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
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/articles/53/medgar-evers-and-the-origin-of-the-civil-rights-movement-in-mississippi
Medgar Evers and the Origin of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi
by Dernoral Davis
Mississippi Historical Society
PHOTO: MEDGAR EVERS
(b. July 2, 1925--d. June 12, 1963)
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
https://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/12/medgar_evers_murder_50_years_later
Medgar Evers’ Murder, 50 Years Later: Widow Myrlie Evers-Williams Remembers "A Man for All Time"
WEDNESDAY, June 12, 2013
Medgar Evers’ Murder, 50 Years Later: Widow Myrlie Evers-Williams Remembers "A Man for All Time"
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
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
Myrlie Evers-Williams On Medgar's Accomplishments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlunCuiojAs
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
PHOTO: MEDGAR EVERS
(b. July 2, 1925--d. June 12, 1963)
