Medgar Evers

• Born: July 2, 1925
• Birthplace: Decatur, Mississippi
• Died: June 12, 1963
• Place of death: Jackson, Mississippi

Civil rights activist

One of the most prominent civil rights activists in the early 1960’s, Evers led voter-registration drives, economic boycotts, nonviolent sit-ins, and demonstrations in Mississippi in his fight for racial equality and justice. When he was killed by a Ku Klux Klan member in 1963, his death focused national attention on the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi.

Areas of achievement: Civil rights; Social issues

Early Life

Medgar Wiley Evers (MEHD-gahr EH-vurs) was born in Decatur, Mississippi, to James, a landowner, and Jessie Wright Evers, a religious woman who impressed upon her children the necessity of education. Evers received his early education in the segregated schools in Decatur. His high school education entailed a twelve-mile walk to school in neighboring Newton. The Everses instilled in their four children the merits of responsibility and industriousness and the virtues of pride and self-reliance.

Before completing high school, Evers entered the segregated U.S. Army when he was sixteen. He served in the 325th Port Company, led by white officers, most of whom were racists. He received an honorable discharge in 1946. Evers was determined to change the racial climate in his hometown. He and a few other veterans registered to vote; however, on his twenty-first birthday, when he attempted to vote, he and the other veterans were threatened with bodily harm. They did not vote that day but returned to vote in the county election in 1947.

In the fall of 1946, Evers entered the state’s oldest black college, Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (later renamed Alcorn State University), to complete high school and earn a college degree. Although he was a bit of a loner at first, by his junior year he had become very popular, excelling in football and track, editing the college newspaper, and serving as junior class president and vice president of the student forum. During his senior year of college, on December 24, 1951, Evers married Myrlie Beasley of Vicksburg.

After Evers graduated from college in 1952, he and Myrlie moved to Mound Bayou, an all-black town in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, the poorest section of the state. Evers got a job selling insurance for the Magnolia Mutual Insurance Company.

Life’s Work

Evers’s job selling insurance to the Delta’s African American residents, mostly sharecroppers, gave him a firsthand view of their poor living conditions. Each visit with the sharecroppers increased his frustration and anger about their plight, which seemed little better than slavery. He and Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard established the Regional Council of Negro Leadership as a local advocacy group to help the sharecroppers improve their living conditions. Evers also set about reviving the sagging National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to help empower the local black population. As a result of his efforts, the NAACP had twenty-one branches with sixteen hundred members in the state by 1953.

Evers’s leadership abilities, tenacity, and dedication caught the attention of NAACP leaders, who appointed him Mississippi’s first state field secretary in November, 1954. In January, 1955, the Evers family (which included two children, Darrell and Rena), moved to Jackson, the state’s capital, where Evers would become a central figure in the Civil Rights movement. Evers’s firsthand experiences of racism, discrimination, and violence contributed to his fervent desire to use this position to end the oppression of African Americans in Mississippi.

As field secretary, Evers investigated, collected, and publicized data about civil rights violations and filed reports with the NAACP state president. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to end segregation in public schools provided ample grounds for investigations, especially once Mississippi passed a resolution opposing school integration. The resolution gave rise to the formation of White Citizens Councils, groups intent on preserving oppression of African Americans throughout the state through violence, even murder. With killings of African Americans on the rise, Evers was determined to bring Mississippi worldwide shame by publicizing the murders. His investigations placed him in the national spotlight and on a death list.

Much of Evers’s time was consumed by school desegregation. As the Civil Rights movement took desegregation beyond Mississippi’s schools, groups including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by Martin Luther King, Jr., became involved. Although the groups were not embraced by the NAACP, Evers was the stabilizing force who helped them work together. He also worked with the U.S. Justice Department in filing suits against county registrars.

On May 20, 1963, Evers made a speech refuting anti-NAACP remarks made by Jackson’s mayor and demanding an end to segregation. The sit-ins, marches, and rallies indicated that the tide was turning in his favor. On June 12, 1963, after President John F. Kennedy’s speech on national television outlining the civil rights legislation that he would introduce to Congress, Evers was killed by an assassin’s bullet. More than three decades later, in 1994, Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of Evers’s murder.

Significance

Evers was a leading figure in the Civil Rights movement who left a legacy of courage, determination, and hope. He never sought fame or glory, only equal rights and justice for African Americans. Two years after his death, voting had become easier for black Mississippians and the state was desegregated.

Bibliography

Evers, Medgar Wiley. 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 Marble. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005. A comprehensive collection of Evers’s memoranda, transcribed public speeches, and personal notes.

Evers-Williams, Myrlie, and William Peters. For Us, the Living. New York: Doubleday, 1967. Written by his widow, this intimate account of Evers’s life explores the passions that drove his fight against racism and injustice.

Nossiter, Adam. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2002. Narrative about the lives of Evers, Beckwith, and the prosecutor in Beckwith’s first trial.

Salter, John R. Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism. Malabar, Fla.: R. E. Krieger, 1987. Provides a detailed primary account of the Civil Rights movement in Jackson and Evers’s involvement in it.

Vollers, Maryanne. Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. An account of the life of Evers, his murder, and the two failed attempts to convict Beckwith. Includes information from prosecutors, Evers’s family, and Beckwith.