IMPORTANT NEW BOOK:

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.

Mamie Kirkland, Witness to an Era of Racial Terror, Dies at 111

https://www.nytimes.com/20…/…/09/us/mamie-kirkland-dead.html

Mamie Kirkland, Witness to an Era of Racial Terror, Dies at 111

She endured the horrors of the African-American experience — lynchings, riots, the Ku Klux Klan — and worked to ensure that they never slipped from collective memory.

VIDEO:

0:00/4:59

Haunted by Memories for 100 Years

In 1915, Mamie Kirkland and her family fled Ellisville, Miss., in fear that her father would be lynched. She swore she would never return. But at age 107, she made the journey.

by Dan Barry

January 9, 2020

New York Times

PHOTO: In 1915, Mamie Kirkland and her family fled Ellisville, Miss., in fear that her father would be lynched. She swore she would never return. But at age 107, she made the journey.CreditCredit...Andrea Morales for The New York Times

Mamie Lang Kirkland died last month at her home in upstate New York. She was the mother of nine, the matriarch of another 158, a longtime  saleswoman for Avon Products, and, at the time of her death, at 111, the oldest resident of Buffalo.

That only begins to describe Ms. Kirkland.

She was also the embodiment of the African-American experience of the 20th century, her life’s long journey altered repeatedly by the racial  violence and bigotry coursing through the United States. Lynchings, riots, the Ku Klux Klan — she survived it all, and spent her centenarian  years working to ensure that these realities never slipped from collective memory.

Her life helped inspire the creation, in 2018, of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Ala. Both document the country’s history of racial terrorism and encourage social justice.

Ms. Kirkland figures in two of the exhibits, said Sia Sanneh, a senior attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit that started the memorials. “Her life was such an inspiration to us,” Ms. Sanneh said. “It embodied all those things.”

Mamie Lang was born on Sept. 3, 1908, in the rural Mississippi town of Ellisville, the daughter of Edward Lang, a laborer and fledgling minister, and Rochelle (Moore) Lang, who minded the family’s rented home. Ms. Kirkland would remember the large peach tree in the yard, and the strange brew concocted by her grandmother that saved her from a typhomalarial fever when she was near death at age 5.

When she was about 7, her father awakened the family to announce that it was time to leave — some local white men were preparing to lynch him and his friend, John Hartfield. The two men slipped out of town that night; Rochelle and the five Lang children, including a nursing baby, escaped by train in the morning.

Ms. Kirkland, with family members and her supporters from the Equal Justice Initiative, prayed at the approximate spot where John Hartfield, her father’s friend, was lynched in 1919.

Ms. Kirkland, with family members and her supporters from the Equal Justice Initiative, prayed at the approximate spot where John Hartfield, her father’s friend, was lynched in 1919.Credit...Andrea Morales for The New York Times

The family friend, Mr. Hartfield, eventually returned to Ellisville, and in the summer of 1919 he was accused of raping a white woman. Some townspeople set a date for his lynching, a public event that the governor of Mississippi claimed he was powerless to prevent. At an appointed time announced in The Jackson Daily News, crowds gathered near a large gum tree beside the train tracks. There Mr. Hartfield was strung up and hanged, after which his body was riddled with bullets and burned. Body parts became souvenirs.

“Could have been my father,” Ms. Kirkland said in an interview with The New York Times in 2015.

Though the Lang family had fled to East St. Louis, Ill., they still could not outrun the racist violence. In 1917, white men responded to the pressures of changing demographics and job competition by rioting in black neighborhoods, burning down homes and shooting residents. Dozens died, thousands were left homeless, and 9-year-old Mamie was seared by the memory of seeing a deaf man shot dead because he could not hear an order to halt.

The family moved again, this time to Alliance, Ohio, reflecting another aspect of the black experience: the Great Migration of the last century, when six million African-Americans left the rural South for the urban Northeast and Midwest — some seeking economic opportunity, others hoping to escape racial terrorism.

Sometimes it followed them north.

In Alliance, in the 1920s, members of the Ku Klux Klan — whose rallies were casually announced in the local press — came to the family’s home, hoods donned and torches afire, to burn a cross on their lawn. The Langs always wondered what would have happened if armed white neighbors hadn’t arrived to chase away the aggressors.

At 15, Mamie married an itinerant railroad worker named Albert Kirkland, and the couple moved to Buffalo. He found work as a grinder at the Pratt & Letchworth plant; she gave birth to nine children, six of whom reached adulthood, and immersed herself in the First Shiloh Baptist Church, of which she was a foundational member.

After her husband died in 1959, Ms. Kirkland worked as a domestic helper and babysitter before becoming a door-to-door saleswoman for Avon. She never learned to drive, and often attributed her longevity to her faith and those many years walking the Buffalo streets selling beauty products. She was still taking orders until a few weeks before her death on Dec. 28, according to her son Tarabu Betserai Kirkland.

Mr. Kirkland, her youngest child at 70, said that his mother’s experience with Avon helped her to shed her shyness and embrace her ability to connect with people. Over time, he said, she became a kind of door-to-door life coach.

“Folks didn’t want her to leave the house,” Mr. Kirkland said in a phone interview this week. “She would help them figure out ways to manage.”

But there was one place that Ms. Kirkland refused to visit: the state of her birth, where the terror of racism had scarred her childhood. She often said that she didn’t even want to see Mississippi on a map.

Her son had been nudging her to tell her life’s powerful story, and in 2015 he showed her a report by the Equal Justice Initiative called “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” It included an image of an old newspaper’s headline: “John Hartfield Will Be Lynched By Ellisville Mob at 5 O’Clock This Afternoon.”

