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| Affiliation | Independent |
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1963-01-01 |
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| Name | Medgar Evers |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
July 02, 1925
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| Died | June 12, 1963
(37 years)
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| Contributor | RBH |
| Last Modifed | Juan Croniqueur
Sep 09, 2024 03:45pm |
| Tags |
Black - Army - Assassinated - NAACP -
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| Info | Medgar Wiley Evers was an African American civil rights activist from Mississippi. He was murdered on June 12, 1963 by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Klu Klux Klan.
Early life
Medgar Evers was a native of Decatur, Mississippi, attending school there until being inducted into the U.S. Army in 1943. Despite fighting for his country as part of the Battle of Normandy, Evers soon found that his skin color gave him no freedom when he and five friends were forced away at gunpoint from voting in a local election. Despite his resentment over such treatment, Evers enrolled at Alcorn State University, majoring in business administration. While at the school, Evers stayed busy by competing on the school's football and track teams, also competing on the debate team, performing in the school choir and serving as president of the junior class.
He married classmate Myrlie Beasley on December 24, 1951, and completed work on his degree the following year. The couple moved to Mound Bayou, MS, 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, he also attended the RCNL's annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954 which drew crowds of ten thousand or more.
Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in February 1954. When his application was rejected, Evers became the focus of an NAACP campaign to desegregate the school, a case aided by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education 347 US 483 that segregation was unconstitutional. In December of that year, Evers became the NAACP's first field officer in Mississippi.
NAACP Field Secretary
He 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.
In the weeks leading up to his death, Evers found himself the target of a number of threats. His public investigations into the murder of Emmett Till and his vocal support of Clyde Kennard left him vulnerable to attack. On May 28, 1963, a molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home, and five days before his death, he was nearly run down by a car after he emerged from the Jackson NAACP office. Civil rights demonstrations accelerated in Jackson during the first week of June 1963. A local television station granted Evers time for a short speech, his first in Mississippi, where he outlined the goals of the Jackson movement. Following the speech, threats on Evers' life increased.
Assassination
On June 12, 1963, Evers pulled into his driveway after returning from an integration meeting where he had conferred with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that stated, "Jim Crow Must Go", Evers was struck in the back with a bullet that ricocheted into his home. He staggered 30 feet before collapsing, dying at the local hospital 50 minutes later. Evers was murdered just hours after President John F. Kennedy's speech on national television in support of civil rights.
Mourned nationally, Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery and received full military honors in front of a crowd of more than 3,000 people, the largest funeral at Arlington since the internment of John Foster Dulles, former US 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 1964 trial, 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, thus allowing him to escape justice.
The murder and subsequent miscarriage of justice caused a social uproar, and musician Bob Dylan wrote the song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about Evers and his assassin. Bob Dylan's lyrics in "Only A Pawn in Their Game" read: "The day that Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet that he caught, they lowered him down as a king." Nina Simone took on the topic in her song "Mississippi Goddam". Eudora Welty's short story Where is the Voice Coming From in which the speaker is the imagined assassin of Medgar Evers was printed in "The New Yorker." 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." 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" and "Bury The Living", a left-leaning hardcore punk band from Memphis, Tennessee mentioned Evers along with Emmett Till in the song "In the State of Mississippi" on their 2003 album, "Burn This ****ing Nightmare." 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 concerning statements he made to others. 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 finally convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the killing. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January 2001.
Before Medgar Evers' body was reburied, a new funeral was staged for Evers. This permitted his children, who were toddlers when he was assassinated and had very little memory of him, to have a chance to see him. The new funeral was covered on HBO's Autopsy series.
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