Medgar Evers

Civil rights activist Medgar Evers was the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. As such, he organized voter-registration efforts and economic boycotts, and investigated crimes perpetrated against blacks. Evers was assassinated outside of his Mississippi home in 1963, and after years of on-again, off-again legal proceedings, his killer was sent to prison in 1994. In 2017, President Barack Obama designated Evers’ home a national historic landmark.He worked to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi, end the segregation of public facilities, and expand opportunities for African Americans, which included the enforcement of voting rights.

Early life

Medgar Evers was born in July 2 1925 in Decatur Mississippi. He went to Alcorn state University, he had three children. He’s father’s names was James Evers’ and he’s mother’s names was Jesse wright. He was the third child of five children. His family owned a sawmill and he attended a segregated school with his siblings and he graduated from high school. Medgar served in the United States Army during World War II from 1943 to 1945. He was sent to the European Theater where he fought in the Battle of Normandy in June 1944.

A college graduate, Evers became active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. Following the 1954 ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Evers challenged the segregation of the state-supported public University of Mississippi, applying to law school there. He also worked for voting rights, economic opportunity, access to public facilities, and other changes in the segregated society. Evers was awarded the 1963 NAACP Spingarn Medal.

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. All-white juries in February and April 1964 deadlocked on De La Beckwith’s guilt and failed to reach a verdict. At the time, most blacks were still disenfranchised by Mississippi’s constitution and voter registration practices; this meant they were also excluded from juries, which were drawn from the pool of registered voters.

Myrlie Evers never gave up the fight for a conviction of her husband’s murderer. She waited until a new judge had been assigned in the county to take her case against de la Beckwith back into the courtroom.In 1994, De La Beckwith was prosecuted by the state based on new evidence. Bobby DeLaughter was the prosecutor. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed for an autopsy.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 had been imprisoned from 1977 to 1980 on separate charges: conspiring to murder A.I. Botnick.) In 1997,De La Beckwith appealed his conviction in the Evers case, but the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld it. He died at age 80 in prison on January 21, 2001.

Evers was memorialized by leading Mississippi and national authors both black and white: James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, and Anne Moody. In 1963, Evers was posthumously awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP.[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 television movie was made based on the book. Celebrating Evers’s life and career, it starred Howard Rollins Jr. and Irene Cara as Medgar and Myrlie Evers, airing on PBS. The film won the Writers Guild of America award for Best Adapted Drama.