights movement, but it galvanized further protest and drew the sympathetic concern of the federal government to his cause.
Born in rural Mississippi in 1925, Evers served with U.S. armed forces in Europe in the Second World War, returning home to attend Alcorn College (a historically black institution located near Lorman, Mississippi), where he was an accomplished student and athlete. There he met his future wife, Myrlie; the couple was married in 1951.
Evers became a protégé of T.R.M. Howard, a black physician and businessman who founded both an insurance agency and a medical clinic in the Mississippi Delta. Howard also established the Mississippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a civil rights organization that employed a “top-down” approach, encouraging leading African-American professionals and clergy to promote self-help, business ownership, and, ultimately, the demand for civil rights among the broader black population.
Evers determined to see the freedoms he had fought for overseas established at home. He soon emerged as one of the Mississippi Regional Council’s most effective activists. Like his mentor, he mixed business with civil rights campaigning, working as a salesman for Howard’s Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company while organizing local chapters of the NAACP and leading boycotts of gas stations that refused blacks access to restrooms. (“Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom” read one bumper sticker.)
In 1954, Evers challenged the segregationist order by applying for enrollment at the law school of the all-white University of Mississippi, known as “Ole Miss.” Evers was turned away, but his effort won him the admiration of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, and he was subsequently named the organization’s first field secretary in Mississippi, a dangerous and lonely assignment.
“It may sound funny, but I love the South,” Evers once said. “I don’t choose to live anywhere else. There’s land here where a man can raise cattle, and I’m going to do it someday. There are lakes where a man can sink a hook and fight a bass. There is room here for my children to play and grow and become good citizens — if the white man will let them.”
At the time, however, whites’ cooperation appeared very much in doubt. Two of the United States’ most infamous modern lynchings occurred in Mississippi in those years — the 1955 killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till, and the 1959 lynching of Mack Charles Parker in Poplarville. Evers helped investigate the Till murder, a case that received extensive national attention. Despite strong evidence of the defendants’ guilt, an all-white male jury took only 67 minutes to acquit them. One juror later asserted that the panel took a “soda break” to stretch deliberations beyond one hour, “to make it look good.” (In May 2004, the Justice Department, calling the 1955 prosecution a “grotesque miscarriage of justice,” reopened the murder investigation. But with many potential witnesses long dead and evidence scattered, a grand jury declined to indict the last remaining living suspect.)
Mississippi reacted harshly to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling and its order to desegregate the nation’s public schools. Local white groups known as Citizens Councils vowed to resist integration at any cost. Evers, who had earlier been denied admission to Ole Miss, assisted other blacks’ efforts to enroll there. In 1962, Air Force veteran James Meredith was admitted to the school by a direct order from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. State officials resisted the order, and Meredith managed to begin classes only after a night of rioting in which two people were killed and hundreds injured.
As his efforts on Meredith’s behalf intensified the segregationist hatred of Evers, he launched a series of boycotts, sit-ins, and protests in Jackson, Mississippi’s largest city. Even the NAACP was occasionally concerned with the extent of Evers’s efforts. When Martin Luther King Jr. led a high-profile civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, Evers stepped up his Jackson Movement — demanding the hiring of black police, the creation of a biracial committee, the desegregation of downtown lunch counters, and the use of courtesy titles (Mr., Mrs., Miss) by whites who dealt with black shoppers in downtown stores.
The city’s reaction was ominous. Workmen erected on the nearby Mississippi State Fairgrounds a series of fenced stockades capable of holding thousands of protestors — a blunt message to those who considered protesting. Undeterred, Evers and his supporters fought on. Local blacks, including many children, took part in the subsequent rallies and store boycotts, marching and joining picket lines. These demonstrations represented a culmination of Evers’s long years of civil rights work. A high point came when Evers appeared on local television to explain the movement’s objectives. Whites were not accustomed to seeing black people on TV, especially presenting their case in their own words, and many were outraged.
Soon, attempts were made on Evers’s life: A bomb was thrown into his carport, a vehicle nearly ran him over. As Evers returned home on the night of June 12, 1963, he was ambushed and shot as he got out of his car. He died at his own front door.
The murder of so popular a leader enraged the black community. Over several days there were numerous confrontations with police in downtown Jackson. Even the whites who ran the city were shocked by Evers’s death, for although he was an agitator, he was at least a familiar presence. The city fathers made the unusual concession of allowing a silent march to honor him, as civil rights leaders from across the nation arrived to pay tribute. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., with full military honors. Medgar’s brother Charles assumed some of his duties with the Jackson campaign, and his widow, Myrlie, became a well-known activist and would serve as chairperson of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998.
It was Medgar Evers’s fate to have his name linked with one of the most frustrating legal cases of the civil rights era. His killer, a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith, scion of an old Mississippi family, was put on trial twice in the 1960s, but in each instance was acquitted by white juries. Not until 1994, a full three decades after Evers had led his fellow Mississippians in a crusade against bigotry and intolerance, was Beckwith convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001.
Ultimately, Evers triumphed, even in death. The year he was murdered, only 28,000 black Mississippians had successfully registered to vote. By 1971, that number had risen to over a quarter-million and, by 1982, to half a million. By 2006, Mississippi had the highest number of black elected officials in the country, including a quarter of its delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives and some 27 percent of its state legislature.
