JOHN A. WILLIAMS
b. December 5, 1925—d. July 3, 2015
FRANTZ FANON
b. July 20, 1925—d. December 6, 1961
PATRICE LUMUMBA
b. July 2, 1925—d. January 17, 1961
MEDGAR EVERS
b. July 2, 1925—d. June 12, 1963
MALCOLM X
b. May 19, 1925—d. February 21, 1965
ROBERT F. WILLIAMS
b. February 26, 1925–d. October 1
Renowned African Revolutionary activist, politician and independence leader Patrice Lumumba who served as the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from June until September 1960, following the May 1960 election. He was the leader of the Congolese National Movement (MNC) from 1958 until his assassination in 1961.
“History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers. Africa will write her own history and it will be a history of glory and dignity.”
―Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“All together, dear brothers and sisters, workers and government employees, workers by brain and by hand, rich and poor, Africans and Europeans, Catholics and Protestants, Kimbanguists and Kitawalists, let us unite and create a great nation.”―Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“Neither cruelty, nor violence, nor torture will make me beg for mercy, because I prefer to die with my head raised high, with unshakeable faith... In my country’s predestination rather than live in submission forsaking my sacred principles.”
―Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“My dear countrymen! In joy and in sorrow I will always be with you. It is together with you that I fought to free my country from foreign rule. Together with you I am fighting to strengthen our national independence. Together with you, I will fight to preserve the integrity and national unity of the Republic of the Congo.”
― Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“I know that an overwhelming majority of the Belgian people are against the oppression of Africans. They disapprove of a colonial status for the Congo under which 14 million Congolese are exposed to the diktat of a tiny economic oligarchy. If the Belgian people were to have their say, the Congo would never have experienced the misfortunes which are affecting it now.”― Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“Our dearest wish perhaps, some may find it utopian is to found in the Congo a Nation in which differences of race and religion will melt away, a homogeneous society composed of Belgians and Congolese who with a single impulse will link their hearts to the destinies of the country.”―Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“We prefer freedom with poverty to wealth with tyranny.”
“History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers. Africa will write her own history and it will be a history of glory and dignity.”
―Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“All together, dear brothers and sisters, workers and government employees, workers by brain and by hand, rich and poor, Africans and Europeans, Catholics and Protestants, Kimbanguists and Kitawalists, let us unite and create a great nation.”―Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“Neither cruelty, nor violence, nor torture will make me beg for mercy, because I prefer to die with my head raised high, with unshakeable faith... In my country’s predestination rather than live in submission forsaking my sacred principles.”
―Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“My dear countrymen! In joy and in sorrow I will always be with you. It is together with you that I fought to free my country from foreign rule. Together with you I am fighting to strengthen our national independence. Together with you, I will fight to preserve the integrity and national unity of the Republic of the Congo.”
― Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“I know that an overwhelming majority of the Belgian people are against the oppression of Africans. They disapprove of a colonial status for the Congo under which 14 million Congolese are exposed to the diktat of a tiny economic oligarchy. If the Belgian people were to have their say, the Congo would never have experienced the misfortunes which are affecting it now.”― Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“Our dearest wish perhaps, some may find it utopian is to found in the Congo a Nation in which differences of race and religion will melt away, a homogeneous society composed of Belgians and Congolese who with a single impulse will link their hearts to the destinies of the country.”―Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
“We prefer freedom with poverty to wealth with tyranny.”
--Patrice Lumumba
Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba
by Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick
Harvard University Press, 2015
Death in the Congo is a gripping account of a murder that became one of the defining events in postcolonial African history. It is no less the story of the untimely death of a national dream, a hope-filled vision very different from what the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo became in the second half of the twentieth century.
When Belgium relinquished colonial control in June 1960, a charismatic thirty-five-year-old African nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, became prime minister of the new republic. Yet stability immediately broke down. A mutinous Congolese Army spread havoc, while Katanga Province in southeast Congo seceded altogether. Belgium dispatched its military to protect its citizens, and the United Nations soon intervened with its own peacekeeping troops. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, both the Soviet Union and the United States maneuvered to turn the crisis to their Cold War advantage. A coup in September, secretly aided by the UN, toppled Lumumba’s government. In January 1961, armed men drove Lumumba to a secluded corner of the Katanga bush, stood him up beside a hastily dug grave, and shot him. His rule as Africa’s first democratically elected leader had lasted ten weeks.
More than fifty years later, the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Lumumba’s assassination still trouble many people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick pursue events through a web of international politics, revealing a tangled history in which many people―black and white, well-meaning and ruthless, African, European, and American―bear responsibility for this crime.
Lumumba (2000) | A Film on Patrice Lumumba | With English Subtitles
Aritra Konar
Premiered July 9, 2021
VIDEO:
This is a biographical film on Patrice Lumumba that shows his rise in politics in Belgian Congo, his days in power just after the Belgian Congo gained sovereignty/independence from Belgium and his eventual fall from power (as an outcome of an international conspiracy and presence of power hungry people around Lumumba). Director: Raoul Peck. Released: 2000. Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961) was a Congolese politician and independence leader who served as the first Prime Minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Republic of the Congo) from June, 1960 to September, 1960. An avid anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist Lumumba dedicated his life for the liberation of Congolese people.
The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination
by Stuart A. Reid
Knopf, 2023
The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination
by Stuart A. Reid
Knopf, 2023
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A spellbinding work of history that reads like a Cold War spy thriller—about the U.S.-sanctioned plot to assassinate the democratically elected leader of the newly independent Congo
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times
“This is one of the best books I have read in years . . . gripping, full of colorful characters, and strange plot twists.” —Fareed Zakaria, CNN host
It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.” Dag Hammarskjöld, the tidy Swede serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization’s biggest peacekeeping mission in history. But chaos was still spreading. Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN and spurned by the United States, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help—an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA. To forestall the spread of Communism in Africa, the CIA sent word to its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin: Lumumba had to go.
Within a year, everything would unravel. The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would fizzle out, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup, transferred to enemy territory in a CIA-approved operation, and shot dead by Congolese assassins. Hammarskjöld, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash en route to negotiate a cease-fire with the Congo’s rebellious southeast. And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades. For the Congolese people, the events of 1960–61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.
See all formats and editions
https://letterboxd.com/film/lumumba-death-of-a-prophet/watch/
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times
“This is one of the best books I have read in years . . . gripping, full of colorful characters, and strange plot twists.” —Fareed Zakaria, CNN host
It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.” Dag Hammarskjöld, the tidy Swede serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization’s biggest peacekeeping mission in history. But chaos was still spreading. Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN and spurned by the United States, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help—an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA. To forestall the spread of Communism in Africa, the CIA sent word to its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin: Lumumba had to go.
Within a year, everything would unravel. The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would fizzle out, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup, transferred to enemy territory in a CIA-approved operation, and shot dead by Congolese assassins. Hammarskjöld, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash en route to negotiate a cease-fire with the Congo’s rebellious southeast. And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades. For the Congolese people, the events of 1960–61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.
See all formats and editions
https://letterboxd.com/film/lumumba-death-of-a-prophet/watch/
Lumumba: Death of a Prophet
1991
1991
Lumumba : La Mort du prophète
Directed by Raoul Peck
Synopsis
Documentary about African political leader Patrice Lumumba, who was Prime Minister of Zaire (now Congo) when he was assassinated in 1961.
Cast
Crew
Details
Genres
Releases
Directed by Raoul Peck
Synopsis
Documentary about African political leader Patrice Lumumba, who was Prime Minister of Zaire (now Congo) when he was assassinated in 1961.
Cast
Crew
Details
Genres
Releases
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination
Patrice Lumumba: the most important assassination of the 20th century
The US-sponsored plot to kill Patrice Lumumba, the hero of Congolese independence, took place 50 years ago today
Supported by
About this content
17 January 2011
The Guardian (UK)
Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo(DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.
Ludo De Witte, the Belgian author of the best book on this crime, qualifies it as "the most important assassination of the 20th century". The assassination's historical importance lies in a multitude of factors, the most pertinent being the global context in which it took place, its impact on Congolese politics since then and Lumumba's overall legacy as a nationalist leader.
For 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo's destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognise the claims of King Leopold II of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin.
When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold's Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony. And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
With the outbreak of the cold war, it was inevitable that the US and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have effective control over strategic raw materials, lest these fall in the hands of their enemies in the Soviet camp. It is in this regard that Patrice Lumumba's determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo's resources in order to utilise them to improve the living conditions of our people was perceived as a threat to western interests. To fight him, the US and Belgium used all the tools and resources at their disposal, including the United Nations secretariat, under Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche, to buy the support of Lumumba's Congolese rivals , and hired killers.
In Congo, Lumumba's assassination is rightly viewed as the country's original sin. Coming less than seven months after independence (on 30 June, 1960), it was a stumbling block to the ideals of national unity, economic independence and pan-African solidarity that Lumumba had championed, as well as a shattering blow to the hopes of millions of Congolese for freedom and material prosperity.
The assassination took place at a time when the country had fallen under four separate governments: the central government in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville); a rival central government by Lumumba's followers in Kisangani (then Stanleyville); and the secessionist regimes in the mineral-rich provinces of Katanga and South Kasai. Since Lumumba's physical elimination had removed what the west saw as the major threat to their interests in the Congo, internationally-led efforts were undertaken to restore the authority of the moderate and pro-western regime in Kinshasa over the entire country. These resulted in ending the Lumumbist regime in Kisangani in August 1961, the secession of South Kasai in September 1962, and the Katanga secession in January 1963.
No sooner did this unification process end than a radical social movement for a "second independence" arose to challenge the neocolonial state and its pro-western leadership. This mass movement of peasants, workers, the urban unemployed, students and lower civil servants found an eager leadership among Lumumba's lieutenants, most of whom had regrouped to establish a National Liberation Council (CNL) in October 1963 in Brazzaville, across the Congo river from Kinshasa. The strengths and weaknesses of this movement may serve as a way of gauging the overall legacy of Patrice Lumumba for Congo and Africa as a whole.
The most positive aspect of this legacy was manifest in the selfless devotion of Pierre Mulele to radical change for purposes of meeting the deepest aspirations of the Congolese people for democracy and social progress. On the other hand, the CNL leadership, which included Christophe Gbenye and Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was more interested in power and its attendant privileges than in the people's welfare. This is Lumumbism in words rather than in deeds. As president three decades later, Laurent Kabila did little to move from words to deeds.
More importantly, the greatest legacy that Lumumba left for Congo is the ideal of national unity. Recently, a Congolese radio station asked me whether the independence of South Sudan should be a matter of concern with respect to national unity in the Congo. I responded that since Patrice Lumumba has died for Congo's unity, our people will remain utterly steadfast in their defence of our national unity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is professor of African and Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History
Explore more on these topics
Global development
Poverty matters blog
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Africa
Patrice Lumumba
The Assassination of Lumumba
by Ludo De De Witte
Verso Books, 2003
The Guardian (UK)
Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo(DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.