“We had never seen anything documented about John Hartfield,” Mr. Kirkland said. “For a long time we didn’t know if it was fact or fiction. But then she pointed to my laptop and said, ‘That’s him.’ And chills went up my back.”

PHOTO: “I left Mississippi a scared little girl of 7 years old,” Ms. Kirkland said in 2016. “Now I’m 107 — and I’m not frightened anymore.”Credit: Andrea Morales for The New York Times

A few months later, Ms. Kirkland returned to Ellisville with her son, who has been working on a documentary film about his mother’s journey. It was an emotional visit to a place that seemed to have erased the Hartfield lynching from memory. Ms. Kirkland took time to pray at the approximate spot where a mob had killed her father’s friend.

“She always maintained this level of grace and forgiveness,” Mr. Kirkland said. “I’m not sure I could do that.”

In addition to her son, Ms. Kirkland’s survivors include her daughters Juanita Hunter, Beatrice Kirkland, Margaret Kirkland and Jeanette Clinton.

In 2016, the Equal Justice Initiative honored Ms. Kirkland at a fund-raising gala in Manhattan. She and her son worked for weeks on her short speech, in which she planned to tell the young people in the audience that stories like hers needed to be told again and again; that stories like hers were just as important now as they were a century ago; that she should know, because she had been there.

Her speech reflected a resilient optimism; a determination to triumph over tribulation. “I left Mississippi a scared little girl of 7 years old,” Ms. Kirkland said at the event. “Now I’m 107 — and I’m not frightened anymore.”

Organizers fretted about how their guest would ascend to the stage, and they offered her a wheelchair. She declined, saying that she intended to walk on her own.

And she did.

RELATED:

Horror Drove Her From South. 100 Years Later, She Returned.

Sept. 19, 2015

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dan Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist, having written both the “This Land” and “About New York” columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics, including sports, culture, New York City, and the nation. @DanBarryNYT • Facebook

PHOTO: In 1915, Mamie Kirkland and her family fled Ellisville, Miss., in fear that her father would be lynched. She swore she would never return. 

But at age 107, she made the journey. Credit:  Andrea Morales for The New York Times

On The 50th Anniversary of Freedom Summer And The Fight For Voting Rights And National Political Representation by African American Citizens From Mississippi

Freedom Summer: How Civil Rights Activists Braved Violence to Challenge Racism in 1964 Mississippi--VIDEO:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7E5wprwJec

http://www.democracynow.org/  

Hundreds of people marched in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on Wednesday to mark the 50th anniversary of Freedom Day. On Jan. 22, 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer and other civil rights activists marched around the Forrest County Courthouse in support of black voting rights. The rally was the beginning of a historic year in Mississippi. Months later civil rights groups launched Freedom Summer. More than 1,000 out-of-state volunteers traveled to Mississippi to help register voters and set up what they called, "Freedom Schools." Out of Freedom Summer grew the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the legitimacy of the white-only Mississippi Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. The period also saw the murders of three civil rights activists — Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. Events are being held across Mississippi in 2014 to mark the 50th anniversary of this historic year. We are joined by Stanley Nelson, director of the new documentary, "Freedom Summer." An Emmy Award-winning MacArthur Genius fellow, Nelson's past films include "Freedom Riders" and "The Murder of Emmett Till."

Democracy Now!, is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on 1,200+ TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9am ET at http://www.democracynow.org/
 
Eyes on the Prize - #5 - Mississippi, Is This America, 1962-1964--VIDEO:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgSitIXiP5Y

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/opinion/sunday/when-civil-rights-unity-fractured.html

Sunday Review | OPINION

When Civil-Rights Unity Fractured
By PENIEL E. JOSEPH
JUNE 28, 2014
New York Times

Members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party jammed an entrance to Atlantic City’s Convention Hall on Aug. 25, 1964, in an effort to attend the second session of the Democratic National Convention. Credit Associated Press

FIFTY years ago this month, more than a thousand predominantly young, predominantly white volunteers arrived in Mississippi to help local blacks register to vote. “Freedom Summer” is remembered as both a high point of interracial democratic activism and a low point in racial violence, most notably in the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, two of whom were white.

Yet Freedom Summer was also a historical hinge point — a pivotal moment that helped fracture the civil rights movement’s tenuous unity and spur black political radicalism. In many ways the divisions that manifested themselves in 1964 are still with us today, and any attempt to build new interracial coalitions will have to first wrestle with their legacy.

White veterans of Freedom Summer recall the time as a life-changing event in their personal involvement in the movement, the apotheosis of their vision for biracial, harmonious activism. And the experience did inspire many students to stay in the state afterward and work for groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (also known as the S.N.C.C.). Others, most notably the free-speech activist and Berkeley student Mario Savio, took lessons learned that summer back to their own campuses, seeding the fledgling student movements that would grow to a revolutionary fervor by the end of the decade.

But many black activists saw things quite differently. Not that they didn’t appreciate the voter-registration work being done. But whereas whites tended to see that as an end in itself, a strike against the white power structure in Mississippi, blacks tended to see activism in Mississippi as a means toward a larger goal of confronting racism on a national scale — a path that would take them from the Delta to the Democratic National Convention, held that summer in Atlantic City.

The vehicle for reaching that goal was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an independently organized project led by the sharecropper turned activist Fannie Lou Hamer. With the newly registered black voters as its base, the party planned to challenge the “regular,” all-white Democratic state delegation at the convention, and dare the national party — and President Lyndon B. Johnson — to deny them.

