In memory of Medgar...
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During the Civil Rights Movement, Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers was widely considered"Public Enemy #1" for the Ku Klux Klan and the Whites Citizens Councils that opposed his efforts to register Black Mississippi residents to vote.
The late Medgar Evers
Born in Decatur, Mississippi on July 2, 1925, Evers attended segregated public schools and after graduating from high school, enlisted in the United States Army where he eventually rose to the rank of sergeant while fighting Nazi tyranny in the European Theater during World War II.
Evers returned from the war and enrolled at Alcorn A&M College, which today is Alcorn State University, an HBCU in Lorman, Mississippi. During his senior year of college, Evers applied for a seat in the entering class of the University of Mississippi School of Law—but was denied admission. Undaunted, he began selling life insurance and was named the Field Secretary for the NAACP in 1954.
One of Evers's first major acts was investigating the brutal lynching of Emmett Till, the 14-year old Chicago boy whose gruesome death for the alleged offense of being "uppity" towards a white woman became an international cause celebre. While Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (below) were charged with Till's death, they were acquitted in less than an hour by an all white male jury.
Following the Bryant/Milam acquittals, Evers shifted his focus to voter registration and legal integration. In the 1950′s, the overwhelming majority of Mississippi's counties were Black but due to Jim Crow, the state maintained an apartheid political climate in which only five percent of voting age Blacks were registered and in most elections, fewer than one percent actually cast ballots.
In 1962, Evers took a second crack at the University of Mississippi, this time seeking the help of prominent NAACP lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley in suing the state on behalf of James Meredith, a fellow Army veteran who had finished his sophomore year at predominantly Black Jackson State College (now University). Meredith would eventually integrate Ole Miss despite the best efforts of Governor Ross Barnett and white supremacist rioters in September of 1962—rioters who looted and burned buildings for several days.
Governor Barnett later reached a private agreement with President John F. Kennedy which allowed Federal troops to escort Meredith to campus—all the while allowing him to claim that he did not concede to racial integration at the state's flagship University, one whose nickname was the "Rebels" and whose mascot, "Colonel Reb," was an old white male adorned in Confederate Army regalia.
Tragically, Medgar Evers would not live to see full integration in Mississippi as he was shot in the back in his drive-way as his wife, Myrlie, and children awaited his arrival on June 12, 1963—60 years ago today!
The Evers family at Medgar's funeral sixty years ago this week….
In what would become an interesting historical coincidence, Evers returned to his home that fateful night only hours after President Kennedy had delivered a televised speech in which he addressed Ku Klux Klan violence against Dr. Martin Luther King and the SCLC in Birmingham, Alabama.
As typical in the South during this era, Byron De La Beckwith was charged with murdering Evers—but was twice acquitted of the charge.
Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett (above) waves a Confederate Battle Flag during the Ole Miss vs. LSU football game in September of 1962
In one of the uglier moments of Southern jurisprudence, Governor Barnett attended the first trial in 1964 and as Mrs. Myrlie Evers testified before the all white jury, he stopped and shook De La Beckwith’s hand for all to see; De La Beckwith would later be convicted in 1994 and spent the remainder of his miserable life in prison.
Medgar Evers was buried with full Masonic /G\ rites and military honors at Arlington National Cemetery…
Lest we forget...