Ludo De Witte, the Belgian author of the best book on this crime, qualifies it as "the most important assassination of the 20th century". The assassination's historical importance lies in a multitude of factors, the most pertinent being the global context in which it took place, its impact on Congolese politics since then and Lumumba's overall legacy as a nationalist leader.
For 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo's destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognise the claims of King Leopold II of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin.
When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold's Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony. And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
With the outbreak of the cold war, it was inevitable that the US and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have effective control over strategic raw materials, lest these fall in the hands of their enemies in the Soviet camp. It is in this regard that Patrice Lumumba's determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo's resources in order to utilise them to improve the living conditions of our people was perceived as a threat to western interests. To fight him, the US and Belgium used all the tools and resources at their disposal, including the United Nations secretariat, under Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche, to buy the support of Lumumba's Congolese rivals , and hired killers.
In Congo, Lumumba's assassination is rightly viewed as the country's original sin. Coming less than seven months after independence (on 30 June, 1960), it was a stumbling block to the ideals of national unity, economic independence and pan-African solidarity that Lumumba had championed, as well as a shattering blow to the hopes of millions of Congolese for freedom and material prosperity.
The assassination took place at a time when the country had fallen under four separate governments: the central government in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville); a rival central government by Lumumba's followers in Kisangani (then Stanleyville); and the secessionist regimes in the mineral-rich provinces of Katanga and South Kasai. Since Lumumba's physical elimination had removed what the west saw as the major threat to their interests in the Congo, internationally-led efforts were undertaken to restore the authority of the moderate and pro-western regime in Kinshasa over the entire country. These resulted in ending the Lumumbist regime in Kisangani in August 1961, the secession of South Kasai in September 1962, and the Katanga secession in January 1963.
No sooner did this unification process end than a radical social movement for a "second independence" arose to challenge the neocolonial state and its pro-western leadership. This mass movement of peasants, workers, the urban unemployed, students and lower civil servants found an eager leadership among Lumumba's lieutenants, most of whom had regrouped to establish a National Liberation Council (CNL) in October 1963 in Brazzaville, across the Congo river from Kinshasa. The strengths and weaknesses of this movement may serve as a way of gauging the overall legacy of Patrice Lumumba for Congo and Africa as a whole.
The most positive aspect of this legacy was manifest in the selfless devotion of Pierre Mulele to radical change for purposes of meeting the deepest aspirations of the Congolese people for democracy and social progress. On the other hand, the CNL leadership, which included Christophe Gbenye and Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was more interested in power and its attendant privileges than in the people's welfare. This is Lumumbism in words rather than in deeds. As president three decades later, Laurent Kabila did little to move from words to deeds.
More importantly, the greatest legacy that Lumumba left for Congo is the ideal of national unity. Recently, a Congolese radio station asked me whether the independence of South Sudan should be a matter of concern with respect to national unity in the Congo. I responded that since Patrice Lumumba has died for Congo's unity, our people will remain utterly steadfast in their defence of our national unity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is professor of African and Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History
Explore more on these topics
Global development
Poverty matters blog
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Africa
Patrice Lumumba
The Assassination of Lumumba
by Ludo De De Witte
Verso Books, 2003
Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Republic of Congo and a pioneer of African unity, was murdered on 17 January 1961.
Democratically elected to lead the Mouvement National Congolais, the party he founded in 1958, Lumumba was at the centre of the country’s growing popular defiance of the colonial rule of oppression imposed by Belgium. When, in June 1960, independence was finally won, his unscheduled speech at the official ceremonies in Kinshasa received a standing ovation and made him a hero to millions. Always a threat to those who sought to maintain a covert imperialist hand over the country, however, he became within months the victim of an insidious plot and was arrested and subsequently tortured and executed.
This book unravels the appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy and betrayals that have surrounded accounts of the assassination since it perpetration. Making use of a huge array of official sources as well as personal testimony from many of those in the Congo at the time, Ludo De Witte reveals a network of complicity ranging from the Belgian government to the CIA. Chilling official memos which detail ‘liquidation’ and ‘threats to national interests’ are analysed alongside macabre tales of the destruction of evidence, putting Patrice Lumumba’s personal strength and his dignified quest for African unity in stark contrast with one of the murkiest episodes in twentieth-century politics.
REVIEWS:
“De Witte has assembled a staggering amount of detail to support his allegations of direct government participation in Lumumba's murder.”—Washington Post Book World
“De Witte has performed an important service in establishing the facts of Lumumba’s last days and Belgium’s responsibility for what happened.”—New York Review of Books
“De Witte writes without stylish frills or narrative tricks, but this is a vivid and utterly compelling account of a nation strangled at birth by the West.”—Ronan Bennett, Los Angeles Times
“De Witte’s book, politically passionate as it is, is an unignorable effort to bring the West face to face with its culpability in this entire sad and sanguinary tale.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times
“One Belgian author has triumphed over decades of official obfuscation: Belgium did collude in Patrice Lumumba’s assassination ... It raises questions about Western policy in Africa that will reverberate for decades to come.”—Michela Wrong, Financial Times
“One should never underestimate the ruthlessness of British gentlemen cradling endangered shares.”—Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books
“Thoroughly researched, passionately written, deeply disturbing.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Whilst the battle for control over the resources of the Congo (now DR Congo) continues today this important book restores Congolese history and saves it from the official version peddled by those directly implicated in the affair.”—New Internationalist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ludo De Witte is a sociologist and a writer. He is author of the Dutch work Crisis in Kongo and has researched two broadcast television documentaries on Patrice Lumumba.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/patrice-lumumba-executed/
This Day in History
January 17, 1961:
Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was Executed
Themes: Imperialism, US Foreign Policy, World History/Global Studies
VIDEO:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering?jwsource=cl
https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/patrice-lumumba-executed/
This Day in History
January 17, 1961:
Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was Executed
Themes: Imperialism, US Foreign Policy, World History/Global Studies
VIDEO:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering?jwsource=cl
https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering
Patrice Lumumba (center), at the 1960 round table conference in Brussels to discuss Congo’s independence. Source: National Archives of the Netherlands.
On January 17, 1961, democratically elected prime minister of the Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was executed with the assistance of the governments of Belgium and the United States.
In his 1960 independence day speech Lumumba said:
"We are going to show the world what the Black man [and woman] can do when he works in freedom, and we are going to make of the Congo the center of the sun’s radiance for all of Africa. We are going to keep watch over the lands of our country so that they truly profit her children."
Just six months later he was imprisoned and executed by firing squad.
The Zinn Education Project has a lesson for high school classes on the Congo, examining the brutal exploitation of the Congolese for rubber in the 19th and 20th centuries and for coltan (in smart phones) today. Here is the text for the role of Lumumba in the lesson:
Patrice Lumumba:
"I was the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was a postal clerk and traveling salesman. In 1958, I helped found the Mouvement National Congolais, a political party that demanded independence from Belgium. In October 1959, I was arrested and imprisoned for inciting anti-colonial riots. I won the country’s first parliamentary election in June 1960."
On June 30, 1960, King Baudouin of Belgium came to grant us our independence. How arrogant. His speech was even worse. He told us that we should be thankful the Belgians brought us civilization. In my speech, I reminded him of all the crimes they committed against us. As you can imagine, he thought I was ungrateful. White kings get upset when Black men talk back to them. Predictably, the United States and Great Britain were also angry. They accused me of being a communist because I believed that the wealth of Congo should remain in Congo to create a strong society. The U.S. CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and their counterparts in Britain and Belgium paid a group of Congolese military men (including Joseph Mobutu) to kill me. I was executed by a firing squad on January 17, 1961, after a long torture session. Before they killed me, they made me eat the paper on which my Independence Day speech was written. After my assassination, people all over the world protested the destruction of our democracy." Download and use full lesson.
To learn more, read “An Assassination’s Long Shadow,” in the New York Times by Adam Hochschild and watch “Patrice Lumumba: 50 Years Later, Remembering the U.S.-Backed Assassination of Congo’s First Democratically Elected Leader” on Democracy Now!
VIDEO:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering?jwsource=cl
https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/index.htm
On January 17, 1961, democratically elected prime minister of the Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was executed with the assistance of the governments of Belgium and the United States.
In his 1960 independence day speech Lumumba said:
"We are going to show the world what the Black man [and woman] can do when he works in freedom, and we are going to make of the Congo the center of the sun’s radiance for all of Africa. We are going to keep watch over the lands of our country so that they truly profit her children."
Just six months later he was imprisoned and executed by firing squad.
The Zinn Education Project has a lesson for high school classes on the Congo, examining the brutal exploitation of the Congolese for rubber in the 19th and 20th centuries and for coltan (in smart phones) today. Here is the text for the role of Lumumba in the lesson:
Patrice Lumumba:
"I was the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was a postal clerk and traveling salesman. In 1958, I helped found the Mouvement National Congolais, a political party that demanded independence from Belgium. In October 1959, I was arrested and imprisoned for inciting anti-colonial riots. I won the country’s first parliamentary election in June 1960."
On June 30, 1960, King Baudouin of Belgium came to grant us our independence. How arrogant. His speech was even worse. He told us that we should be thankful the Belgians brought us civilization. In my speech, I reminded him of all the crimes they committed against us. As you can imagine, he thought I was ungrateful. White kings get upset when Black men talk back to them. Predictably, the United States and Great Britain were also angry. They accused me of being a communist because I believed that the wealth of Congo should remain in Congo to create a strong society. The U.S. CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and their counterparts in Britain and Belgium paid a group of Congolese military men (including Joseph Mobutu) to kill me. I was executed by a firing squad on January 17, 1961, after a long torture session. Before they killed me, they made me eat the paper on which my Independence Day speech was written. After my assassination, people all over the world protested the destruction of our democracy." Download and use full lesson.
To learn more, read “An Assassination’s Long Shadow,” in the New York Times by Adam Hochschild and watch “Patrice Lumumba: 50 Years Later, Remembering the U.S.-Backed Assassination of Congo’s First Democratically Elected Leader” on Democracy Now!
VIDEO:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering?jwsource=cl
https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/index.htm
Patrice Lumumba
1925-1961
1925-1961
Answer: "This is a propagandist trick aimed at me. I am not a Communist. The colonialists have campaigned against me throughout the country because I am a revolutionary and demand the abolition of the colonial regime, which ignored our human dignity. They look upon me as a Communist because I refused to be bribed by the imperialists."