One of the key figures behind the party was Stokely Carmichael (who later changed his name to Kwame Ture). As part of Freedom Summer, he led interracial groups of student volunteers from Greenwood, Miss., which served as a base for the S.N.C.C.’s sprawling efforts throughout the Delta, one of America’s poorest and most racially segregated regions. But he also spent parts of the summer organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a tedious process made even more difficult by harassment, cross burnings and the constant threat of violent reprisals.

That summer shaped Carmichael, long before he became a household name and a synonym for black radicalism. In 1964, at just 23 years old, he had set himself up as an ambassador of sorts, hosting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., coordinating with veteran local activists and recruiting the most promising white volunteers to continue on after the summer.

But Freedom Summer ultimately broke Carmichael’s heart. Yes, voters were registered by the thousands. But as many white volunteers headed home, their spirits lifted by the experience, Carmichael, Hamer and the rest headed to New Jersey, to see if all that work would pay off.

It didn’t. Thanks to the personal intervention of President Johnson — through the Minnesota senator Hubert H. Humphrey, a close ally of the civil rights movement — the convention leadership thwarted the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party’s demands. The discussion between black activists and their liberal allies devolved into a screaming match over a proposed compromise to give the activists two at-large convention seats — which they rejected.

The behavior of the S.N.C.C.’s white liberal allies at the convention helped to sour the black activists’ support for interracial political alliances. White liberals interpreted the rejected offer as the sort of necessary, if unpleasant, compromise that formed the bedrock of democratic politics. Blacks, most potently Carmichael, viewed the proceedings as an enormous betrayal of the very ideal — one person, one vote — that they had gambled their lives on in Mississippi.

The black radical politics of the 1960s and subsequent decades had roots long before 1964. But it was amplified by the events of that summer, precisely at the moment when a new generation of young activists and intellectuals like Carmichael were coming into their own, and those events sent them in a direction far beyond the nonviolent political vision outlined by King a year earlier during the March on Washington.

Instead of biracial politics as an end in itself, power, through local political organizing outside of either major political party, would be Carmichael’s mantra over the next two years. It was in Mississippi in 1966 that he unleashed his controversial call for “black power.”

The emergence of black radicalism in the late 1960s, and the rift in the biracial coalition, is often interpreted as a product of the movement’s shift from the Jim Crow South to the urban North. But the experience in Mississippi and Atlantic City demonstrates how much more complicated the story really is.

It also captures one of the difficulties in forming and maintaining biracial coalitions, as true today as it was 50 years ago: White and black activists will often see the same situation very differently.

But above all, that experience shows why the white version of Freedom Summer — local and minority politics mediated through major political parties — was inadequate. Instead, the grass roots had to accumulate its own power, which 50 years later remains Freedom Summer’s most enduring legacy.

Peniel E. Joseph is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University and the author of “Stokely: A Life.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/opinion/freedom-summer-looking-beyond-racial-lines.html?mabReward=RI%3A9&action=click&contentCollection=The+Upshotion%3DFooter&module=Recommendation&src=recg&pgtype=article&_r=0

The Opinion Pages | LETTER

Freedom Summer: Looking Beyond Racial Lines
JULY 3, 2014

To the Editor:

Re: “When Civil-Rights Unity Fractured,” by Peniel E. Joseph (Sunday Review, June 29), about the aftermath of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project:

As it happens, we both just attended a four-day commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the project. Mr. Joseph argues that it was the different experiences of blacks and whites in the Summer Project that laid the groundwork for black nationalism.

Specifically, he argues that achieving voter registration goals of white volunteers revealed breaches with a black empowerment agenda pursued by blacks. In fact, voter registration remained all but impossible until after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And although factions existed, to be sure, they were not specifically racial ones and not along the lines he describes.

First, there was no “white” agenda before or after the Summer Project. Many volunteers, like one of us, Marshall Ganz, thought the project was meant to support empowerment of local communities by putting a stop to the terror that made any kind of organizing so difficult, and that this was a key step in a broader assault on institutionalized racism in America.

Second, the Summer Project also focused on organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a key step in breaking through barriers to voter registration and full black participation in politics and public life.

Third, the leadership of the white liberal establishment that supported President Lyndon B. Johnson by urging compromise on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention were joined by black colleagues — and received as much criticism from white volunteers as from black organizers.

The Summer Project was a complex event, with many strengths and weaknesses, and its consequences were anything but unmixed. This merits serious analysis and discussion. But applying an overly simplistic racial lens is disrespectful of the event and the people who took part.

MARSHALL GANZ
JULIAN BOND
Cambridge, Mass.

July 1, 2014

Mr. Ganz is a senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. Mr. Bond, the civil rights leader, is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/think-they-got-killed-1964-lbj-and-three-civil-rights-icons.html?action=click&contentCollection=The+Upshot&module=RelatedCoverageion%3DMarginalia&pgtype=article

HISTORYSOURCE

‘Think They Got Killed?’: 1964, L.B.J. and Three Civil Rights Icons

by Michael Beschloss
@BeschlossDC

JUNE 25, 2014
The Upshot Page
New York Times

Fifty years ago this week, three young civil rights activists — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman — vanished in Neshoba County, Miss.

That same week, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the Senate and was on its way to President Lyndon Johnson for his signature. Mississippi had been seething with death threats against young men and women who had come to register African-American voters in what they called “Freedom Summer.” Goodman and Schwerner were white New Yorkers, Chaney a black Mississippian.

Thanks to Johnson’s secret taping system, we can go back to that moment and hear the president and those around him reacting to the terrible news.

