Medgar Evers

Mississippi used to be one of the most segregated states in the country. But this all changed as one Black man stood up to stop the madness. This man was Medgar Wiley Evers, a political activist that propelled the Civil Rights Movement further than he knew he could. He dedicated his whole life to the Civil Rights Movement which also led to his untimely death.

On July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, Medgar Evers became one of the four children of James and Jessie Evers. During Medgar’s childhood, his parents showered him with love and joy even though his father worked in a sawmill and his mother was a laundress. Because of this, the family didn’t make much profit, but nevertheless, his family was strict about education, religion, and hard work.

During Medgar Evers’ childhood, he witnessed many tragic things that would leave him scarred for life and would cause him to rebel in the future. At only the age of fourteen, Medgar witnessed a horrible and tragic event. A friend of Medgar’s father, Tingle, was dragged behind a wagon through the streets of Decatur. He was later shot and hanged in accusation of insulting a White woman. Everyday that Medgar would go to his under-funded school, he would pass by the tree from which Tingle was hanged, and he would recall the bloody clothes and the tragic death of his father’s friend. He would never forget it.

At the age of seventeen in 1942, Medgar volunteered and was inducted into the United States Army where he fought in World War II. He was assigned to a segregated port battalion, which was normal at the time, but this only maddened him. Once he made it home safely from the war, he wanted to vote against the segregated battalions. So, in the summer of 1946, Medgar, his brother Charles, and many other Black veterans registered to vote at the Decatur city hall. But when Election Day came around, Medgar and the other veterans were forced away at gunpoint from casting their ballots by a mob of angry White people. This angered Medgar even more and this was when his tension snapped. This is the key event that finally sparked his rebellion.

Back in Medgar Evers’ time, Black people and White people weren’t allowed to be “separate but equal” in the south. Medgar Evers did not support segregation, and did many things to oppose it by helping the Civil Rights Movement. He participated in many boycotts, desegregated the University of Mississippi, and even became the first NAACP (National Association of the Advancement of Colored People) field officer in Mississippi. Along with all of the things listed above, Medgar also helped with the public investigations of Emmett Till, a young Black boy that was kidnapped and murdered after being accused of “flirting” with the wife of a White grocery shop owner named Roy Bryant, by disguising himself as a cotton picker, to see if he could gather some information on where Emmett Till might have been after he had gone missing. All of these things made Medgar very popular in the quest for equal rights between Black and White Americans, but it also made him a popular target for many segregationists.

Although Medgar Evers had catapulted Civil Rights Movement far, it had left him vulnerable to attack, and the day of the attack finally came on June 12, 1963. As Medgar came home from an integration meeting with the NAACP carrying T-shirts that had: “Jim Crow Must Go” sprawled across the front, a sniper’s bullet dug itself deep into Medgar’s back. He stumbled blindly about thirty feet until he finally collapsed. His wife, Myrlie, heard the high-powered rifle’s shot, and ran outside to find Medgar lying face-down in the carport, in a pool of blood. Medgar died soon after in the hospital due to the loss of blood and internal injuries.

After Medgar’s tragic death, a high-powered rifle, which was thought to have been the weapon that killed Medgar, was found in the thicket of some bushes approximately 150 feet from Medgar’s carport. The fingerprints on the rifle were still fresh and they were identified as those of Byron De La Beckwith, former member of the White Citizens’ Council and KKK (Ku Klux Klan). Beckwith was tried twice for Medgar’s murder in front of all-white male jurors but wasn’t found guilty. But when he was tried thirty years later in front of eight Blacks and four Whites, he was given a life sentence. He only served seven years though, before dying of a heart attack on January 21, 2001.

At Medgar’s funeral, about three hundred young mourners began singing and moving in a mass toward Capital Street, the main street of the capital city. The police reacted by using billy-clubs and dogs to disperse them, but the crowd responded by hurling bricks, bottles, and rocks. And this isn’t the only thing that happened after Medgar’s death. Many songs, statues, and monuments were made in his honor. Even a whole school was constructed in honor of him.

Even though Medgar Evers never got to finish his job, he had catapulted the Civil Rights Movement further than he thought he could. He might not know it, but even if his death seemed like the worst possible thing for the Civil Rights Movement then, it seems that it actually helped the Civil Rights Movement even more because more people had started to get involved as they were inspired by him during his short, but great life.