(From an interview to a "France-Soir" correspondent on July 22, 1960)
“We are neither Communists, Catholics nor socialists. We are African nationalists. We reserve the right to choose our friends in accordance with the principle of positive neutrality.”
The goal Patrice sought to achieve
Biography
Political Statements
Statement at the Closing Session of the Belgo-Congolese Round Table Conference, February 20, 1960
Independence Day Speech, June 30, 1960 [alternative translation]
Interview with TASS, July 28, 1960
Correspondence with United Nations General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, July & August, 1960
From a letter to the President of the Security Council, August 1, 1960
From a telegram to the President of the Security Council, August 1, 1960
Statement at a press conference in Leopoldville, August 16, 1960
Statement at a press conference in Leopoldville, August 17, 1960
Statement at a press conference in Leopoldville, August 19, 1960
Speech at the opening of the All-African Conference in Leopoldville, August 25, 1960
Concluding speech at the All-African Conference in Leopoldville, August 31, 1960
Address to Congolese Youth, August, 1960
Radio Broadcast Message, September 5, 1960
Solemn Appeal to the President and members of the Security Council and to all the member states of the United Nations, September 10, 1960
From the letter to the President of the UN General Assembly, November 11, 1960
Letter to A.M. Dayal, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General, January 4, 1961
Letter from Thysville Prison to Mrs. Lumumba . [alternative translation]
Poetry
May Our People Triumph
[alternative translation]
Dawn in the Heart of Africa, Voice of Africa, May 1961
Reminiscences of Lumumba
A Life given up for the People by Jean Bulabemba
The goal Patrice sought to achieve by N. Khokhlov
Patrice Lumumba's Second Life by Tomas Kolesnichenko
In the Struggle for Independence by Henri Laurent
Meetings with Lumumba by Romano Ledda
The Congo before and after the arrest of the Prime Minister by Oleg Orestov
Last days of Freedom by Lev Volodin
Such was Lumumba by Yuri Zhukov
“We are neither Communists, Catholics nor socialists. We are African nationalists. We reserve the right to choose our friends in accordance with the principle of positive neutrality.”
The goal Patrice sought to achieve
Biography
Political Statements
Statement at the Closing Session of the Belgo-Congolese Round Table Conference, February 20, 1960
Independence Day Speech, June 30, 1960 [alternative translation]
Interview with TASS, July 28, 1960
Correspondence with United Nations General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, July & August, 1960
From a letter to the President of the Security Council, August 1, 1960
From a telegram to the President of the Security Council, August 1, 1960
Statement at a press conference in Leopoldville, August 16, 1960
Statement at a press conference in Leopoldville, August 17, 1960
Statement at a press conference in Leopoldville, August 19, 1960
Speech at the opening of the All-African Conference in Leopoldville, August 25, 1960
Concluding speech at the All-African Conference in Leopoldville, August 31, 1960
Address to Congolese Youth, August, 1960
Radio Broadcast Message, September 5, 1960
Solemn Appeal to the President and members of the Security Council and to all the member states of the United Nations, September 10, 1960
From the letter to the President of the UN General Assembly, November 11, 1960
Letter to A.M. Dayal, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General, January 4, 1961
Letter from Thysville Prison to Mrs. Lumumba . [alternative translation]
Poetry
May Our People Triumph
[alternative translation]
Dawn in the Heart of Africa, Voice of Africa, May 1961
Reminiscences of Lumumba
A Life given up for the People by Jean Bulabemba
The goal Patrice sought to achieve by N. Khokhlov
Patrice Lumumba's Second Life by Tomas Kolesnichenko
In the Struggle for Independence by Henri Laurent
Meetings with Lumumba by Romano Ledda
The Congo before and after the arrest of the Prime Minister by Oleg Orestov
Last days of Freedom by Lev Volodin
Such was Lumumba by Yuri Zhukov
Patrice Lumumba, from the book Fighters for National Liberation [Progress Publishers] 1984
Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice...
https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/lumumba-patrice-emery-1925-1961/
Patrice Emery Lumumba (1925-1961)
by Tunde Adeleke
April 16, 2008
BlackPast
Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice...
https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/lumumba-patrice-emery-1925-1961/
Patrice Emery Lumumba (1925-1961)
by Tunde Adeleke
April 16, 2008
BlackPast
Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Democratic Republic of the Congo. Image detail courtesy National Archives of The Netherlands (2.24.01.05)
Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent nation, the Republic of Congo, was born July 2, 1925, in Onalua in Kasai province of the Belgian Congo. With just primary education, Lumumba emerged to become one of Africa’s most vocal critics of colonialism. Early in life, he developed an interest in grassroots union activities and joined the Postal Union. As secretary-general of the union, Lumumba began publishing essays critical of Belgian colonial rule and advocating independence and a unified centralized Congo. His writings appealed beyond ethnic and regional loyalties to a national constituency.
In 1955, Lumumba became regional leader of the Circle of Stanleyville and joined the Belgian Liberal Party. In 1956, he was arrested and charged with embezzling union funds and sentenced to two years imprisonment. Released after twelve months, Lumumba became sales director of a brewery in Leopoldville. To solidify his political base, in 1957 Lumumba helped found a broad-based organization that appealed beyond ethnic and regional loyalties—Movement National Congolais (MNC). The following year, he represented the MNC at the Pan-African Conference in Accra, Ghana.
His relentless attacks on Belgian rule soon fractured the MNC, resulting in a leadership split in July 1959. Undaunted, Lumumba insisted on the complete dismantling of Belgian rule. In October 1959, he was arrested for allegedly inciting anti-colonial riots and sentenced to six months. Shortly thereafter, the Belgian government summoned a conference in Brussels to discuss the future of the Congo. Confronted by MNC’s threat of boycott, the government released Lumumba. In Brussels, Lumumba boldly condemned Belgian rule and advocated immediate independence. Convinced of the imminence of Congolese freedom, Belgium set aside June 30, 1960, as Independence Day.
The Movement National Congolais won the majority in the general election held in May 1960, and Lumumba became prime minister of the Congo, with his political rival Joseph Kasavubu as president. Lumumba’s scathing denunciation of colonialism ruffled feathers not only in Belgium but also in the United States and Great Britain. Unfortunately, his tenure was brief and marred by crises. It began with the army revolt and secession in Katanga and Southern Kasai.
When the United Nations ignored his repeated appeals for intervention, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union. This move only strengthened Western opposition to his regime. Using the crisis as an excuse, Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba as Prime Minister. Though reinstated by the National Assembly, Lumumba was subsequently overthrown by Col. Joseph (later Sese Seko) Mobutu and placed under house arrest. He made the fateful attempt to escape to Stanleyville where his supporters had gained control. He was apprehended by secessionist rebels and assassinated on January 18, 1961.
Lumumba became a martyr and symbol of Congolese and African freedom. He is remembered today as one of only a handful of African leaders truly dedicated to national unity and genuine independence. In February 2002, responding to a Belgian Commission’s Report that implicated Belgium in Lumumba’s death, the Belgian government acknowledged “moral responsibility” and officially apologized. Lumumba remains an inspiration to African politicians. Several of the major political parties in the 2006 presidential election in the Congo invoked Lumumba’s legacy.
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/…/a-tribute-to-legend…
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on June 12, 2013):
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
A TRIBUTE TO LEGENDARY CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER AND MISSISSIPPI ACTIVIST MEDGAR EVERS (1925-1963) ON THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF HIS TRAGIC ASSASSINATION
Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent nation, the Republic of Congo, was born July 2, 1925, in Onalua in Kasai province of the Belgian Congo. With just primary education, Lumumba emerged to become one of Africa’s most vocal critics of colonialism. Early in life, he developed an interest in grassroots union activities and joined the Postal Union. As secretary-general of the union, Lumumba began publishing essays critical of Belgian colonial rule and advocating independence and a unified centralized Congo. His writings appealed beyond ethnic and regional loyalties to a national constituency.
In 1955, Lumumba became regional leader of the Circle of Stanleyville and joined the Belgian Liberal Party. In 1956, he was arrested and charged with embezzling union funds and sentenced to two years imprisonment. Released after twelve months, Lumumba became sales director of a brewery in Leopoldville. To solidify his political base, in 1957 Lumumba helped found a broad-based organization that appealed beyond ethnic and regional loyalties—Movement National Congolais (MNC). The following year, he represented the MNC at the Pan-African Conference in Accra, Ghana.
His relentless attacks on Belgian rule soon fractured the MNC, resulting in a leadership split in July 1959. Undaunted, Lumumba insisted on the complete dismantling of Belgian rule. In October 1959, he was arrested for allegedly inciting anti-colonial riots and sentenced to six months. Shortly thereafter, the Belgian government summoned a conference in Brussels to discuss the future of the Congo. Confronted by MNC’s threat of boycott, the government released Lumumba. In Brussels, Lumumba boldly condemned Belgian rule and advocated immediate independence. Convinced of the imminence of Congolese freedom, Belgium set aside June 30, 1960, as Independence Day.
The Movement National Congolais won the majority in the general election held in May 1960, and Lumumba became prime minister of the Congo, with his political rival Joseph Kasavubu as president. Lumumba’s scathing denunciation of colonialism ruffled feathers not only in Belgium but also in the United States and Great Britain. Unfortunately, his tenure was brief and marred by crises. It began with the army revolt and secession in Katanga and Southern Kasai.
When the United Nations ignored his repeated appeals for intervention, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union. This move only strengthened Western opposition to his regime. Using the crisis as an excuse, Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba as Prime Minister. Though reinstated by the National Assembly, Lumumba was subsequently overthrown by Col. Joseph (later Sese Seko) Mobutu and placed under house arrest. He made the fateful attempt to escape to Stanleyville where his supporters had gained control. He was apprehended by secessionist rebels and assassinated on January 18, 1961.
Lumumba became a martyr and symbol of Congolese and African freedom. He is remembered today as one of only a handful of African leaders truly dedicated to national unity and genuine independence. In February 2002, responding to a Belgian Commission’s Report that implicated Belgium in Lumumba’s death, the Belgian government acknowledged “moral responsibility” and officially apologized. Lumumba remains an inspiration to African politicians. Several of the major political parties in the 2006 presidential election in the Congo invoked Lumumba’s legacy.
