Remembering the 40th anniversary of rights-activist Medgar Evers’ death
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) – It was after midnight when Medgar Evers’ family heard his car tires crunch along the gravel driveway of their home. Evers’ wife, Myrlie, and three children – 9-year-old Darrell, 8-year-old Reena and 3-year-old Van – had stayed up late watching President Kennedy’s civil rights speech on television.
They waited for the door to open and Medgar Evers, field secretary of the state NAACP, to enter.
Instead, they heard the shot that killed him.
On June 12, 1963 – 40 years ago this week – Medgar Evers was cut down at the hands of a white segregationist in the driveway of his home in northwest Jackson.
He was 37.
Yet rather than snuffing out a fledgling civil rights movement, the death focused attention on the plight of blacks across the South and reverberated across the nation.
Several events this week, including an Evers family homecoming Tuesday in Decatur, will mark the anniversary and recognize the legacy of the civil rights leader.
“The attitudes of whites in this state have changed tremendously toward blacks,” said Charles Evers, the slain man’s brother.
“I have white friends now who wouldn’t have had anything to do with me 40 years ago.”
Late last month, a racially diverse group of teenagers from New York listened to stories about the slain leader.
Zach Barasz, 17, said he had only recently started to learn about Evers.
In lessons about the civil rights movement, “it’s all Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King,” Barasz said.
“You never hear about Medgar Evers. But, it took a whole lot more than just the big people to do the civil rights movement.”
Evers became an NAACP leader in 1954, after the University of Mississippi, then all-white, rejected his law school application.
During those turbulent times, even joining the NAACP could bring death threats from whites who felt their way of life was under attack.
Through the NAACP, Evers pushed to increase black voter registration, led business boycotts and helped bring attention to murders like the 1955 slaying of black teenager Emmett Till.
“Understand, black people during that time had three choices,” said the Rev. Dolphus Weary, who grew up in Simpson County, 30 miles south of Jackson and was in high school when Evers was killed.
“One choice was to play a role and act happy and stay in your place. Medgar didn’t make that choice.
“The second choice was to rebel. He made a decision to rebel,” said Weary, the executive director of Mission Mississippi, a Christian ministry that promotes racial reconciliation.
The third choice was to leave the state, he said.
Weary said rebellion “was not getting out there and shooting people.”
Instead, it was in everyday acts like going into stores where black people were banned, looking whites in the face or calling them by their first names – even staying on a sidewalk when a white person approached.
Segregationist Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of Evers’ murder 30 years after the shooting.
During two trials in 1964, all-white juries deadlocked and he walked free.
The case was reopened in 1989 when new evidence was uncovered, and a biracial jury convicted Beckwith of murder on Feb. 5, 1994. Beckwith, 80, died Jan. 21, 2001, while still in custody.
Myrlie Evers moved her family to California in 1964.
She later married Walter Williams and was chosen to lead the national NAACP, a post she held from 1995-1998.
Earlier this year, the Mississippi Legislature honored the work of Myrlie Evers-Williams and Medgar Evers.
She said her former husband loved Mississippi, even in the difficult times.
“I love this state, too,” she said. “I find myself pulling back a little when people still say, ‘Oh, Mississippi this’ or ‘Mississippi that.’
“But then some reserve comes up and I find the strength to say, ‘But that’s my state. That is Medgar’s state.”‘
Charles Evers said he always had a pact with his younger brother. If anything should happen to either of them, the other would take over that person’s work.
So, hours after Medgar Evers was killed, Charles Evers left Chicago and returned to Mississippi. For the next six years, Charles Evers worked as the state NAACP field secretary.
Charles Evers became mayor of the tiny town of Fayette in 1969, and in 1971 he became the first black candidate in modern times to make a serious, but unsuccessful, run for governor.
Charles Evers, now a prominent Republican, said Mississippi has changed “almost 100 percent” since his brother’s slaying.
Segregated bus stations and water fountains are long gone. Universities and public schools are desegregated. In Jackson, the main U.S. Post Office and one of the busiest streets are named for Medgar Evers.
“There wasn’t a single black elected official in the state back then. Now Mississippi has more than any other state,” Charles Evers said. “There wasn’t a single black policeman that I know of, other than in Mound Bayou. Now, in every police department you have them.”
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On the Net:
Evers bio: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/evers_medgar/
AP-ES-06-10-03 1513EDT