“What do you think happened?” L.B.J. asks his assistant legal counsel, Lee White. “Think they got killed?”

White replies: “This morning they had absolutely no trace. As far as they’re concerned, they just disappeared from the face of the earth.”

Johnson recalls that in preparation for Freedom Summer, he had asked J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director, “to fill up Mississippi with F.B.I. men and infiltrate” the Ku Klux Klan and other militant segregationist groups — “that they haul them in by the dozens.”

“The only weapon I have for locating them is the F.B.I.,” he says. “I can’t find them myself.”

He scoffs at the suggestion by his growing political rival, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, that the president visit with the missing young men’s parents. “I’m afraid that if I start housemothering each kid that’s gone down there and that doesn’t show up, that we’ll have this White House full of people every day, asking for sympathy,” he tells Kennedy’s deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach. “And congressmen too, because they want to come over and have their picture made and get on TV.”

Asked what he thinks befell the young men, Katzenbach says they probably “got picked up by some of these Klan people.”

Johnson asks, “And murdered?”

“Or else they’re just being hidden in one of those barns,” Katzenbach says. “And having the hell scared out of them.”

When L.B.J. calls Senator James Eastland, a Mississippi Democrat and a well-known segregationist, Eastland makes it clear he is anything but sympathetic to the young men’s plight.

“I don’t believe there’s three missing,” he sputters. “I believe it’s a publicity stunt.”

Then Hoover calls the president to report that the F.B.I. has found the Ford station wagon that the three had been riding in. “The car was burned,” he says, “and we do not know yet whether any bodies are inside of the car because of the intense heat that still is in the area of the car.

“Apparently what’s happened — these men have been killed. … This is merely an assumption — that probably they were burned in the car. On the other hand, they may have been taken out and killed on the outside.”

“Or maybe kidnapped and locked up,” Johnson says.

Ruefully, Hoover says, “I would doubt whether those people down there would give them even that much of a break.”

Soon the president realizes he must see the young men’s relatives, but wants it done quietly. “Tell them to just come down to your office, and come in that side door,” he instructs Lee White. “Tell them what-all we’ve done, and let me come over and say a word. And I just ought to tell them we’ve found the car.”

White says, “That’s going to be rough.”

When Goodman’s parents and Schwerner’s father entered the Oval Office, Goodman’s mother, Carolyn, heard L.B.J. talking to Hoover about finding the car. She later recalled, “I wanted to leap toward his desk and shout: ‘Tell me quickly. Are they all right?'”

Johnson took her hand and described the flaming wreck, saying, “Ma’am, we’ll do everything we can.”

But on Aug. 4, 1964, the remains of the three brave men were discovered under an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss. Chaney had been shot three times and bludgeoned, the other two shot through the heart.

Twenty-one Ku Klux Klansmen and local law enforcement officials were accused by the F.B.I. in the case, but the Mississippi authorities would not prosecute for murder. Instead, the federal government was reduced to prosecuting 18 for denying the three victims their civil rights; seven were found guilty, and each served less than six years.

Edgar Ray Killen, a Klansman accused of supervising the murders, stayed free until 2005, when, at the age of 80, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison.


Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, is the author of nine books and a contributor to NBC News and “PBS NewsHour.” Follow him on Twitter at @BeschlossDC.

The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Chokwe Lumumba, 1947-2014: Revolutionary Political Activist, Community Organizer, Public Intellectual, Outstanding Attorney, and Mayor of Jackson Mississippi

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/us/chokwe-lumumba-66-dies-activist-who-became-mayor-in-mississippi.html

 CHOKWE LUMUMBA
(b. August 2, 1947--d. February 25, 2014)

Left to right: Chokwe Lumumba.  Credit Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press and Mr. Lumumba with Fulani Sunni Ali, whom he defended on charges related to the robbery of a Brinks armored car in 1981. Ali was acquitted of all charges. Credit Richard Drew/Associated Press

All,

The surprising early death of Chokwe Lumumba is yet another MAJOR LOSS for us all on many different levels. Chokwe Lumumba was a committed radical political activist and community leader, a dynamic public intellectual, an outstanding attorney, and a consummate organizer of great courage and integrity. He will be deeply missed by many people throughout not only this country but the world. May brother Lumumba Rest in Peace & Power and our deepest and most heartfelt condolences go to his entire family and city of Jackson, Mississippi. Free the Land!...

Kofi

Chokwe Lumumba, 66, Dies; Activist Who Became Mayor in Mississippi
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
February 26, 2014
New York Times

Chokwe Lumumba, a civil rights lawyer who once called for an independent black-majority country in the American Southeast before running for mayor of Jackson, Miss., last year, winning handily, died on Tuesday in Jackson. He was 66.

His family said the cause had not been determined.

As a political activist, Mr. Lumumba campaigned for the United States to pay billions of dollars to blacks as reparations for their ancestors’ enslavement.

As a lawyer, he helped the rapper Tupac Shakur in a successful effort to clear himself of assault charges in 1993; he persuaded Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi to release two sisters from a Mississippi prison in 1996 after they had served 16 years for an armed robbery that they said they had not committed; and he defended self-styled revolutionaries charged with robbing a Brinks armored car in 1981 in Rockland County, N.Y., and murdering three people in the process.

In Jackson, the state capital, Mr. Lumumba earned respect as a civic leader and a successful youth basketball coach and won election to the City Council in 2009. In a city that is 80 percent black and has had a black mayor since 1997, he was urged by neighbors and politicians to run for mayor last year as a Democrat. He won with 87 percent of the vote.