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/…/a-tribute-to-legend…
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on June 12, 2013):
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
A TRIBUTE TO LEGENDARY CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER AND MISSISSIPPI ACTIVIST MEDGAR EVERS (1925-1963) ON THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF HIS TRAGIC ASSASSINATION
MEDGAR EVERS
(b. July 2, 1925--June 12,1963)
(b. July 2, 1925--June 12,1963)
All,
Medgar Evers (1925-1963) is one of the central and thus most important figures to emerge in the modern Civil rights movement that began directly after WWII in the United States. A brilliant visionary, shrewd political strategist, and deeply courageous man who had served his country with great honor, distinction, and bravery throughout Europe fighting fascism in the second world war, a 21 year old Medgar returned to the United States as did hundreds of thousands of his fellow African American veteran soldiers in 1945-46 absolutely determined to confront, challenge, and defeat the ruthlessly racist system of Jim Crow segregation that absolutely ruled his home state of Mississippi as well as the entire southern region of the country with an iron fist and the morally bankrupt sanction of the law--and tellingly in most of the rest of the country as well. Arriving back in his hometown of Jackson, it didn't take long for the ambitious and dynamic Evers to take full advantage of the higher educational opportunities provided by the GI bill that financially enabled an entire generation to attend college. Medgar immediately enrolled in and successfully completed a B.A. program in business administration at Alcorn State College, a well regarded historically black college where he met and soon married Myrlie Beasley in 1951. They had three children and raised a strong family together first in Mound Bayou, Missisippi, and later in Jackson, Miss. while Evers worked as a life insurance salesman for an independently successful black insurance company. Evers's boss T.R.M. Howard was a prominent civil rights activist in his own right and was local President of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL). Through its auspices Evers played a major role in organizing the RCNL's boycott of filling stations that denied black people use of the stations' restrooms. Over the next couple years from 1952-1954 Evers and his brother Charles were very active representatives and organizers of the RCNL's annual conferences which attracted thousands of local black residents.
In 1954 Evers became an even more high profile figure in the burgeoning--and very dangerous--Mississippi civil rights struggle when a highly qualified Evers in a NAACP sponsored legal test case applied to the then completely segregated University of Mississippi. Predictably his application was rejected but Evers's effort galvanized many other black activists throughout the country who were inspired by Evers's courageous example and emulated his activity in many similar anti-segregation cases in the United States. In late 1954 the NAACP officially named Evers its first field secretary in Mississippi. In this leadership capacity Medgar organized many boycotts and established many local chapters of the NAACP. Medgar was also at the epicenter of the heroic desegregation efforts of James Meredith to successfully enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962 after major violence by enraged white Mississippi students and many local racist thugs who rioted both on and off campus in protest of Meredith's admission were confronted and disarmed by federal troops that President John Kennedy sent to quell the racist violence.
Evers continued as he always had as a dedicated local civil rights leader and organizer in Mississippi who also worked as an investigator in various civil rights cases and incidents around the issues of voter registration (which like in most of the south was still denied to African American citizens), education, and labor rights. For these and other activities Evers was targeted by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and many other racist organizations throughout the region. For his important public investigations into the vile racist murders of 14 year old Emmitt Till in 1955 and his outspoken support for Clyde Kennard an innocent and brilliant black man (and also WWII veteran) who after trying vainly to transfer from the University of Chicago following his junior year after returned to his native Mississippi to aid a sick and infirm family relative and tried to enroll in a prominent and racially segregated all white Mississippi college. After leading an unsuccessful legal and political effort during the late '1950s to enroll in the school Kennard was framed and falsely imprisoned for burglary because he was seen as a local "troublemaker" for trying to enroll in the school. His case was later thrown out of court years later because of false arrest.
From this point in 1960 onward Medgar was a marked man by the Klan and others for his leadership and on May 28, 1963a Molotov cocktail bomb was thrown into the carport of his home and a week later on June 7, 1963 Evers was nearly run down by a car after he emerged from his Jackson, Mississippi NAACP office. Then just five days later only a few minutes past midnight on June 12, 1963 Medgar was assassinated by a well known KKK and white citizens council member and murderer by the name of Byron De La Beckworth. After being acquited in two all white male deadlocked jury trials in 1964 it would be another 30 years before De La Beckworth was finally convicted and sent to prison where he died at the age of 80 in 2001. It was the fiercely dedicated persistence and deep commitment by Medgar Evers's extraordinary wife and widow who was and is also a civil rights leader and organizer in her own right (and later chairperson during the late 1990s of the NAACP) who diligently fought for the successful reopening of his husband's case over a three decade period that led to finally bring Medgar's racist murderer to justice. At age 80 Mrs. Evers-Williams continues her now 50 year old fight to carry on and implement the tremendous legacy of Medgar's astonishing human and civil right activism on behalf of genuine justice, freedom, and equality today.
The following collection of original texts, videos, recordings, photographs and other pertinent archival information about Medgar Evers's inspiring life and work follows. We offer it all in humble recognition and deep appreciation for what Medgar fought for and achieved during his exceptional life and what now remains for all the rest of us to do both in his personal honor and on behalf of our own collective humanity. Long Live Medgar Evers!...
Kofi
http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/…/medgar-evers-and-the…
Medgar Evers and the Origin of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi
by Dernoral Davis
Mississippi Historical Society
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.
Mississippi Historical Society © 2000–2013. All rights reserved.
Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures)
by Minrose Gwin
University of Georgia Press, 2013
by Minrose Gwin
University of Georgia Press, 2013
http://www.democracynow.org/…/medgar_evers_murder_50_years_…
Medgar Evers’ Murder, 50 Years Later: Widow Myrlie Evers-Williams Remembers "A Man for All Time"
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, 2013
Fifty years ago today — June 12th, 1963 — 37-year-old civil rights organizer Medgar Evers was assassinated in the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. In the early 1960s, Evers served as the first NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, where he worked to end segregation, fought for voter rights, struggled to increase black voter registration, led business boycotts, and brought attention to murders and lynchings. We hear from Edgers’ widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, on how she wants her husband to be remembered "a man for all time, one who was totally dedicated to freedom for everyone — and was willing to pay a price."
TRANSCRIPT:
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show remembering the life of African-American civil rights activist Medgar Evers. In the early 1960s, Evers served as the first NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, where he worked to end segregation and fought for voter rights. It was 50 years ago today, June 12th, 1963, when the 37-year-old organizer was assassinated in his driveway.
AMY GOODMAN: I recently caught up with his widow, Myrlie Evers, at an NAACP dinner here in New York and asked her how people should remember her husband, for whom she sought justice for so many years.
MYRLIE EVERS-WILLIAMS: Well, what I would encourage young people to do is to go online and find out as much as they can about him, his contributions, to go, believe it or not, to their libraries and do research, and to say to them that he was a man of all time, one who was totally dedicated to freedom for everyone, and was willing to pay a price. And he knew what that price was going to be, but he was willing to pay it. As he said at one of his last speeches, "I love my wife, and I love my children, and I want to create a better life for them and all women and all children, regardless of race, creed or color." I think that kind of sizes him up. He knew what was going to happen. He didn’t want to die, but he was willing to take the risk.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about where he was coming from that night that he was killed in your driveway.
MYRLIE EVERS-WILLIAMS: Medgar was coming from a mass rally that we had two or three times a week, actually. And there had been a meeting after that session, and he was on his way home. I know how weary he was, because he got out of his car on the driver’s side, which was next to the road where the assassin was waiting, and we had determined quite some time ago that we should always get out on the other side of the car. And that night, he got out on the driver’s side with an armful of T-shirts that said "Jim Crow must go." And that bullet struck him in his back, ricocheted throughout his chest, and he lasted 30 minutes after that. And the doctors said they didn’t know how he did. But he was determined to live. The good thing, his body is not here, but he still lives. And I’m very happy, proud and pleased to have played a part in making that come true.
AMY GOODMAN: Myrlie Evers, 50 years ago today, June 12th, 1963, her husband, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37 years old, was assassinated in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi.
Medgar Evers, Mississippi Martyr
by Michael Vinson Williams
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
by Michael Vinson Williams
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
Myrlie Evers-Williams On Medgar's Assassination:
The widow of Medgar Evers, Mississippi civil rights activist and former chairperson of the NAACP, Myrlie Evers-Williams talks about both the events leading up to her husband's assassination and the tragic incident itself in interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibJFzOBtmag
The widow of Medgar Evers, Mississippi civil rights activist and former chairperson of the NAACP, Myrlie Evers-Williams talks about both the events leading up to her husband's assassination and the tragic incident itself in interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibJFzOBtmag
The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches
Edited by Myrlie Evers-Williams and Manning Marable
Basic Civitas Books 2006:
Edited by Myrlie Evers-Williams and Manning Marable
Basic Civitas Books 2006:
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America
by Joy-Ann Reid
Mariner Books, 2024
[Publication date: February 6, 2024]
“Medgar Evers deserves a place alongside Malcolm X and Dr. King in our historical memory. Evers, with Myrlie as his partner in activism and in life, was doing civil rights work in the single most hostile and dangerous environment in America.”—from Medgar and Myrlie
By MSNBC's Joy-Ann Reid, a triumphant work of biography that repositions slain Civil Rights pioneer Medgar Evers at the heart of America's struggle for freedom, and celebrates Myrlie Evers's extraordinary activism after her husband's assassination in the driveway of their Mississippi home.
"I love this book. The empathic, brilliant, and wise Joy Reid has brought us the poignant, fascinating inside story of Medgar and Myrlie Evers, transformational leaders who confronted pure evil and risked their lives to ensure that all American children might grow up in a United States that was more just. As Reid shows us, that painful task is now more urgent than ever.” — Michael Beschloss
Myrlie Louise Beasley met Medgar Evers on her first day of college. They fell in love at first sight, married just one year later, and Myrlie left school to focus on their growing family.
Medgar became the field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, charged with beating back the most intractable and violent resistance to black voting rights in the country. Myrlie served as Medgar’s secretary and confidant, working hand in hand with him as they struggled against public accommodations and school segregation, lynching, violence, and sheer despair within their state’s “black belt.” They fought to desegregate the intractable University of Mississippi, organized picket lines and boycotts, despite repeated terroristic threats, including the 1962 firebombing of their home, where they lived with their three young children.
On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers became the highest profile victim of Klan-related assassination of a black civil rights leader at that time; gunned down in the couple’s driveway in Jackson. In the wake of his tragic death, Myrlie carried on their civil rights legacy; writing a book about Medgar’s fight, trying to win a congressional seat, and becoming a leader of the NAACP in her own right.
In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie’s relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.
Labels:
African American history, Black Love, Civil Rights Movement, Joy-Ann Reid, Medgar Evers, Mississippi,Myrlie Evers
Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures)
by Minrose Gwin
University of Georgia Press, 2013
Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures)
by Minrose Gwin
University of Georgia Press, 2013
Medgar Evers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Medgar Evers in 1963
Medgar Wiley Evers (/ˈmɛdɡər/; July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963) was an American civil rights activist who was the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi. Evers, a United States Army veteran who served in World War II, 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, he was murdered at his home in Jackson, Mississippi, now the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, by Byron De La Beckwith,[1] a member of the White Citizens' Council in Jackson.
