Medgar Evers Unisex T-Shirt

Description

Evers was born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, the third of five children (including elder brother Charles Evers) of Jesse (Wright) and James Evers. The family included Jesse’s two children from a previous marriage. The Evers family owned a small farm and James also worked at a sawmill. Evers and his siblings walked 12 miles (19 kilometers) a day to attend segregated schools; eventually Medgar earned his high school diploma.

Evers 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. After the end of the war, Evers was honorably discharged as a sergeant.

In 1948, Evers enrolled at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (a historically black college, now Alcorn State University), majoring in business administration. He also competed on the debate, football, and track teams, sang in the choir, and was junior class president. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1952.

On December 24, 1951, he married classmate Myrlie Beasley. Together they had three children: Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise, and James Van Dyke Evers.

Activism

The couple moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a town developed by African Americans, where Evers became a salesman for T. R. M. Howard‘s Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company. Evers was also president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), which began to organize actions for civil rights; Evers helped organize the RCNL’s boycott of gasoline stations that denied blacks the use of the stations’ restrooms. Evers and his brother Charles attended the RCNL’s annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954, which drew crowds of 10,000 or more.

In 1954, following the U.S. Supreme Court decision that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Evers applied to the state-supported University of Mississippi Law School, but his application was rejected because of his race. He submitted his application as part of a test case by the NAACP.

On November 24, 1954, Evers was named as the NAACP’s first field secretary for Mississippi. In this position, he helped organize boycotts and set up new local chapters of the NAACP. He was involved with James Meredith‘s efforts to enroll in the University of Mississippi in the early 1960s.

Evers also encouraged Dr. Gilbert Mason Sr. in his organizing of the Biloxi wade-ins from 1959 to 1963, protests against segregation of the city’s public beaches on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Evers conducted actions to help integrate Jackson’s privately owned buses and tried to integrate the public parks. He led voter registration drives, and used boycotts to integrate Leake County schools and the Mississippi State Fair.

Evers’s civil rights leadership, along with his investigative work, made him a target of white supremacists. Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, local whites founded the White Citizens’ Council in Mississippi, and numerous local chapters were started, to resist the integration of schools and facilities. In the weeks before Evers was killed, he encountered new levels of hostility. His public investigations into the 1955 lynching of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi, and his vocal support of Clyde Kennard, had made him a prominent black leader. On May 28, 1963, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home. On June 7, 1963, Evers was nearly run down by a car after he came out of the NAACP office in Jackson, Mississippi.

Assassination

The rifle used by De La Beckwith to murder Evers

Medgar Evers lived with the constant threat of death. A large white supremacist population and the Ku Klux Klan were present in Jackson and its suburbs. The risk was so high that before his death, Evers and his wife Myrlie had trained their children on what to do in case of a shooting, bombing or other kind of attack on their lives. Evers, who was regularly followed home by at least two FBI cars and one police car, arrived at his home on the morning of his death without an escort. None of his usual protection was present, for reasons unspecified by the FBI or local police. There has been speculation that many members of the police force at the time were members of the Klan.

In the early morning of Wednesday, June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy‘s nationally televised Civil Rights Address, Evers pulled into his driveway after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. Evers’ family had worried for his safety that day, and Evers himself had warned his wife that he felt in greater danger than usual.

Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go“, Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Eddystone Enfield 1917 rifle; the bullet passed through his heart. Initially thrown to the ground by the impact of the shot, Evers rose and staggered 30 feet (10 meters) before collapsing outside his front door. His wife, Myrlie, was the first to find him.

He was taken to the local hospital in Jackson, where he was initially refused entry because of his race. His family explained who he was and he was admitted; he died in the hospital 50 minutes later. He was only 37 years old. Evers was the first black man to be admitted to an all-white hospital in Mississippi. Mourned nationally, Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery, where he received full military honors before a crowd of more than 3,000.

After Evers was assassinated, an estimated 5,000 people marched from the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street to the Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street in Jackson. Allen Johnson, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders led the procession. The Mississippi police came prepared with riot gear and rifles in case the protests turned violent. While tensions were initially high in the stand-off between police and marchers, both in Jackson and in many similar marches around the state, leaders of the movement maintained nonviolence among their followers.

Trials

On June 21, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the 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 black people 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 did not give up the fight for the conviction of her husband’s killer. 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 and the US Supreme Court declined to hear it. He died at age 80 in prison on January 21, 2001.

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