Medgar Wiley Evers (; July 2, 1925June 12, 1963) was an American civil rights activist who was the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi. A United States Army veteran who served in World War II, he was engaged in efforts to overturn racial segregation at the University of Mississippi, end the segregation of public facilities, and expand opportunities for African Americans, including the enforcement of voting rights, prior to his assassination.
After college, Evers became active in the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Following the 1954 ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, he challenged the segregation of the state-supported public University of Mississippi. Evers applied to law school there, as the state had no public law school for African Americans. He also worked for voting rights, economic opportunity, access to public facilities, and other changes in the segregated society. In 1963, Evers was awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal.
On June 12, 1963, Evers was murdered at his home in Jackson, Mississippi, now the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council in Jackson. Only hours earlier, Evers was listening to President John F. Kennedy's speech Report to the American People on Civil Rights.
Evers' assassination and the resulting trials inspired civil rights protests. His life and death have inspired numerous works of art, music, and film. Although all-white juries failed to reach verdicts in the first two trials of De La Beckwith in the 1960s, he was convicted in 1994 based on new evidence. Evers' widow Myrlie became a noted activist in her own right and served as national chair of the NAACP. In 1969, after passage of civil rights legislation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medgar's older brother Charles was elected as mayor of Fayette, Mississippi. He was the first African American to be elected mayor of a Mississippi city in the post-Reconstruction era.
Early life and education Medgar Wiley Evers was born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, the third of five children (including elder brother Charles Evers) of Jesse (Wright) and James Evers. The family included Jesse's two children from a previous marriage."James Charles Evers" , Black Past The Evers family owned a small farm and James also worked at a sawmill. Evers and his siblings walked a day to attend racially segregated schools; Medgar eventually earned his high school diploma.
In 1943, Evers enlisted in the United States Army at age 17. Evers served in the 657th Port Company, a segregated unit of the Army's Transportation Corps, participating in the Normandy landings in June 1944. In France, Evers' unit was part of the Red Ball Express, which delivered supplies to Allied troops fighting on the frontlines. During his time in the Army, Evers was angered by the segregation and mistreatment endured by African-American troops. While in France, Evers had many experiences that changed his perspective, including serving as a military policeman (a job unattainable by Black Mississippians) and dating a white French woman, which would have been a death sentence in Mississippi. Witnessing Black soldiers of the Free French Forces being treated as the equals of white troops, he once told Charles that "When we get out of the Army, we’re going to straighten this thing out!"
In 1946, Evers was honorably discharged from the Army at the rank of technician fifth grade. After returning to Decatur, Evers enrolled at the historically black Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1948, majoring in business administration. He also competed on the debate, football, and track teams, sang in the choir, and was elected as junior class president. Evers earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1952. On December 24, 1951, Evers married classmate Myrlie Beasley. They had three children together: Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise, and James Van Dyke.
Activism Evers and his wife moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a town developed by African Americans after the Civil War. Evers became a salesman for T. R. M. Howard's Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company.
Becoming active in the civil rights movement, Evers served as president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), which began to organize actions to end segregation; he helped organize the RCNL's boycott of those gasoline stations that denied blacks the use of the stations' restrooms. Evers and his brother Charles attended the RCNL's annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954, which drew crowds of 10,000 or more.
In 1954, following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Evers applied to the state-supported University of Mississippi Law School to challenge that practice in the state. His application was rejected due to his race, as the flagship school had long been segregated. Evers submitted his application as part of a test case by the NAACP.
On November 24, 1954, Evers was named as the NAACP's first field secretary for Mississippi. In this position, he helped organize boycotts and set up new local chapters of the NAACP. Evers was also involved with James Meredith's efforts to enroll in the University of Mississippi in the early 1960s.
Evers also encouraged Dr. Gilbert Mason Sr. in his organizing of the Biloxi wade-ins from 1959 to 1963, protests against segregation of the city's public beaches on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Evers conducted actions to help integrate Jackson's privately owned buses and tried to integrate the public parks. Evers led voter registration drives and used boycotts to integrate Leake County schools and the Mississippi State Fair.
