Medgar Evers (1925-1963)
NAACP field secretary. 1963
Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-109400
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Medgar Evers was buried with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D. C.
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Medgar Evers statue in Jackson.
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October 9, 2009: a dry cargo ammunition ship will be named the USNS Medgar Evers announced U. S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi. Courtesy, U. S. Navy.
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Medgar Evers and the Origin of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi
By Dernoral Davis
Mississippi became a major theatre of struggle during the Civil Rights
Movement of the mid-20th century because of its resistance to equal rights
for its black citizens. Between 1952 and 1963, Medgar Wiley Evers was
one of the state’s most impassioned activist, orator, and visionary
for change. He fought for equality and fought against brutality.
Born July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, Medgar was one of four children
born to James and Jesse Evers. His father worked in a sawmill and his
mother was a laundress. Evers’s childhood was typical in many ways
of black youths who grew up in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression
of the 1930s and in the years preceding World War II. As a youth, Evers’s
parents showered him with love and affection, taught him family values,
and routinely disciplined him when needed. The Evers home emphasized education,
religion, and hard work.
Among his siblings, Evers spent the most time with Charles, whom he idolized.
As Evers’s older brother, Charles protected him, taught him to fish,
swim, hunt, box, wrestle, and generally served as a sounding board for
many of Medgar’s early experiences. He attended all-black schools
in the dual and segregated public educational system of Newton County.
Segregated public education meant long walks to school for the Evers children.
The schools had few resources and operated with outdated textbooks, few
teachers, large classes, and small classrooms without laboratories and
supplies for the study of biology, chemistry, and physics.
Besides his under-funded public education, Evers on occasion saw and witnessed
acts of raw violence against blacks. On these occasions, Evers’s
parents and older brother could not shield him from the realities of a
society built on racial discrimination. At about age 14, Evers observed
to his horror the dragging of a black man, Willie Tingle, behind a wagon
through the streets of Decatur. Tingle was later shot and hanged. A friend
of Evers’s father, Tingle was accused of insulting a white woman.
Evers later recalled that Tingle’s bloody clothes remained in the
field for months near the tree where he was hanged. Each day on his way
to school Evers had to pass this tableau of violence. He never forgot
the image.
A World War II soldier
At the end of his sophomore year of high school and several months before
his eighteenth birthday, Evers volunteered and was inducted into the United
States Army in 1942. The decision to volunteer was prompted by a desire
to see the world and to follow Charles, who had enlisted a year earlier.
During his tour of duty in World War II, Evers was assigned to and served
with a segregated port battalion, first in Great Britain and later in
France. Though typical at the time, racial segregation in the military
only served to anger Evers. By the end of the war, Evers was among a generation
of black veterans committed to answering W.E.B. Dubois’s clarion
call of nearly three decades earlier: “to return [home] fighting”
for change.
Upon returning home, the initial “fight” for Evers was to
register to vote. For Evers voting was an affirmation of citizenship.
Accordingly, in the summer of 1946, along with his brother, Charles, and
several other black veterans, Evers registered to vote at the Decatur
city hall. But on election day, the veterans were prevented by angry whites
from casting their ballots. The experience only deepened Evers’s
conviction that the status quo in Mississippi had to change.
A college student
Evers spent the next decade preparing to become part of the vanguard
for change in Mississippi. He returned to school to complete his education
under the military’s GI Bill, which was passed by Congress in 1944
to provide education to people who had served in the armed forces during
World War II.
In 1946, he enrolled at Alcorn A&M College in Lorman, Mississippi,
where he roomed with his brother Charles. At Alcorn, which had both high
school and college courses of study, Evers first completed high school
and remained to pursue a college degree with a major in business administration.
While in college, Evers met and courted Myrlie Beasley, an education major
from Vicksburg. They were married Christmas Eve 1951. Myrlie remembers
her initial impressions of Evers as a well-built, self-assured veteran
and athlete. Soon afterward she realized he was a “rebel”
at heart. “He was ready,” Myrlie recalls, “to put his
beliefs to any test. He [even] saw a much larger world than the one that,
for the moment, confined him; but he aspired to be a part of that world.”
During his years at Alcorn, Evers enjoyed reading and worked hard to pass
all classes. Participation in extracurricular activities remained Evers’s
real passion from his freshman year through his senior year. As a freshman
he joined the debate team, the business club, played football, and ran
track. As a junior he was elected president of his class and vice president
of the student forum. By his senior year he had become editor of the Alcorn
Yearbook, the student newspaper, the Alcorn Herald, and was named
to Who’s Who Among American College Students.
