The big read - Medgar evers

Known today more for his struggles for civil rights in Mississippi and his untimely death at the hands of an assassin than for his writings, Medgar Evers nevertheless left behind an impressive record of achievement.

Medgar Wiley Evers was born July 2, 1925, near Decatur, Mississippi, and attended school there until he was inducted into the army in 1943. After serving in Normandy, he attended Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University), majoring in business administration. While at Alcorn, he was a member of the debate team, the college choir, and the football and track teams, and he also held several student offices and was editor of the campus newspaper for two years and the annual for one year. In recognition of his accomplishments at Alcorn, he was listed in Who’s Who in American Colleges.

At Alcorn he met Myrlie Beasley, of Vicksburg, and the next year, they were married on December 24, 1951. He received his B.A. degree the next semester and they moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, during which time Evers began to establish local chapters of the NAACP throughout the Delta and organizing boycotts of gasoline stations that refused to allow blacks to use their restrooms. He worked in Mound Bayou as an insurance agent until 1954, the year a Supreme Court decision ruled school segregation unconstitutional. Despite the court’s ruling, Evers applied for and was denied admission to the University of Mississippi Law School, but his attempt to integrate the state’s oldest public university attracted the attention of the NAACP’s national office, and that same year he was appointed Mississippi’s first field secretary for the NAACP.

Evers and his wife moved to Jackson, where they worked together to set up the NAACP office, and he began investigating violent crimes committed against blacks and sought ways to prevent them. His boycott of Jackson merchants in the early 1960s attracted national attention, and his efforts to have James Meredith admitted to the University of Mississippi in 1962 brought much-needed federal help for which he had been soliciting. Meredith was admitted to Ole Miss, a major step in securing civil rights in the state, but an ensuing riot on campus left two people dead, and Evers’ involvement in this and other activities increased the hatred many people felt toward Evers.

"It may sound funny, but I love the South. 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 some day. There are lakes where a man can sink a hook and fight the bass. There is room here for my children to play and grow, and become good citizens—if the white man will let them...."

Medgar Evers, "Why I Live in Mississippi"

On June 12, 1963, as he was returning home, Medgar Evers was killed by an assassin’s bullet. Black and white leaders from around the nation came to Jackson for his funeral and then gathered at Arlington National Cemetery for his interment. Following his death, his brother, Charles, took over Medgar’s position as state field secretary for the NAACP. The accused killer, a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith, stood trial twice in the 1960s, but in both cases the all-white juries could not reach a verdict. Finally, in a third trial in 1994 (and thirty-one years after Evers’ murder), Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

The legacy of Medgar Evers is everywhere present in the Mississippi of today. This peaceful man, who had constantly urged that "violence is not the way" but who paid for his beliefs with his life, was a prominent voice in the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi. Many tributes have been paid to Medgar Evers over the years, including a book by his widow, For Us, the Living, but perhaps the greatest tribute can be found in changes noted in Mississippi Black History Makers: "Ten years after Medgar’s death the national office of the NAACP reported that Mississippi had 145 black elected officials and that blacks were enrolled in each of the state’s public and private institutions of higher learning.... In 1970, according to statistics compiled by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, more than one-fourth or 26.4 percent of black pupils in Mississippi public schools attended integrated schools with at least a 50 percent white enrollment. When Medgar died in 1963, only 28,000 blacks were registered v
oters. By 1971, there were 250,000 and by 1982 over 500,000."

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. It was the largest funeral at Arlington since the interment of John Foster Dulles, former U.S. Secretary of State in 1959. The past chairman of the American Veterans' Committee, Mickey Levine, said at the services, "No soldier in this field has fought more courageously, more heroically than Medgar Evers."

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 miscarriage of justice 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: The day that Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet that 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.

In 1965, Jackson C. Frank included the lyrics "But there aren't words to bring back Evers" in his tribute to the Civil Right Movement, "Don't Look Back," found on his only, self-titled, album. Malvina Reynolds mentioned "the shot in Evers' back" in her song "It Isn't Nice". More recently, rapper Immortal Technique asks if a diamond is "worth the blood of Malcolm and Medgar Evers?" in the song "Crossing the Boundary". The Rza sang on "I Can't Go to Sleep" by Wu-Tang Clan, "Medgar took one to the skull for integrating college."

In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence. 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. Beckwith was convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after having lived as a free man for three decades after the killing. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January 2001.

A quiet integrationist

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 to 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. Upon 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 Evers's 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 Medgar 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 his hope for changes in his native Mississippi.

"YOU CAN KILL A MAN BUT YOU CAN'T KILL AN IDEA."

—MEDGAR EVERS

After the war, Evers attended Mississippi's Alcorn A&M College, where he participated in football, track, debate, and choir. He also met his future 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.

‘‘The Man in Mississippi’’

Medgar Wiley Evers, known as "The Man in Mississippi," is a seminal figure in the history of the American Civil Rights Movement. The third of four children, Medgar was born on July 2, 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi to James and Jessie Evers. Evers grew up in a devoutly religious home in segregated Mississippi, where services and accommodations such as schools and public facilities were specified for "Colored" or "White" use. Despite the fact that he could not attend the same theaters or drink from the same fountains as white Mississippians, like many men of his generation, Evers left his home to enlist in the military following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Although he was serving his country against its foreign enemies, Evers soon became disillusioned by the fact that while he was supposedly fighting for freedom of people halfway around the world, his own nation was rooted in the unequal segregationist ideology of separation and white supremacy. Evers’ experiences of the racist sentiments of white citizens as an
African-American soldier demonstrated to him the need for action.

Emboldened by lessons learned while at war, Evers returned to Mississippi and dedicated himself to academic studies at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, where he earned a Bachelor's degree in 1952. Evers was acutely aware of the need to continue the struggle against injustice and soon became an important member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Jackson, Mississippi. From 1954 until his assassination in 1963, Evers traveled throughout Mississippi organizing African-Americans in peaceful protest, economic boycotts, political sit-ins, and voter registration drives to draw national and world attention to unjust practices.

Elected the first Field Secretary of the NAACP, Evers created new strategies to enfranchise and empower African-Americans. As Dr. Patricia Murrain writes, "…articulating the demands of the black masses, Evers was instrumental in wielding hosts of fragmented, inarticulate and somewhat ineffective voices into unification." Evers’ work was instrumental to many political and social victories for African-Americans in Mississippi, most notably the admission of James Meredith to the previously white-only University of Mississippi.

However, on June 12, 1963, "The Man in Mississippi," who was the voice of so many disenfranchised Americans, was silenced by a shot to the back in the driveway of his home. Following Evers’ assassination, his wife Myrlie continued his legacy by traveling around the world stressing the positive achievements of the Civil Rights Movement and the necessity to continue the struggle until the dream of equality is realized. Myrlie Evers has remained a stalwart figure in the struggle for Civil Rights up to the present, serving as the Chairperson of the NAACP’s Board of Directors from 1995 to 1998.

Medgar Evers College was founded as a senior college of the City University of New York in 1970 through a partnership between the educators and community leaders in Central Brooklyn. More than just college named for a famous person, Medgar Evers College is a family whose members strive to fulfill their namesake’s legacy through a commitment to the educational empowerment of the African Diaspora community. Although Medgar Evers was born into a world where people of different races were not allowed to mix, students and faculty of Medgar Evers College gather each day in the community of harmony, equality and understanding for which he gave his life.