Evers' civil rights leadership, along with his investigative work, made him a target of white supremacists. Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, local whites founded the White Citizens' Council in Mississippi, and numerous local chapters were started to resist the integration of schools and facilities. In the weeks before Evers was killed, he encountered new levels of hostility. Evers' public investigations into the 1955 lynching of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi and his vocal support of Clyde Kennard had made Evers a prominent African-American leader. On May 28, 1963, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home. Ten days later, Evers was nearly run over by a car after he came out of the NAACP office in Jackson, Mississippi.
Assassination
Evers lived with the constant threat of death. A large white supremacist population and the Ku Klux Klan were present in Jackson and its suburbs. The risk was so high that before his death, Evers and his wife Myrlie had trained their children on what to do in case of a shooting, bombing, or other kind of attack on their lives.Bates, Karen Grigsby. "Trials & Transformation: Myrlie Evers' 30-Year Fight to Convict Medgar's Accused Killer", Emerge 02 1994: 35. ProQuest. Web. May 27, 2017 Evers, who was regularly followed home by at least two FBI cars and a police car, arrived at his home on the morning of his death without an escort. None of his usual protection was present for reasons unspecified by the FBI or local police. There has been speculation that many members of the police force at the time were members of the Klan.
In the early morning of Wednesday, June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy's nationally televised Civil Rights Address, Evers pulled into his driveway after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. His family had worried for his safety that day, and Evers himself had warned his wife that he felt in greater danger than usual.
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 Eddystone Enfield 1917 rifle; the bullet passed through his heart. Initially thrown to the ground by the impact of the shot, Evers rose and staggered before collapsing outside his front door. His wife, Myrlie, was the first to find him. Evers was taken to hospital in Jackson. He died at 1:20 am the following day. Mourned nationally, Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery, where he received full military honors before a crowd of more than 3,000 people..
Aftermath After Evers was assassinated, an estimated 5,000 people marched from the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street to the Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street in Jackson. Allen Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders led the procession. The Mississippi police came to the non-violent protest armed with riot gear and rifles. While tensions were initially high in the stand-off between police and marchers, both in Jackson and in many similar marches around the state, leaders of the movement maintained non-violence among their followers.
Trials On June 21, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the Citizens' Council (and later of the Ku Klux Klan), was arrested for Evers' murder. District Attorney and future governor Bill Waller prosecuted De La Beckwith. All-white juries in February and April 1964 deadlocked on De La Beckwith's guilt and failed to reach a verdict. At the time, most African-Americans were still disenfranchised by Mississippi's constitution and voter registration practices. That meant they were also excluded from juries, which were drawn from the pool of registered voters.
Myrlie Evers did not give up the fight for the conviction of her husband's killer. She waited until a new judge had been assigned in the county to take her case against De La Beckwith back into the courtroom. In 1994, De La Beckwith was prosecuted by the state based on new evidence. Bobby DeLaughter was the prosecutor. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed for an autopsy. His body was embalmed and was in such good condition that his son was allowed to view his father's remains for the first time in 30 years.
On February 5, 1994, De La Beckwith was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, having lived as a free man for much of the three decades following the killing. He had been imprisoned from 1977 to 1980 for conspiring to murder A. I. Botnick. In 1997, De La Beckwith appealed his conviction in the Evers case, but the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld it, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear it. He died at age 80 in prison on January 21, 2001."Deliverance." People Weekly February 21, 1994: 60. ProQuest. Web. May 27, 2017"Unfinished Business". U.S. News & World Report January 24, 1994: 14. ProQuest Web. May 27, 2017
Legacy
Evers was memorialized by leading Mississippi and national authors James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, and Anne Moody. In 1963, Evers was posthumously awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP. Six years later, Medgar Evers College was established in Brooklyn, New York, as part of the City University of New York.
Evers' widow Myrlie co-wrote the 1967 book For Us, the Living with William Peters. In 1983, a television movie was made based on the book. Celebrating Evers's life and career, it starred Howard Rollins Jr. and Irene Cara as Medgar and Myrlie Evers, airing on PBS. The film won the Writers Guild of America award for Best Adapted Drama.
In 1969, a community pool in the Central District neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, was named after Evers, honoring his life.
On June 28, 1992, the city of Jackson, Mississippi erected a statue in honor of Evers. All of Delta Drive (part of U.S. Highway 49) in Jackson was renamed in his honor. In December 2004, the Jackson City Council changed the name of the city's airport to Jackson–Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport in Evers' honor.