The decision to attend college afforded Evers critical exposure and experiences
that contributed to his development as an emerging activist and eventual
leader of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. A crucial experience
occurred during his senior year when each month he drove to Jackson to
participate in an interracial seminar jointly sponsored by then all-white
Millsaps and all-black Tougaloo colleges. It was at one of the interracial
seminars that Evers became aware of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), which he subsequently joined.
An insurance agent
After Evers’s graduation, he and Myrlie moved to the all-black
town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where he began work as an insurance
agent for the Magnolia Mutual Insurance Company, selling life and hospitalization
policies to blacks in the Mississippi Delta. The insurance company was
owned by Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a black physician in Mound Bayou and a political
activist. It was largely because of Howard’s influence that Evers,
from 1952 to 1954, not only traveled his Delta route selling insurance,
but organized new chapters of the NAACP. The NAACP organizing travels
convinced Evers that Jim Crow rendered the state a virtual closed society
and that mobilizing at the grassroots level was essential for building
a movement for social change. Increasingly, too, Evers saw himself in
the vanguard to put an end to Mississippi’s infrastructure of segregation.
Other people in the still-young Mississippi Civil Rights Movement also
began thinking of Evers as a leader.
The leadership prospects for Evers only increased when he volunteered
to become the first black applicant to seek admission to the University
of Mississippi. University and state officials reacted to Evers’s
January 1954 application for admission to the law school in Oxford with
alarm and sought to handle the matter with dispatch. His application was
rejected on the “technicality” that it failed to include letters
of recommendation from two individuals in the county (Bolivar) where he
lived at the time.
NAACP state field secretary
The law school application soon catapulted Evers from relative obscurity
to broader name recognition and to serious leadership consideration within
the emerging state Civil Rights Movement. E.J. Stringer, president of
the NAACP Mississippi State Conference, was so impressed with Evers’s
leadership potential that he recommended him for the newly created position
of state field secretary of the civil rights organization. The National
Office of the NAACP voted in favor of Stringer’s recommendation.
In December 1954, Evers’s appointment as state field secretary was
officially announced. The new position required that Evers move from Mound
Bayou to Jackson and establish an NAACP field office. Evers negotiated
with the NAACP National Office for Myrlie to be appointed as the office’s
paid secretary. The Medgar Evers family, which now included two children,
Darryl Kenyatta and Reena Denise, came to Jackson in January 1955 –
the couple in 1960 had another son, James. Once in Jackson a residence
for the family was quickly secured followed by the selection of the new
NAACP office in the business hub of the local black community on North
Farish Street. Evers relocated the field office ten months later to the
Masonic Temple on Lynch Street.
When Evers assumed his position as state field secretary, he began an
eight-year career in public life that was both demanding and frustrating.
The 1950s proved frustrating and anxiety-laden as some white Mississippians
responded with massive resistance to the civil rights activities of the
NAACP and to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision
which declared segregated schools unconstitutional. There was widespread
racial violence against blacks and from 1955 to 1960, Evers faced a range
of daunting challenges. He investigated nine racial murders and countless
numbers of alleged maltreatment cases involving black victims during the
period.
And, Evers’s organizing efforts on behalf of the NAACP proved just
as demanding. He worked to promote the growth of adult-lead chapters and
to encourage involvement of younger activists in local youth councils
across the state. The inclusion of youth, Evers believed, was critical
to a winning strategy in the crusade against Jim Crow. In several areas
of the state – Jackson, Meridian, McComb, and Vicksburg most notably
– youth councils emerged and were quite active. Statewide membership
in NAACP chapters nearly doubled between 1956 and 1959 from about 8,000
to 15,000 dues-paying activists.
In the 1960s the agitation for civil rights grew more radical and diverse
in its protest strategies. The dominant protest strategies became direct
action with civil disobedience, such as boycotts against white merchants.
Evers had only limited knowledge of these protest strategies but willingly
embraced them to advance the struggle.
On the morning of June 12, 1963, around 12:20 a.m., Medgar Evers arrived
home from a long meeting at the New Jerusalem Baptist Church located at
2464 Kelley Street. He got out of his car, arms filled with “Jim
Crow Must Go” T-shirts, and walked toward the kitchen door when
a shot was fired from a high-powered rifle, striking Evers in the back.
Myrlie heard the shot, ran outside with the children behind her, and saw
Medgar lying face down in the carport. Next-door-neighbor Houston Wells
heard the shot and called the police. The police arrived only minutes
later and provided an escort as Wells drove Evers to the emergency room
of the University of Mississippi Medical Center on North State Street.
Evers died shortly after 1:00 a.m. of loss of blood and internal injuries.
In the initial police investigation, a rifle, which was thought to have
fired the fatal shot, was discovered in a thicket of honeysuckle approximately
150 feet from Evers’s carport. White leaders publicly expressed
shock and regret. Governor Ross Barnett called the shooting a “dastardly
act.” On behalf of the city, Mayor Allen Thompson offered a $5,000
reward for the arrest of the shooter and added that he was “dreadfully
shocked, humiliated and sick at heart.”