His major issue was the pragmatic one of fixing streets and sewers. In January, Mr. Lumumba persuaded voters to accept a one percent sales tax to pay for the improvements. His slogan: “One city, one aim, one destiny.”

Mr. Lumumba had earned a reputation as an aggressive defense lawyer, particularly in police brutality cases. He did not hesitate to challenge judges in the courtroom. Several cited him for contempt and reprimanded him. He spent three days in jail after appealing one such reprimand. In 2004, his Mississippi law license was taken away for six months.

He was born Edwin Finley Taliaferro in Detroit on Aug. 2, 1947, the second of eight children. He told an interviewer that as an 8-year-old he had been horrified when his mother showed him a magazine picture of the brutalized body of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old who had recently been murdered in Mississippi after being accused of flirting with a white woman in a grocery store. The case helped spark the civil rights movement.

Edwin was later at his mother’s side on the streets of Detroit as she passed out literature for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights organization. He attended Roman Catholic schools and in high school was student council president and captain of the football team.

He recalled that when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, he was so distraught that he changed his name to Chokwe Lumumba (pronounced SHOW-kway Luh-MOOM-buh). Chokwe was the name of one of the last African tribes to resist the slave trade. He took the name Lumumba after Patrice Lumumba, the African leader who led what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in its successful fight to win independence from Belgium in 1960.

Chokwe Lumumba, a student at Kalamazoo College at the time of Dr. King’s assassination, joined students at Western Michigan University, which is also in Kalamazoo, in taking over a campus building, demanding more scholarships for blacks and more black professors.

After graduating with a degree in political science in 1969, he earned a law degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Around the same time, he joined the Republic of New Afrika, a black separatist group that advocated a majority-black republic in the American South, becoming its second vice president.

He soon traveled with the group to Hinds County, Miss., which includes Jackson. He became the New Afrika justice minister and led negotiations with unfriendly neighbors and law enforcement agencies. The group eventually left Jackson.

In 1976, Mr. Lumumba returned to Detroit to work as a public defender. Two years later he set up his own law firm to handle civil rights cases.

In the Brinks case, he defended Fulani Sunni Ali, the Republic of New Afrika’s information minister, who was originally known as Cynthia Boston. The presiding judge, saying Mr. Lumumba had used the proceedings to promote a “propaganda campaign” on behalf of the New Afrika group, threw him off the case, which was being tried in federal court in Manhattan. Civil libertarians criticized the judge, saying he had infringed on the defendant’s right to choose her own lawyer. Charges against Ms. Ali were dropped in 1981.

Later, in a separate proceeding, Mr. Lumumba won the acquittal of Ms. Ali’s husband, Bilal Sunni Ali, formerly William Johnson, but was cited for contempt for arguing with the judge. Mr. Lumumba began his summation by exclaiming the group’s slogan, “Free the Land!” He went on to compare the prosecutor to a dishonest “used-car salesman.”

Mr. Lumumba returned to Mississippi in 1988, and applied to practice law. Three years later, his application was accepted.

In the Shakur case, in 1993, the rap star became involved in a shooting melee with two off-duty police officers in Atlanta. Charges filed against Mr. Shakur and one of the officers were dropped. (Mr. Shakur was murdered in 1996 in Las Vegas.)

Mr. Lumumba’s wife, Nubia, died in 2003. He is survived by his sons Kambon Mutope, Thurman Lumumba and Chokwe Antar Lumumba; his daughter, Rukia Lumumba; and one grandson.

Mr. Lumumba hardly moderated his views in recent years. In an interview last year he continued to defend the Republic of New Afrika. The day after his election, he raised hackles by questioning Columbus’s historical importance. And at his inauguration, he could not resist raising his fist in the black power salute and shouting an old slogan: “Free the Land!”

A TRIBUTE TO LEGENDARY CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER AND MISSISSIPPI ACTIVIST MEDGAR EVERS (1925-1963) ON THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF HIS TRAGIC ASSASSINATION

MEDGAR EVERS

(1925-1963)

All,

Medgar Evers (b. 1925) 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 racially segregated University of Mississippi Law School.  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 murder 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 Beckwith.  After being acquited in two all white male deadlocked jury trials in 1964 it would be another 30 years before De La Beckwith 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  was later chairperson of the NAACP during the late 1990s)   who diligently fought for the successful reopening of his husband's case over a three decade period that led to finally bringing 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 below.  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

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
 

http://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

Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers
by Frank X. Walker
University of Georgia Press, 2013

Frank X Walker

Frank X Walker is the author of six poetry collections, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (University of Georgia, forthcoming May 2013); When Winter Come: the Ascension of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Black Box (Old Cove Press, 2005); Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2003), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2004; and Affrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000). A 2005 recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry, Walker is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky and Director of African American & Africana Studies, and the editor of PLUCK! the new Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture.


Frank X Walker (born June 11, 1961) is an African-American poet from Danville, Kentucky. Walker coined the word "Affrilachia", signifying the importance of the African-American presence in Appalachia: the "new word ... spoke to the union of Appalachian identity and the region's African-American culture and history"

As of 2013, he is the new Poet Laureate of Kentucky.The following two poems are taken from his critically acclaimed new book of poetry in honor of Medgar Evers entitled Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (University of Georgia 2013):

One Third of 180 Grams of Lead

Both of them were history, even before one
pulled the trigger, before I rocketed through
the smoking barrel hidden in the honeysuckle
before I tore through a man’s back, shattered

his family, a window, and tore through an inner wall
before I bounced off a refrigerator and a coffeepot
before I landed at my destined point in history
–next to a watermelon. What was cruel was the irony

not the melon, not the man falling in slow motion,
but the man squinting through the crosshairs
reducing the justice system to a small circle, praying
that he not miss, then sending me to deliver a message

as if the woman screaming in the dark
or the children crying at her feet
could ever believe
a bullet was small enough to hate.
------------------------------------------------

After Birth

“Killing that nigger gave me no more inner
discomfort than our wives endure when they
give birth to our children.” 