His murder 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 Evers, 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 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.[2] The family included Jesse's two children from a previous marriage.[3][4] The Evers family owned a small farm and James also worked at a sawmill.[5] Evers and his siblings walked 12 miles (19 kilometers) a day to attend racially segregated schools; Medgar eventually earned his high school diploma.[6]
Evers while he was serving in the U.S. Army
In 1943, Evers enlisted in the United States Army at the age of 17; he was prompted to do so by the racism he experienced at home and Charles' prior enlistment in the Army. 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. 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 discharged from the Army at the rank of technician fifth grade, having earned the Good Conduct Medal, European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, and World War II Victory Medal.[7] After returning to Decatur, Evers enrolled at the historically black Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1948, majoring in business administration.[8][9] He also competed on the debate, football, and track teams, sang in the choir, and was elected as junior class president.[10] Evers earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1952.[9] On December 24, 1951, Evers married classmate Myrlie Beasley.[11] They had three children together: Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise, and James Van Dyke.[12][13]
Activism
The couple 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.[14]
Becoming active in the civil rights movement, he served as president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), which began to organize actions to end segregation;[15] Evers helped organize the RCNL's boycott of those gasoline stations that denied blacks the use of the stations' restrooms. He 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.[16]
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.[17] Evers submitted his application as part of a test case by the NAACP.[18]
On November 24, 1954,[19] Evers was named as the NAACP's first field secretary for Mississippi.[5] 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.[18]
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.[20] 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.[8]
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 black leader. On May 28, 1963, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home.[21] Ten days later, Evers was nearly run over by a car after he came out of the NAACP office in Jackson, Mississippi.[14]
Death
In 1943, Evers enlisted in the United States Army at the age of 17; he was prompted to do so by the racism he experienced at home and Charles' prior enlistment in the Army. 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. 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 discharged from the Army at the rank of technician fifth grade, having earned the Good Conduct Medal, European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, and World War II Victory Medal.[7] After returning to Decatur, Evers enrolled at the historically black Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1948, majoring in business administration.[8][9] He also competed on the debate, football, and track teams, sang in the choir, and was elected as junior class president.[10] Evers earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1952.[9] On December 24, 1951, Evers married classmate Myrlie Beasley.[11] They had three children together: Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise, and James Van Dyke.[12][13]
Activism
The couple 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.[14]
Becoming active in the civil rights movement, he served as president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), which began to organize actions to end segregation;[15] Evers helped organize the RCNL's boycott of those gasoline stations that denied blacks the use of the stations' restrooms. He 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.[16]
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.[17] Evers submitted his application as part of a test case by the NAACP.[18]
On November 24, 1954,[19] Evers was named as the NAACP's first field secretary for Mississippi.[5] 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.[18]
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.[20] 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.[8]
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 black leader. On May 28, 1963, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home.[21] Ten days later, Evers was nearly run over by a car after he came out of the NAACP office in Jackson, Mississippi.[14]
Death
The rifle used by De La Beckwith to assassinate Evers
The Evers house at 2332 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive, now the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, where Medgar Evers was fatally shot after getting out of his car.[22]
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.[23] 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.[24]
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 30 feet (10 meters) before collapsing outside his front door. His wife, Myrlie, was the first to find him.[23]
Evers was taken to the local hospital in Jackson, where he was initially refused entry because of his race. Evers' family explained who he was, and he was admitted; Evers died in the hospital 50 minutes later, three weeks before his 38th birthday.[25] Evers was the first black man to be admitted to an all-white hospital in Mississippi.[23] 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.[15][26][27]
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.[28] 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.[24]
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.[29] District Attorney and future governor Bill Waller prosecuted De La Beckwith.[30] All-white juries in February and April 1964[31] deadlocked on De La Beckwith's guilt and failed to reach a verdict. At the time, most black people were still disenfranchised by Mississippi's constitution and voter registration practices; this 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.[23] 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.[32] 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.[33]
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.[34] He died at age 80 in prison on January 21, 2001.[35][36]
Legacy
Evers' grave at Arlington National Cemetery
Evers was memorialized by leading Mississippi and national authors James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, and Anne Moody.[37] In 1963, Evers was posthumously awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP.[38] 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.[39]
In 1969, a community pool in the Central District neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, was named after Evers, honoring his life.[40]
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.[41]
Statue of Evers at the Medgar Evers Boulevard Library in Jackson, Mississippi
Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers, became a noted activist in her own right, eventually serving as national chairperson of the NAACP.[42] Myrlie also founded the Medgar Evers Institute in 1998, with the initial goal of preserving and advancing the legacy of her husband's life's work. Anticipating the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Medgar Evers and recognizing the international leadership role of Myrlie Evers, the Institute's board of directors changed the organization's name to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute.
Evers' brother, Charles, returned to Jackson in July 1963, and served briefly with the NAACP in his brother's place. Charles remained involved in Mississippi civil rights activities for many years, and in 1969, was the first African-American mayor elected in the state.[43] He died on July 22, 2020, at age 97, in nearby Brandon.[44]
On the 40th anniversary of Evers' assassination, hundreds of civil rights veterans, government officials, and students from across the country gathered around his gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery to celebrate his life and legacy. Barry Bradford and three students—Sharmistha Dev, Jajah Wu, and Debra Siegel, formerly of Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois—planned and hosted the commemoration in his honor.[45] Evers was the subject of the students' research project.[46]
In October 2009, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former Mississippi governor, announced that USNS Medgar Evers (T-AKE-13), a Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship, would be named in the activist's honor.[47] The ship was christened by Myrlie Evers-Williams on November 12, 2011.[48]
In June 2013, a statue of Evers was erected at his alma mater, Alcorn State University, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Evers' death.[49] Alumni and guests from around the world gathered to recognize his contributions to American society.
Evers was also honored in a tribute at Arlington National Cemetery on the 50th anniversary of his death.[50] Former President Bill Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, Senator Roger Wicker, and NAACP President Benjamin Jealous all spoke commemorating Evers.[51][52] Evers's widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, spoke of his contributions to the advancement of civil rights:[53]
Medgar was a man who never wanted adoration, who never wanted to be in the limelight. He was a man who saw a job that needed to be done and he answered the call and the fight for freedom, dignity and justice not just for his people but all people.
Evers was identified as a Freedom hero by The My Hero Project.[6]
In 2017, the Medgar and Myrlie Evers House was named as a National Historic Landmark.[54] Two years later, the site was designated a National Monument.
The Route 3 Bridge over the Hackensack River is dedicated to Evers.
In 2024, Evers was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden.[55] The following year, as part of a series of Trump administration anti-DEI deletions by the U.S. Department of Defense, a profile of Evers was deleted from the Arlington National Cemetery website.[56]
In popular culture
Music
Musician Bob Dylan wrote his song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about the assassination on July 2, 1963, on what would have been Evers' 38th birthday. Nina Simone wrote and sang "Mississippi Goddam" about the Evers case. Phil Ochs referred to Evers in the song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" and wrote the songs "Another Country" and "Too Many Martyrs" (also titled "The Ballad of Medgar Evers") in response to the killing. Malvina Reynolds referenced Evers' murder in her song, "It Isn't Nice". Matthew Jones and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers recorded a version of the latter song.[57] Wadada Leo Smith's album Ten Freedom Summers contains a track called "Medgar Evers: A Love-Voice of a Thousand Years' Journey for Liberty and Justice".[58] Jackson C. Frank's self-titled debut album, released in 1965, also includes a reference to Medgar Evers in the song "Don't Look Back".[59]
Essays and books
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 July 1963.[60]
Attorney Bobby DeLaughter wrote a first-person narrative article entitled "Mississippi Justice" published in Reader's Digest about his experiences as state prosecutor in the murder trial. He added to this account in a book, Never Too Late: A Prosecutor's Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case (2001).[61]
In Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement,[62] Minrose Gwin, then the Kenan Eminent Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and coeditor of The Literature of the American South and the Southern Literary Journal, looked at the body of artistic work inspired by Evers' life and death—fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and songs from James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, Lucille Clifton, Bob Dylan, and Willie Morris, among others.
Film
Evers was portrayed by Howard Rollins in the 1983 television film For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story.[63]
The 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi, directed by Rob Reiner, explores the 1994 trial of De La Beckwith in which prosecutor DeLaughter of the Hinds County District Attorney's office secured a conviction in state court. Beckwith and DeLaughter were played by James Woods and Alec Baldwin, respectively, with Whoopi Goldberg as Myrlie Evers. Medgar was portrayed by James Pickens Jr. The film was based on a book of the same name.[64] Preservationist Catherine Fleming Bruce, whose book explored the restoration of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, opened with a quote from Reiner, who included the site as a location during filming of Ghosts of Mississippi.[65]
In the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), Evers is one of three Black activists (the other two are Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X) who are the focus of reminiscences by author James Baldwin, who recounts the circumstances of and his reaction to Evers' assassination.[66]
In the 2011 film The Help, a clip of Evers speaking for civil rights is shown on TV, quickly followed by news of his assassination, and a glimpse of an article by his widow published in Life magazine.[67]
The 2020 documentary film The Evers features interviews with his surviving family members.[68]
The 2022 film Till depicts Evers (played by Tosin Cole) assisting Mamie Till-Bradley (Danielle Deadwyler) seek justice for the murder of her son, Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall).
Television
A 2021 episode of Extra History from Extra Credits talks about Evers, his activism, and his assassination.[69]
See also
List of civil rights leaders
Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers, became a noted activist in her own right, eventually serving as national chairperson of the NAACP.[42] Myrlie also founded the Medgar Evers Institute in 1998, with the initial goal of preserving and advancing the legacy of her husband's life's work. Anticipating the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Medgar Evers and recognizing the international leadership role of Myrlie Evers, the Institute's board of directors changed the organization's name to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute.
Evers' brother, Charles, returned to Jackson in July 1963, and served briefly with the NAACP in his brother's place. Charles remained involved in Mississippi civil rights activities for many years, and in 1969, was the first African-American mayor elected in the state.[43] He died on July 22, 2020, at age 97, in nearby Brandon.[44]
On the 40th anniversary of Evers' assassination, hundreds of civil rights veterans, government officials, and students from across the country gathered around his gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery to celebrate his life and legacy. Barry Bradford and three students—Sharmistha Dev, Jajah Wu, and Debra Siegel, formerly of Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois—planned and hosted the commemoration in his honor.[45] Evers was the subject of the students' research project.[46]
In October 2009, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former Mississippi governor, announced that USNS Medgar Evers (T-AKE-13), a Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship, would be named in the activist's honor.[47] The ship was christened by Myrlie Evers-Williams on November 12, 2011.[48]
In June 2013, a statue of Evers was erected at his alma mater, Alcorn State University, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Evers' death.[49] Alumni and guests from around the world gathered to recognize his contributions to American society.
