Medgar Evers: Civil Rights Activism and Assassination

Born in 1925 in Decatur Mississippi, Medgar Evers served with the U.S. Army during World War Two, participating in the D-Day invasions at Normandy France, before enrolling in present-day Alcorn State University, graduating in 1952 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in business administration.

Medgar Evers’ Civil Rights Activism

Moving to Mound Bayou Mississippi with his young wife Myrlie, Evers worked as a salesman for the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company, at the same time becoming president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, where his civil rights activism led to the boycott of Mississippi gas stations that banned Blacks from using their restrooms.

Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown V Board of Education decision, which ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Evers submitted his application as a test case to the state-supported University of Mississippi Law School, which was summarily rejected due to the color of his skin.

NAACP, Emmett Till and KKK

That same year, Evers was named the first NAACP field secretary of Mississippi, where his mounting civil rights activism—including his public investigation of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till—Evers and his young family lived with the constant threat of death from racist white hate groups, including the White Citizens’ Council created to block segregation of public schools and the Ku Klux Klan.

In May of 1963, a molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his Jackson home, while on June 7th of that same year, Evers was nearly run down by a car after leaving the Jackson office of the NAACP. Five days later, just hours after President John F. Kennedy delivered a nationally televised civil rights address, Evers was assassinated by avowed segregationist Byron De La Beckwith, who was subsequently acquitted by two all-white juries in February and April of 1964.

Beckwith Convicted

Refusing to give up the fight for justice for her fallen husband, Myrlie Evers sought a retrial based on new evidence in 1994, leading to Beckwith’s February 5th conviction of murder, a full three decades after he ended Evers’s life with a World War One-era Eddystone Enfield rifle.

Beckwith appealed his conviction in 1997, which was later upheld by the Mississippi Supreme Court, passing away in prison on January 21st, 2001, making the activist life and tragic death of Medgar Evers, an early ignition point in a nation’s slow embrace of racial equality.