The day after Evers’s death, several demonstrations broke out in
the local black community in reaction to the murder. Black ministers and
businessmen joined other angry blacks as they surged out into the streets.
Jackson police used force to stop the demonstrations.
On June 15, 1963, Evers’s funeral was held at the Masonic Temple,
with Charles Jones, Campbell College chaplain, officiating the service.
A special permit was obtained from the city in anticipation of a large
funeral cortege and march from the site of the services to Collins Funeral
Home. The permit prohibited slogans, shouting, and singing during the
funeral procession. After the service about 5,000 mourners joined the
procession from the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street, east to Pascagoula,
then north onto Farish to the funeral home. When the cortege reached the
funeral home, approximately 300 young mourners began singing and moving
south in mass toward Capitol Street, the main street of the capital city.
The police, who had been shadowing the cortege, responded to mourners
by using billy clubs and dogs to disperse them. The crowd then began hurling
bricks, bottles, and rocks. A potentially deadly incident was averted
when several civil rights workers, and John Doar, a U.S. Justice Department
lawyer, beseeched the mourners to stop, which they soon did.
The loss of Medgar Evers was a serious blow to the civil rights struggle
across the state. Gone were his imposing presence, compelling oratory,
and committed leadership. In a mere eight years, Evers had advanced the
civil rights struggle in Mississippi from a fledgling organization to
a formidable agent for change.
Medgar Evers is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Despite the loss of Evers’s leadership, the Mississippi Civil Rights
Movement forged ahead. The remaining years of the 1960s saw the emergence
of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (1964), Freedom Summer (1964),
James Meredith’s March Against Fear (1966), and other protests for
racial equality.
On June 22, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’
Council, was arrested and charged with the slaying of Medgar Evers. Beckwith
was tried twice for Evers’s murder, first in February and later
in April 1964. Both trials (before all-white male jurors) ended in hung
juries. Beckwith was not retried for the Evers murder until 30 years later.
In a two-week trial, held in February 1994 before a jury of eight blacks
and four whites, Beckwith was found guilty of the murder of Evers, for
which he received a life sentence. Beckwith served only seven years of
his life sentence at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in
Rankin County before dying of a heart attack January 21, 2001.
Dernoral Davis, Ph.D., is chairman of the history and philosophy
departments, Jackson State University.
Posted October 2003
Bibliography:
Books
Chafe, William. Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina
and the Black Struggle for Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press,
1980.
Delaughter, Bobby. Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of
Justice in the Medgar Evers Case. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Evers, Charles. Evers. New York: The World Publishing Company,
1971.
Evers, Myrlie (with William Peters). For Us the Living. New
York: Doubleday, 1967. Reprint. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1996.
Johnston, Erle. Mississippi’s Defiant Years, 1953-1973.
Forest, Mississippi: Lake Haber Publishers, 1990.
Lawson, Steven, and Payne, Charles. Debating the Civil Rights Movement,
1945-1968. New York: Rowman, Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998.
McMillen, Neil, ed. Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on
the American South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.
Mendelsohn, Jack. The Martyrs: Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial
Justice. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.
Mottley, Constance Baker. Equal Justice Under Law. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Numan, Bartley. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics
in the South During the 1950s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1969.
Payne, Charles. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing
Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995.
Salter, John. Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle
and Schism. Malabar, Florida: Robert Krueger Publishing Company,
1987.
Articles
Crittendon, Denise. “Medgar Evers Killer Finally Convicted.”
Crisis, April 8, 1994.
Evers, Medgar. “Why I Live In Mississippi.” Ebony,
September, 1963, 44.
Evers, Myrlie. “He said he wouldn’t mind dying if.”
Life, June 28, 1963, 35.
Mitchell, Dennis. “Trial for Honor.” Mindscape (Publication
of the Mississippi Committee for the Humanities), 1986, 3-5.
Wynn, Linda. “The Dawning of a New Day: The Nashville Sit-Ins,
February 13-May 10, 1960.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly,
Vol 50 (1991), 42-54.
Pamphlet
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). M
is for Mississippi and Murder. New York: NAACP, 1955. This NAACP
publication was based on the investigations of Medgar Evers, the newly
appointed field secretary for the civil rights organization in Mississippi.
The pamphlet provided details on three racial murders in 1955. The three
victims were George W. Lee of Belzoni, Lamar Smith of Brookhaven, and
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old teenager from Chicago who was visiting his
grandfather in Money, Mississippi. At least ten other Black men were racial
murder victims during the 1950s in Mississippi.
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