Evers was also honored in a tribute at Arlington National Cemetery on the 50th anniversary of his death.[50] Former President Bill Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, Senator Roger Wicker, and NAACP President Benjamin Jealous all spoke commemorating Evers.[51][52] Evers's widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, spoke of his contributions to the advancement of civil rights:[53]
Medgar was a man who never wanted adoration, who never wanted to be in the limelight. He was a man who saw a job that needed to be done and he answered the call and the fight for freedom, dignity and justice not just for his people but all people.
Evers was identified as a Freedom hero by The My Hero Project.[6]
In 2017, the Medgar and Myrlie Evers House was named as a National Historic Landmark.[54] Two years later, the site was designated a National Monument.
The Route 3 Bridge over the Hackensack River is dedicated to Evers.
In 2024, Evers was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden.[55] The following year, as part of a series of Trump administration anti-DEI deletions by the U.S. Department of Defense, a profile of Evers was deleted from the Arlington National Cemetery website.[56]
In popular culture
Music
Musician Bob Dylan wrote his song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about the assassination on July 2, 1963, on what would have been Evers' 38th birthday. Nina Simone wrote and sang "Mississippi Goddam" about the Evers case. Phil Ochs referred to Evers in the song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" and wrote the songs "Another Country" and "Too Many Martyrs" (also titled "The Ballad of Medgar Evers") in response to the killing. Malvina Reynolds referenced Evers' murder in her song, "It Isn't Nice". Matthew Jones and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers recorded a version of the latter song.[57] Wadada Leo Smith's album Ten Freedom Summers contains a track called "Medgar Evers: A Love-Voice of a Thousand Years' Journey for Liberty and Justice".[58] Jackson C. Frank's self-titled debut album, released in 1965, also includes a reference to Medgar Evers in the song "Don't Look Back".[59]
Essays and books
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 July 1963.[60]
Attorney Bobby DeLaughter wrote a first-person narrative article entitled "Mississippi Justice" published in Reader's Digest about his experiences as state prosecutor in the murder trial. He added to this account in a book, Never Too Late: A Prosecutor's Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case (2001).[61]
In Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement,[62] Minrose Gwin, then the Kenan Eminent Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and coeditor of The Literature of the American South and the Southern Literary Journal, looked at the body of artistic work inspired by Evers' life and death—fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and songs from James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, Lucille Clifton, Bob Dylan, and Willie Morris, among others.
Film
Evers was portrayed by Howard Rollins in the 1983 television film For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story.[63]
The 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi, directed by Rob Reiner, explores the 1994 trial of De La Beckwith in which prosecutor DeLaughter of the Hinds County District Attorney's office secured a conviction in state court. Beckwith and DeLaughter were played by James Woods and Alec Baldwin, respectively, with Whoopi Goldberg as Myrlie Evers. Medgar was portrayed by James Pickens Jr. The film was based on a book of the same name.[64] Preservationist Catherine Fleming Bruce, whose book explored the restoration of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, opened with a quote from Reiner, who included the site as a location during filming of Ghosts of Mississippi.[65]
In the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), Evers is one of three Black activists (the other two are Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X) who are the focus of reminiscences by author James Baldwin, who recounts the circumstances of and his reaction to Evers' assassination.[66]
In the 2011 film The Help, a clip of Evers speaking for civil rights is shown on TV, quickly followed by news of his assassination, and a glimpse of an article by his widow published in Life magazine.[67]
The 2020 documentary film The Evers features interviews with his surviving family members.[68]
The 2022 film Till depicts Evers (played by Tosin Cole) assisting Mamie Till-Bradley (Danielle Deadwyler) seek justice for the murder of her son, Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall).
Television
A 2021 episode of Extra History from Extra Credits talks about Evers, his activism, and his assassination.[69]
See also
List of civil rights leaders
https://apnews.com/article/myrlie-evers-williams-civil-rights-mississippi-c7edb1a3a00657a5e19764fcbb176b53
U.S. News
60 years after Medgar Evers’ murder, his widow continues a civil rights legacy
by Emily Wagster Pettus
June 11, 2023
Associated Press News
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — At 90, Myrlie Evers-Williams still speaks in a clear, strong voice as she says she terribly misses her first love, civil rights icon Medgar Evers, and as she reflects on his work — and her own — to push the U.S. toward a promise of equality and justice for all.
It’s been 60 years since a white supremacist hid in the darkness of night and assassinated Evers outside the family’s Jackson home, shooting the Mississippi NAACP leader hours after then-President John F. Kennedy gave a televised speech advocating civil rights legislation.
Evers-Williams and the couple’s three young children were in the house. After hearing the crack of a rifle, she rushed to her mortally wounded husband, who lay bleeding in the carport.
“Medgar is so very much a part of me, and he’s here,” Evers-Williams told about 200 people who gathered on a hot and humid morning last week for the ceremonial opening of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, a unit of the National Park Service.
The monument is in a subdivision where people still raise families in modest two- and three-bedroom homes. A large bouquet of red roses and daisies stood in the carport Monday at the Evers home, which is open for tours by appointment. No appointment is needed at the new visitors’ space nearby, which has a herb and vegetable garden.
Evers was a World War II veteran who fought in Europe and then faced the hostile realities of a deeply segregated society after returning home to Mississippi. As the first field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP beginning in 1954, he led voter registration drives and boycotts to push for racial equality. He also investigated lynchings, beatings and other violence that Black residents suffered at the hands of white segregationists. His wife worked alongside him as his secretary.
“When my husband was shot at the doorstep of our home — June 12, 1963 — I thought my life was over,” Evers-Williams said. “And I realized it was just beginning because there were three children — Medgar’s children, my children — who were looking up to me.”
Mississippi’s white power structure in the early 1960s prevented most Black people from registering to vote, and most public schools remained segregated until 1970.
Evers-Williams said her home state needed to overcome division and “show the rest of this nation that Mississippi was not at the bottom of the heap, but that we could rise to be what we should be.” She and the children moved to California in 1964, and she raised them there.
In 1976, she married Walter Williams, a longshoreman and union activist.
“God was very good and sent another man in my life — a man who loved and appreciated Medgar,” she said.
White supremacist Byron De La Beckwith stood trial twice in the 1960s in the killing of Evers, but all-white juries deadlocked. Prosecutors reopened the case in the early 1990s after new witnesses came forward. In 1994, an integrated jury convicted Beckwith of murder and sentenced him to life in prison, where he died in 2001.
Evers-Williams said Evers never wanted to give up on Mississippi, even when he knew he was in danger. He “gave his life so it could be better for all of us,” she said.
During last week’s ceremony at the Evers home, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said the family’s work is honorable.
“I want you to recognize the humanity here,” Lumumba told the crowd. “The humanity of a family that has given it all. The humanity of a family that did not allow a coward’s bullet to stop them.”
Evers-Williams has been a civil rights activist in her own right. She served as national chairperson of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998, winning the position within days of when Williams died of cancer. In 2013, she delivered the invocation during then-President Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
The airport and the main post office in Jackson have both been named for Evers for many years, and a statue of him stands at a busy intersection.
About 38% of Mississippi residents are Black — the largest percentage of any U.S. state. In the six decades since Evers was murdered and the federal government enacted voting rights legislation, Black voter registration in Mississippi has increased dramatically. Black people have won hundreds of local offices and dozens of Mississippi legislative seats but no statewide offices. Among the state’s four U.S. House members, one is Black.
In the past week, several events have been held in and around Jackson to commemorate the Evers family legacy. Young people attended seminars about human rights activism. A Voices of Courage and Justice gala honored people committed to social change.
At a “More Than a Widow” brunch for Evers-Williams, a gospel choir sang: “What do you do when you’ve done all you can? ... God has a purpose. Yes, God has a plan.”
Evers-Williams’ daughter Reena Evers-Everette accompanied her to the events. She said it’s important for people to learn about the Civil Rights Movement, even as politicians try to restrict how history is taught.
“We are trying to ... make sure our history is never erased,” Evers-Everette said.
She said the commemorative events are likely to be her mother’s final big public appearances. After moving from California to Oregon and back to Mississippi, Evers-Williams is living in California again.
Evers-Williams, who spoke at the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in 2017, said last week that she is proud of her native state — something she could not always say.
“I haven’t said it’s perfect or even near perfect,” she said. “But it’s changed so much since my birth, and I hope it continues to do so in a very positive way.”
She chuckled as she mentioned being 90, and then said she remains committed to trying to eliminate racism and prejudice: “I hope I will be able to do so until I take my last breath.”
It’s been 60 years since a white supremacist hid in the darkness of night and assassinated Evers outside the family’s Jackson home, shooting the Mississippi NAACP leader hours after then-President John F. Kennedy gave a televised speech advocating civil rights legislation.
Evers-Williams and the couple’s three young children were in the house. After hearing the crack of a rifle, she rushed to her mortally wounded husband, who lay bleeding in the carport.
“Medgar is so very much a part of me, and he’s here,” Evers-Williams told about 200 people who gathered on a hot and humid morning last week for the ceremonial opening of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, a unit of the National Park Service.
The monument is in a subdivision where people still raise families in modest two- and three-bedroom homes. A large bouquet of red roses and daisies stood in the carport Monday at the Evers home, which is open for tours by appointment. No appointment is needed at the new visitors’ space nearby, which has a herb and vegetable garden.
Evers was a World War II veteran who fought in Europe and then faced the hostile realities of a deeply segregated society after returning home to Mississippi. As the first field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP beginning in 1954, he led voter registration drives and boycotts to push for racial equality. He also investigated lynchings, beatings and other violence that Black residents suffered at the hands of white segregationists. His wife worked alongside him as his secretary.
“When my husband was shot at the doorstep of our home — June 12, 1963 — I thought my life was over,” Evers-Williams said. “And I realized it was just beginning because there were three children — Medgar’s children, my children — who were looking up to me.”
Mississippi’s white power structure in the early 1960s prevented most Black people from registering to vote, and most public schools remained segregated until 1970.
Evers-Williams said her home state needed to overcome division and “show the rest of this nation that Mississippi was not at the bottom of the heap, but that we could rise to be what we should be.” She and the children moved to California in 1964, and she raised them there.
In 1976, she married Walter Williams, a longshoreman and union activist.
“God was very good and sent another man in my life — a man who loved and appreciated Medgar,” she said.
White supremacist Byron De La Beckwith stood trial twice in the 1960s in the killing of Evers, but all-white juries deadlocked. Prosecutors reopened the case in the early 1990s after new witnesses came forward. In 1994, an integrated jury convicted Beckwith of murder and sentenced him to life in prison, where he died in 2001.
Evers-Williams said Evers never wanted to give up on Mississippi, even when he knew he was in danger. He “gave his life so it could be better for all of us,” she said.