-Byron de la Beckwith

Like them, a man can conceive
an idea, an event, a moment so clearly
he can name it even before it breathes.
We both can carry a thing around inside
for only so long and no matter how small
it starts out, it can swell and get so heavy
our backs hurt and we can’t find comfort
enough to sleep at night. All we can think
about is the relief that waits, at the end.
When it was finally time, it was painless.
It was the most natural thing I’d ever done.
I just closed my eyes and squeezed
then opened them and there he was,
just laying there still covered with blood,
(laughs) but already trying to crawl.
I must admit, like any proud parent
I was afraid at first, afraid he’d live,
afraid he’d die too soon.
Funny how life ‘n death
is a whole lot of pushing and pulling,
holding and seeking breath;
a whole world turned upside down
until some body screams.

© Frank X Walker, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, University of Georgia Press, forthcoming May 2013

Medgar Evers,  1962

http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2013/06/11/2411137/



Myrlie Evers:  'Times when the anger builds up'


Myrlie Evers, the widow of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers, talks about her emotions fifty years after her husband was assassinated, and about her part in the inauguration of President Barack Obama. (June 11. 2013)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_HBdrJkmDE



Medgar Evers - Part 1, Civil Rights Heroes, Martin Kent Documentary


www.youtube.com



MEDGAR EVERS DOCUMENTARY
DISCOVERY CHANNEL
DIRECTED BY MARTIN KENT

Uploaded on Jan 23, 2010:

http://yearslaterwewouldremember.com/ - Watch part 2 of this compelling excerpt from Civil Rights Heroes, a documentary from Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Martin Kent, which originally aired on Discovery Networks. Before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took over, as the voice, conscience and vehicle of the Civil Rights Movement, there was Medgar Evers, whose civil rights activism in Mississippi began with the death of Emmett Till in 1955. Evers was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963. Black History Month video.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZhFKV4Q40U

Medgar Evers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born:    Medgar Wiley Evers on July 2, 1925
Decatur, Mississippi U.S.
Died:    June 12, 1963 (aged 37)
Jackson, Mississippi, U.S.
Occupation:    Civil rights activist
Spouse:    Myrlie Evers-Williams 1951-1963 (his assassination)
Children:    Three
Parents:   James Evers (father) Jesse Evers (Mother)


Medgar Wiley Evers (July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963) was an African-American civil rights activist from Mississippi involved in efforts to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi. After returning from overseas military service in World War II and completing his secondary education, he became active in the civil rights movement. He became a field secretary for the NAACP.


Evers was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council. As a veteran, Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. His murder and the resulting trials inspired civil rights protests, as well as numerous works of art, music, and film.

Evers was born July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, third of the five children (including older brother Charlie Evers) of James and Jesse Evers; the family also included Jesse's two children from a previous marriage. The Everses owned a small farm and James worked at a sawmill. Evers walked twelve miles to school to earn his high-school diploma. From 1943 to 1945 he fought in Europe with the US Army, and was discharged honorably as a sergeant.


In 1948 Evers enrolled at Alcorn College (a historically black college, now Alcorn State University) majoring in business administration. He also competed on the debate, football, and track teams, sang in the choir, and was junior class president.  He earned his BA in 1952.


On December 24, 1951, he married classmate Myrlie Beasley. Together they had three children: Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise, and James Van Dyke. Darrell died in February 2001 of colon cancer.


Activism

The couple moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where Evers became a salesman for T. R. M. Howard's Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company. Howard was also president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL); Evers helped organize the RCNL's boycott of filling stations which denied blacks use of the stations' restrooms. Evers and his brother Charles also attended the RCNL's annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954, which drew crowds of ten thousand or more.


Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in 1954 but his application was rejected. He submitted his application in concert with the NAACP as a test case.


In late 1954 Evers' was named the NAACP's first field secretary for Mississippi.In this position, he helped organize boycotts and set up new local chapters of the NAACP. He was involved with James Meredith's efforts to enroll in the University of Mississippi in the early 1960s.


Evers’ civil rights leadership and investigative work made him a target of white supremacists. In the weeks leading up to his death, the hostility directed towards him grew. His public investigations into the murder of Emmett Till and his vocal support of Clyde Kennard had made him a prominent black leader. On May 28, 1963, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home. On June 7, 1963, Evers was nearly run down by a car after he emerged from the Jackson NAACP office.


Assassination

In the early morning of June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy's speech on national television in support of civil rights, Evers pulled into his driveway after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. 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 Enfield 1917 rifle; it ricocheted into his home. He staggered 9 meters (30 feet) before collapsing. He died at a local hospital 50 minutes later.

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.


On June 21, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens' Council (and later of the Ku Klux Klan), was arrested for Evers' murder.


District Attorney and future governor Bill Waller prosecuted De La Beckwith. Juries composed solely of white men twice that year deadlocked on De La Beckwith's guilt.

In 1994, 30 years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, De La Beckwith was brought to trial based on new evidence. Bobby DeLaughter was the prosecutor. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy.  De La Beckwith was convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after having lived as a free man for much of the three decades following the killing (he was imprisoned from 1977 to 1980 for conspiring to murder A. I. Botnick). De La Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died at age 80 in prison in January 2001.


Legacy


Evers's legacy has been kept alive in a variety of ways. Evers was memorialized by leading Mississippi and national authors, both black and white: Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Margaret Walker and Anne Moody.[13] In 1963, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.[14] In 1969, Medgar Evers College was established in Brooklyn, New York as part of the City University of New York. Evers's widow, Myrlie Evers co-wrote the book For Us, the Living with William Peters in 1967. In 1983, a 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.[15] 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 Evers' honor. In December 2004, the Jackson City Council changed the name of the city's airport to "Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport" (Jackson-Evers International Airport) in honor of him.[16]



His widow Myrlie Evers became a noted activist in her own right later in life, eventually serving as chair of the NAACP.[ Medgar's brother Charles Evers returned to Jackson in July 1963 and served briefly in his slain brother's place. He remained involved in Mississippi civil rights activities for many years and resides in Jackson.


On the 40-year anniversary of Evers' assassination, hundreds of civil rights veterans, government officials, and students from across the country gathered around his grave site 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.[19] Evers was the subject of the students' research project.


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.  The ship was christened by Myrlie Evers-Williams on November 12, 2011.


In popular culture

The murder and subsequent trials caused an uproar. Musician Bob Dylan wrote his 1963 song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about the assassination. Nina Simone wrote and sang "Mississippi Goddam" about the Evers case and Phil Ochs wrote the songs "Another Country" and "Too Many Martyrs" (also titled "The Ballad Of Medgar Evers") in response to the killing, with Matthew Jones and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers also recording the latter song.  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 1963.


Evers' story inspired a 1991 episode of the NBC TV series In the Heat of the Night, entitled "Sweet, Sweet Blues", written by author William James Royce. The story tells of a murder of a young black man and the elderly white man, played by actor James Best, who seems to have gotten away with the 40-year-old murder. (The TV episode preceded by several years the trial that convicted Beckwith.) In the Heat of the Night won its first NAACP Image Award for Best Dramatic Series that season.

The 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi, directed by Rob Reiner, tells the story of the 1994 retrial of Beckwith, in which prosecutor DeLaughter of the US District Attorney's office secured a conviction in federal court. Beckwith and DeLaughter were played by James Woods and Alec Baldwin, respectively; Whoopi Goldberg played Myrlie Evers. Evers was portrayed by James Pickens, Jr.. The film was based on a book of the same name.

Robert DeLaughter wrote a first-person narrative article entitled "Mississippi Justice" published in Reader's Digest, and a book, Never Too Late: A Prosecutor's Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case (2001), based on his experiences.

See also

International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics
List of civil rights leaders
References[edit]

^ per Charles Evers bio "Have no Fear" page 5
^ Ellis, Kate; Smith, Stephen (2011). "State of Siege: Mississippi Whites and the Civil Rights Movement". American Public Media. Retrieved February 19, 2011.
^ a b Baden, M. M. (2006): Chapter III: Time of Death and Changes after Death. Part 4: Exhumation. In: Spitz, W. U. & Spitz, D. J. (eds): Spitz and Fisher’s Medicolegal Investigation of Death. Guideline for the Application of Pathology to Crime Investigations (Fourth edition), Charles C. Thomas, pp. 174-83; Springfield, Illinois.
^ a b Williams, Reggie. (2005, July 2). Remembering Medgar. Afro King - American Red Star, p. A.1. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from Black Newspapers.
^ Sina, “Freedom Hero: Medgar Wiley Evers.” The My Hero Project, 2005. Accessed: 25 Oct 2009.
^ Evers-Williams, Myrlie; Marable, Manning (2005). The Autobiography Of Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches. Basic Civitas Books. ISBN 0-465-02177-8.
^ Padgett, John B. “Medgar Evers.” The Mississippi Writers Page, University of Mississippi. 2008. Accessed: 2 September 2010.
^ David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 75, 80-81.
^ Myra Ribeiro (1 October 2001). The Assassination of Medgar Evers. The Rosen Publishing Group. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-8239-3544-4. Retrieved 27 September 2012.
^ a b Nikki L. M. Brown; Barry M. Stentiford (30 September 2008). The Jim Crow Encyclopedia: Greenwood Milestones in African American History. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 277–8. ISBN 978-0-313-34181-6. Retrieved 27 September 2012.
^ Birnbaum, p. 490.
^ Dufresne, Marcel (October 1991). "Exposing the Secrets of Mississippi Racism". American Journalism Review.
^ Minrose Gwin"Mourning Medgar: Justice, Aesthetics, and the Local", Southern Spaces, 2008.
^ "NAACP Spingarn Medal". Naacp.org. Retrieved 2013-06-13.
^ "For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story". www.allrovi.com. Retrieved 2011-09-12.
^ "Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport". Jackson Municipal Airport Authority. 2013. Retrieved 22 January 2013.
^ "NAACP Chairwoman Myrlie Evers-Williams Will Not Seek Re-Election". Books.google.com. 1998-03-02. Retrieved 2013-06-13.
^ "Charles Evers's biography, PBS". Pbs.org. Retrieved 2013-06-13.
^ "Medgar Evers", Arlingon Cemetery. Note: Bradford later was notable for his work in helping reopen the Mississippi Burning and Clyde Kennard cases.
^ Lottie L. Joiner (July 2003), "The nation remembers Medgar Evers", The Crisis, 110(4), 8. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from Research Library Core.
^ Mabus, Ray, "The Navy Honors a Civil Rights Pioneer." The White House Blog. 9 Oct 2009. Accessed: 2 Sep 2010.
^ "A Memorial for Medgar", San Diego Union-Tribune, November 13, 2011.
^ a b "NAACP Evers biography". Naacp.org. Retrieved 2013-06-13.
^ "Where Is The Voice Coming From?", The New Yorker July 6, 1963 by Eudora Welty
^ "Image Awards". imdb.com. 1992. Retrieved 12 September 2011.
^ Vollers, Maryanne (April 1995). Ghosts of Mississippi: the murder of Medgar Evers, the trials of Byron de la Beckwith, and the haunting of the new South. Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-91485-7. Retrieved 2011-09-12.
^ "Biography of Bobby B. DeLaughter". 2002. Retrieved 2011-09-29.
^ "''Never Too Late: A Prosecutor's Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case'', New York: Simon and Schuster". Books.simonandschuster.co.uk. Retrieved 2013-06-13.
External links[edit]

    Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Medgar Evers
Audio recording of T.R.M. Howard's eulogy at the memorial service for Medgar Evers, June 15, 1963, Jackson, Mississippi.
Myrlie Evers (28 June 1963). 'He said he wouldn't mind dying - if...'. LIFE. pp. 34–47.
Gwin, Minrose. "Mourning Medgar: Justice, Aesthetics, and the Local" March 11, 2008. Southern Spaces http://southernspaces.org/2008/mourning-medgar-justice-aesthetics-and-local
Medgar Evers in the U.S. Federal Census American Civil Rights Pioneers
Medgar Evers biography at africawithin.com
Medgar Evers at the Internet Movie Database
imbd.com
FBI
Medgar Evers at Find a Grave Retrieved on February 22, 2010

Myrlie Louise Evers, widow of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, leans down to kiss her late husband's forehead before the casket was opened for public viewing at a funeral home in Jackson, Ms. on June 13, 1963. Medgar Evers, who was the first Mississippi field director of NAACP, 1954-1963, was shot in front of his home early Wednesday. Funeral services will be held on Saturday. With Mrs. Evers is Charles Evers, her brother-in-law. (AP Photo)

 
http://thegrio.com/2013/06/05/president-barack-obama-meets-with-myrlie-evers-at-white-house/ 

President Barack Obama meets with Myrlie Evers at White House
by Carrie Healey 

June 5, 2013

The Grio.com

The widow of Medgar Evers, as well as her children and grandchildren, were invited to the White House to commemorate the upcoming 50th anniversary of the assassination of her husband, Medgar Evers.

The Mississippi Civil Rights Activist was assassinated on June 12, 1963 for working to end segregation.

Senior adviser to the president Valerie Jarrett called yesterday’s meeting a “deeply poignant moment,” reports White House Correspondent April Ryan.

A World War II veteran, Medgar Evers is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.   Jarrett said President Obama told Myrlie Evers this “demonstrates that he is a warrior of justice.”

According to Ryan, Evers presented Obama with two black and white portrait originals before leaving.  One was a portrait of Rosa Parks and the other was a portrait of Coretta Scott King with Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers.


http://youtu.be/jIyivVDdzyU
 

Medgar Evers’ widow:

‘Jim Crow is alive…in a Brooks Brothers suit’
by Morgan Whitaker, @morganwinn

06/12/2013

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/politicsnation/52184921

On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights hero Medgar Evers, his widow Myrlie Evers-Williams says segregation has not disappeared.


“Jim Crow is alive, and it’s dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, my friend, instead of a white robe,” she said on PoliticsNation Wednesday.


She talked about the progress she’s seen in the last half-century–and current threats to that progress, like voter suppression.


“Look at some of the racist things that are still happening in America,” she said. “For instance when President Obama was reelected there was rioting at the University of Mississippi because of that. There are still deaths that take place. We look at those things that have happened to keep people from voting.”


“These negatives are not as pronounced as they were in the 50′s and 60′s because we don’t have people in the streets marching today,” she said. “But that’s serious.”


Evers-Williams became a civil rights leader in her own right after Medgar Evers’ death. She fought for decades to see his murderer, Byron De La Beckwith, brought to justice, and became the first Chairwoman of the NAACP.
When asked how she stood by her husband, despite the threats they dealt with as he pursued his activism, she had a simple answer.


“Love. I loved and respected Medgar tremendously,” she said. “He knew who he was. He was a veteran of World War II, he had seen many things happen in his area where he lived in Decatur, Mississippi, and had made a determination that he would do whatever he could to bring America around to the point of keeping its promises, because he had fought for the country and then had to come home and be a second-class citizen.”


“What happened was his determination to do whatever he could, register people, get them to vote, challenge the system of education and so many other things that needed attention. I came along with the job,”  she said. ”And I hate to say it but I must, I wasn’t always there with him.”


Evers-Williams said she always knew retaliation was coming for the work that she and her husband did.


“We reached a point in our marriage where I challenged him about what he was doing and he replied to me, ‘Either you are with me or you aren’t.’ And I told him, ‘I’ll let you know when I make my decision.’”


Although separation was never on the table, she said they had serious conversations about balancing their family life and activist work.


She described also described the night of Medgar’s assassination in detail. Their children were awake, having stayed up at their father’s request to watch President Kennedy’s address to the nation. She expected him home at any minute when she heard the rifle blast.


To this day, the memory brings tears to her eyes. She wept last week at a memorial held at his gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. ”There were tears, tears of sadness, wishing that Medgar had survived, but knowing full well that it was our duty and responsibility as well as others’ to carry the movement forward, and I certainly have felt that responsibility,” she said.


“Fifty years later, I might be a little tired,” she added. “I might be a little weary, but I can’t stop, because there’s too much at stake.”