During last week’s ceremony at the Evers home, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said the family’s work is honorable.
“I want you to recognize the humanity here,” Lumumba told the crowd. “The humanity of a family that has given it all. The humanity of a family that did not allow a coward’s bullet to stop them.”
Evers-Williams has been a civil rights activist in her own right. She served as national chairperson of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998, winning the position within days of when Williams died of cancer. In 2013, she delivered the invocation during then-President Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
The airport and the main post office in Jackson have both been named for Evers for many years, and a statue of him stands at a busy intersection.
About 38% of Mississippi residents are Black — the largest percentage of any U.S. state. In the six decades since Evers was murdered and the federal government enacted voting rights legislation, Black voter registration in Mississippi has increased dramatically. Black people have won hundreds of local offices and dozens of Mississippi legislative seats but no statewide offices. Among the state’s four U.S. House members, one is Black.
In the past week, several events have been held in and around Jackson to commemorate the Evers family legacy. Young people attended seminars about human rights activism. A Voices of Courage and Justice gala honored people committed to social change.
At a “More Than a Widow” brunch for Evers-Williams, a gospel choir sang: “What do you do when you’ve done all you can? ... God has a purpose. Yes, God has a plan.”
Evers-Williams’ daughter Reena Evers-Everette accompanied her to the events. She said it’s important for people to learn about the Civil Rights Movement, even as politicians try to restrict how history is taught.
“We are trying to ... make sure our history is never erased,” Evers-Everette said.
She said the commemorative events are likely to be her mother’s final big public appearances. After moving from California to Oregon and back to Mississippi, Evers-Williams is living in California again.
Evers-Williams, who spoke at the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in 2017, said last week that she is proud of her native state — something she could not always say.
“I haven’t said it’s perfect or even near perfect,” she said. “But it’s changed so much since my birth, and I hope it continues to do so in a very positive way.”
She chuckled as she mentioned being 90, and then said she remains committed to trying to eliminate racism and prejudice: “I hope I will be able to do so until I take my last breath.”
Friday, July 4, 2025
Medgar Evers (1925-1963): His Life and Work On The Centennial of His Birth: July 2, 1925
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/11/civil-rights-anniversary-11-june-1963?CMP=twt_gu
An epochal moment for civil rights in a single day: 11 June 1963
Fifty years ago, three seminal events – a standoff with Alabama's governor, a presidential speech and the murder of Medgar Evers – left an indelible mark on American history, writes Gary Younge
by Gary Younge
June 11, 2013
The Guardian (UK)
PHOTO: Alabama's segregationist Governor George Wallace blocking the entrance to the University of Alabama to prevent two black students enrolling at the University of Alabama, 11 June 1963. Photograph: AP
In the early morning of 11 June 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy examined maps of the University of Alabama's Tuscaloosa campus as his three young children played by his feet. Within 18 hours, his brother, the president, had given an impromptu national address on civil rights, the Alabama governor had confronted the federal authorities on national television and blinked, and one of the movement's most prominent leaders had been gunned down outside his home.
In the early morning of 11 June 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy examined maps of the University of Alabama's Tuscaloosa campus as his three young children played by his feet. Within 18 hours, his brother, the president, had given an impromptu national address on civil rights, the Alabama governor had confronted the federal authorities on national television and blinked, and one of the movement's most prominent leaders had been gunned down outside his home.
MEDGAR EVERS (1925-1963)
In retrospect, the events that summer Tuesday – some planned, most spontaneous, and all more hostage to eventualities than planning – would become emblematic of the trajectory of the nation's racial and political dynamics for the next 50 years.
Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood after successfully enrolling at the University of Alabama. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
Bobby Kennedy was trying to work out the federal government's options for getting two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, registered for classes on campus at the university. A few hours later, in a choreographed piece of brinkmanship, Alabama's segregationist governor, George Wallace, stood at the entrance to the Foster auditorium, flanked by state troopers, to refuse them entry. The students went to their dorms while Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach ordered Wallace to allow them in. Wallace refused and delivered a speech on states' rights.
President Kennedy then federalised the Alabama national guard and ordered Wallace's removal. "Sir, it is my sad duty to ask you to step aside under the orders of the President of the United States," said General Henry Graham. Wallace made another quick announcement, stepped aside and Malone and Hood registered.
"They knew he would step aside," Cully Clark, author of The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama, told NPR. "I think the fundamental question was how."
"It had been little more than a ceremony of futility," wrote journalist and Wallace biographer Marshall Frady:
"And, as a historical moment, a rather pedestrian production. But no other southern governor had managed to strike even that dramatic a pose of defiance and it has never been required of southern popular heroes that they be successful. Indeed, southerners tend to love their heroes more for their losses."
The previous day the president's inner circle was divided as to whether he should deliver a televised national address on civil rights. They decided to wait and see how things went in Alabama. After the incident had passed with more theatre than chaos, they unanimously advised the speech was now unnecessary.
Bobby Kennedy was trying to work out the federal government's options for getting two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, registered for classes on campus at the university. A few hours later, in a choreographed piece of brinkmanship, Alabama's segregationist governor, George Wallace, stood at the entrance to the Foster auditorium, flanked by state troopers, to refuse them entry. The students went to their dorms while Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach ordered Wallace to allow them in. Wallace refused and delivered a speech on states' rights.
President Kennedy then federalised the Alabama national guard and ordered Wallace's removal. "Sir, it is my sad duty to ask you to step aside under the orders of the President of the United States," said General Henry Graham. Wallace made another quick announcement, stepped aside and Malone and Hood registered.
"They knew he would step aside," Cully Clark, author of The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama, told NPR. "I think the fundamental question was how."
"It had been little more than a ceremony of futility," wrote journalist and Wallace biographer Marshall Frady:
"And, as a historical moment, a rather pedestrian production. But no other southern governor had managed to strike even that dramatic a pose of defiance and it has never been required of southern popular heroes that they be successful. Indeed, southerners tend to love their heroes more for their losses."
The previous day the president's inner circle was divided as to whether he should deliver a televised national address on civil rights. They decided to wait and see how things went in Alabama. After the incident had passed with more theatre than chaos, they unanimously advised the speech was now unnecessary.
President John F Kennedy addresses the nation on 11 June 1963: every American should 'examine his conscience' on civil rights, he said. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
Kennedy decided to ignore them, calling executives at the three television networks himself to request airtime. In The Bystander, Nick Bryant describes how, with only six hours to write the speech, Kennedy's team struggled to pull anything coherent together. Minutes before the cameras rolled, all they had was a bundle of typed pages interspersed with illegible scribbles. His secretary had no time to type up a final version and his speechwriters had not come up with a conclusion. With the cameras on, Kennedy started reading from the text and, for the last four minutes, improvised with lines he'd used before from the campaign trail and elsewhere.
"If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?"
Kennedy went on to reflect on the issues of black unemployment and the slow pace of integration, described how the south was embarrassing the nation in front of its cold war adversaries and announced plans to introduce civil rights legislation. In Bryant's assessment:
"The speech was the most courageous of Kennedy's presidency. After two years of equivocation on the subject of civil rights, Kennedy had finally sought to mobilize that vast body of Americans who had long considered segregation immoral, and who were certainly unprepared to countenance the most extreme forms of discrimination."
A thousand miles away, in Jackson, Mississippi, Myrlie Evers – who, in 2013, would deliver the invocation at President Barack Obama's second inauguration – had watched the presidential address in bed with her three children. Her husband, Medgar, the field secretary of the state's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organisation in the country), arrived home just after midnight from a meeting with activists in a local church, carrying white T-shirts announcing "Jim Crow Must Go”.
Kennedy decided to ignore them, calling executives at the three television networks himself to request airtime. In The Bystander, Nick Bryant describes how, with only six hours to write the speech, Kennedy's team struggled to pull anything coherent together. Minutes before the cameras rolled, all they had was a bundle of typed pages interspersed with illegible scribbles. His secretary had no time to type up a final version and his speechwriters had not come up with a conclusion. With the cameras on, Kennedy started reading from the text and, for the last four minutes, improvised with lines he'd used before from the campaign trail and elsewhere.
"If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?"
Kennedy went on to reflect on the issues of black unemployment and the slow pace of integration, described how the south was embarrassing the nation in front of its cold war adversaries and announced plans to introduce civil rights legislation. In Bryant's assessment:
"The speech was the most courageous of Kennedy's presidency. After two years of equivocation on the subject of civil rights, Kennedy had finally sought to mobilize that vast body of Americans who had long considered segregation immoral, and who were certainly unprepared to countenance the most extreme forms of discrimination."
A thousand miles away, in Jackson, Mississippi, Myrlie Evers – who, in 2013, would deliver the invocation at President Barack Obama's second inauguration – had watched the presidential address in bed with her three children. Her husband, Medgar, the field secretary of the state's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organisation in the country), arrived home just after midnight from a meeting with activists in a local church, carrying white T-shirts announcing "Jim Crow Must Go”.
White supremacist Byron dela Beckwith, after his first trial; civil rights leader Medgar Evers, whom Beckwith was later convicted of killing; (both 1963). Photograph: Reuters
Lurking in the honeysuckle bushes across the road with a 30.06 bolt-action Winchester hunting rifle was Byron DeLa Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and Klan member from nearby Greenwood. The sound of Evers slamming the car door was followed rapidly by a burst of gunfire. Myrlie ran downstairs while the children assumed the position they had learned to adopt if their house ever came under attack. By the time she reached the front door, Medgar's body was slumped in front of her. A bullet had gone through his back and exited through his chest. A few hours later, he was pronounced dead.
On the day of Medgar Evers' funeral, around 1,000 black youths marched through town, joined later by their elders. When police ordered them to disperse, scuffles broke out. The crowd chanted:
"We want the killer."
Meeting their demand should not have been difficult. The rifle that was fired was traced to Beckwith, whose fingerprints were on its telescopic sight. Some witnesses reported seeing a man who fit his description in the area that night, as well as a car that looked like his white Plymouth Valiant. If that wasn't enough, he'd openly bragged to fellow Klansmen about carrying out the shooting. Though it took several weeks, he was eventually arrested on the strength of this overwhelming evidence, and charged with the murder.
It was then that matters took an all-too predictable turn. Not once, but twice, in the course of 1964, all-white juries twice failed to reach a verdict. Beckwith was arrested again in 1990, and finally found guilty in 1994. He wore a confederate flag pin throughout the hearings. He died in prison in 2001.
Between them, these three events, which all took place within a day, would signal the end of a period of gruesome certainty in America's racial politics – and the beginning of an era of greater complexity. What soon became evident was threefold: the economic stratification within black America, the political realignment of southern politics and the evolution of the struggle of equality from the streets to the legislature.
Wallace's otiose performance and Beckwith's murderous assault typified the segregationists' endgame: a series of dramatic, often violent, acts perpetrated by the local state or its ideological surrogates, with no strategic value beyond symbolizing resistance and inciting a response. They were not intended to stop integration, but to protest its inevitability. And while those protests were futile, they nonetheless retained the ability to provoke, as the disturbances following Evers' funeral testified.
The years to come were sufficiently volatile that even ostensibly minor events, such as a traffic stop in Watts, Los Angeles, or the raid of a late-night drinking den in Detroit, could spark major unrest. The violence and chaos that ensued polarised communities – not on issues of ideology or strategy, but on the basis of race, in a manner that weakened the already dim prospects for solidarity across the colour line.
PHOTO: Myrlie Evers-Williams, wife of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Photograph: Rogelio V Solis/AP
As Myrlie Evers, who went on to dedicate her life to nonviolent interracial activism, recalled:
"When Medgar was felled by that shot, and I rushed out and saw him lying there and people from the neighbourhood began to gather, there were also some whose colour happened to be white. I don't think I have ever hated as much in my life as I did at that particular moment anyone who had white skin."
In Malone and Hood's registration at the University of Alabama that day, we saw the doors to higher education and, through them, career advancement, reluctantly being opened for the small section of black America that was in a position, at that time, to reap the fruits of integration. There had been a middle class in black America for a long time, but as long as segregation existed, the material benefits deriving from that status were significantly circumscribed, particularly in the south.
Race dominated almost everything. A black doctor or dentist could not live outside particular neighbourhoods, nor eat in certain establishments, nor be served in certain stores. Whatever class differences existed within the black community, and there were many, they were inevitably subsumed under the broader struggle for equality.
With integration, however, came the fracturing of black communities, as those equipped to take advantage of the new opportunities forged ahead, leaving the rest to struggle with the legacy of the past 300 years. Wealthier people could move to the suburbs, their kids could integrate in white schools, and from there go on to top universities.
But this success brought its own challenges. The doors of opportunity were only opened to a few – but enough for some to ask, in the absence of legal barriers, that if some could make it, then why not others. Black Americans no longer fell foul of the law of the land, yet still remained on the wrong side of the law of probabilities: more likely to be arrested, convicted and imprisoned; less likely to be employed, promoted and educated.
A national guardsman amid the rubble following the Watts riots, Los Angeles, California, August 1965. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
For most black Americans, the end of segregation did not feel like the liberation that had been promised. After the Watts riots, Martin Luther King told Bayard Rustin, who organised the March on Washington:
"You know Bayard, I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I've got to do something … to help them get the money to buy them."
With Kennedy's appeal for legislation, we saw the shift in focus moving from the streets of Birmingham to Washington's corridors of power. This was progress. Changing the law had been the point of the protests. Within a year, Lyndon B Johnson, who that November assumed the presidency in the wake of Kennedy's assassination, signed the Civil Rights Act; within two years, he'd signed the Voting Rights Act.
But the shift from protesters' demands to congressional bills limited possibilities for radical transformation. Clear moral demands were replaced by horsetrading. Marchers cannot be stopped by a filibuster; legislation can. Rustin's argument ran as follows:
"We were moving from a period of protest to one of political responsibility. That is, instead of marching on the courthouse, or the restaurant or the theatre, we now had to march the ballot box. In protest, there must never be any compromise. In politics, there is always compromise."
The trouble was the nature of the deal-making was itself in flux. By aligning himself with civil rights, Kennedy would end the Democratic party's dominance of the south. The next day, southern Democrats would respond by defeating a routine funding bill. "[Civil rights] is overwhelming the whole, the whole program," House majority leader Carl Albert told him. "I couldn't do a damn thing with them."
President Lyndon Johnson with Martin Luther King at the signing of the voting rights act, 1965. Photograph: Hulton Archive
Veteran journalist Bill Moyers wrote that when Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act a year later, "he was euphoric'":
"But late that very night, I found him in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the bulldog edition of the Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was troubling him. 'I think we just delivered the south to the Republican party for a long time to come,' he said."
Johnson's fears were well-founded. The Republicans, sensing an opportunity, decided to pitch a clear appeal to southern segregationists in particular, and suburban whites in general, on the grounds of race. This would create a thoroughgoing transformation in the nation's politics that is only today, in the 21st century, beginning to unravel.
"We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said shortly before the last presidential election.
That day, 11 June 1963, epitomised the beginning of the end for business as usual.
• Gary Younge's The Speech: the Story Behind Martin Luther King's Dream will be published by Haymarket Books in August. Follow him on Twitter @garyyounge
Lurking in the honeysuckle bushes across the road with a 30.06 bolt-action Winchester hunting rifle was Byron DeLa Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and Klan member from nearby Greenwood. The sound of Evers slamming the car door was followed rapidly by a burst of gunfire. Myrlie ran downstairs while the children assumed the position they had learned to adopt if their house ever came under attack. By the time she reached the front door, Medgar's body was slumped in front of her. A bullet had gone through his back and exited through his chest. A few hours later, he was pronounced dead.
On the day of Medgar Evers' funeral, around 1,000 black youths marched through town, joined later by their elders. When police ordered them to disperse, scuffles broke out. The crowd chanted:
"We want the killer."
Meeting their demand should not have been difficult. The rifle that was fired was traced to Beckwith, whose fingerprints were on its telescopic sight. Some witnesses reported seeing a man who fit his description in the area that night, as well as a car that looked like his white Plymouth Valiant. If that wasn't enough, he'd openly bragged to fellow Klansmen about carrying out the shooting. Though it took several weeks, he was eventually arrested on the strength of this overwhelming evidence, and charged with the murder.
It was then that matters took an all-too predictable turn. Not once, but twice, in the course of 1964, all-white juries twice failed to reach a verdict. Beckwith was arrested again in 1990, and finally found guilty in 1994. He wore a confederate flag pin throughout the hearings. He died in prison in 2001.
Between them, these three events, which all took place within a day, would signal the end of a period of gruesome certainty in America's racial politics – and the beginning of an era of greater complexity. What soon became evident was threefold: the economic stratification within black America, the political realignment of southern politics and the evolution of the struggle of equality from the streets to the legislature.
Wallace's otiose performance and Beckwith's murderous assault typified the segregationists' endgame: a series of dramatic, often violent, acts perpetrated by the local state or its ideological surrogates, with no strategic value beyond symbolizing resistance and inciting a response. They were not intended to stop integration, but to protest its inevitability. And while those protests were futile, they nonetheless retained the ability to provoke, as the disturbances following Evers' funeral testified.
The years to come were sufficiently volatile that even ostensibly minor events, such as a traffic stop in Watts, Los Angeles, or the raid of a late-night drinking den in Detroit, could spark major unrest. The violence and chaos that ensued polarised communities – not on issues of ideology or strategy, but on the basis of race, in a manner that weakened the already dim prospects for solidarity across the colour line.
PHOTO: Myrlie Evers-Williams, wife of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Photograph: Rogelio V Solis/AP
As Myrlie Evers, who went on to dedicate her life to nonviolent interracial activism, recalled:
"When Medgar was felled by that shot, and I rushed out and saw him lying there and people from the neighbourhood began to gather, there were also some whose colour happened to be white. I don't think I have ever hated as much in my life as I did at that particular moment anyone who had white skin."
In Malone and Hood's registration at the University of Alabama that day, we saw the doors to higher education and, through them, career advancement, reluctantly being opened for the small section of black America that was in a position, at that time, to reap the fruits of integration. There had been a middle class in black America for a long time, but as long as segregation existed, the material benefits deriving from that status were significantly circumscribed, particularly in the south.
Race dominated almost everything. A black doctor or dentist could not live outside particular neighbourhoods, nor eat in certain establishments, nor be served in certain stores. Whatever class differences existed within the black community, and there were many, they were inevitably subsumed under the broader struggle for equality.
With integration, however, came the fracturing of black communities, as those equipped to take advantage of the new opportunities forged ahead, leaving the rest to struggle with the legacy of the past 300 years. Wealthier people could move to the suburbs, their kids could integrate in white schools, and from there go on to top universities.
But this success brought its own challenges. The doors of opportunity were only opened to a few – but enough for some to ask, in the absence of legal barriers, that if some could make it, then why not others. Black Americans no longer fell foul of the law of the land, yet still remained on the wrong side of the law of probabilities: more likely to be arrested, convicted and imprisoned; less likely to be employed, promoted and educated.
A national guardsman amid the rubble following the Watts riots, Los Angeles, California, August 1965. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
For most black Americans, the end of segregation did not feel like the liberation that had been promised. After the Watts riots, Martin Luther King told Bayard Rustin, who organised the March on Washington:
"You know Bayard, I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I've got to do something … to help them get the money to buy them."
With Kennedy's appeal for legislation, we saw the shift in focus moving from the streets of Birmingham to Washington's corridors of power. This was progress. Changing the law had been the point of the protests. Within a year, Lyndon B Johnson, who that November assumed the presidency in the wake of Kennedy's assassination, signed the Civil Rights Act; within two years, he'd signed the Voting Rights Act.
But the shift from protesters' demands to congressional bills limited possibilities for radical transformation. Clear moral demands were replaced by horsetrading. Marchers cannot be stopped by a filibuster; legislation can. Rustin's argument ran as follows:
"We were moving from a period of protest to one of political responsibility. That is, instead of marching on the courthouse, or the restaurant or the theatre, we now had to march the ballot box. In protest, there must never be any compromise. In politics, there is always compromise."
The trouble was the nature of the deal-making was itself in flux. By aligning himself with civil rights, Kennedy would end the Democratic party's dominance of the south. The next day, southern Democrats would respond by defeating a routine funding bill. "[Civil rights] is overwhelming the whole, the whole program," House majority leader Carl Albert told him. "I couldn't do a damn thing with them."
President Lyndon Johnson with Martin Luther King at the signing of the voting rights act, 1965. Photograph: Hulton Archive
Veteran journalist Bill Moyers wrote that when Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act a year later, "he was euphoric'":
"But late that very night, I found him in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the bulldog edition of the Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was troubling him. 'I think we just delivered the south to the Republican party for a long time to come,' he said."
Johnson's fears were well-founded. The Republicans, sensing an opportunity, decided to pitch a clear appeal to southern segregationists in particular, and suburban whites in general, on the grounds of race. This would create a thoroughgoing transformation in the nation's politics that is only today, in the 21st century, beginning to unravel.
"We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said shortly before the last presidential election.
That day, 11 June 1963, epitomised the beginning of the end for business as usual.
• Gary Younge's The Speech: the Story Behind Martin Luther King's Dream will be published by Haymarket Books in August. Follow him on Twitter @garyyounge