Medgar Evers

Civil rights activist, Medgar Evers, was born in Decatur, Mississippi, in 1925. At age eighteen he left Mississippi and enlisted in the United States Army, where he fought in both France and Germany during World War II before receiving an honorable discharge in 1946.

In 1948, he entered Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Lorman, Mississippi. During his senior year, Evers married a fellow student, Myrlie Beasley; they later had three children: Darrell, Reena, and James. After graduating in 1952, Evers moved his family to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he worked as an insurance salesman.

In 1954, the year of the momentous Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which should have ended segregation of schools, Medgar quit the insurance business; he applied for, and was denied, admission to the University of Mississippi Law School. His unsuccessful effort to integrate Mississippi’s oldest public educational institution attracted the attention of the NAACP’s national office.

Medgar Evers moved to Jackson and became the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. As such, he recruited members throughout Mississippi and organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations, and economic boycotts of white-owned companies that practiced discrimination; he worked to investigate crimes perpetrated against blacks, most notably the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy who had allegedly been killed for talking to a white woman.

As early as 1955, Evers’ activism made him the most visible civil rights leader in Mississippi. As a result, he and his family were subjected to numerous threats and violent actions over the years, including a firebombing of their house in May 1963. Then, on June 12, 1963, at 12:40 a.m., Medgar Evers was shot in the back, in the driveway of his home, in Jackson.

He died less than a hour later at a nearby hospital.

A police and FBI investigation of the murder soon had a suspect--Byron De La Beckwith, a white segregationist and founding member of Mississippi's White Citizens Council. Despite substantial evidence against him--a rifle found near the scene was registered to Beckwith, had his fingerprints on the scope, and witnesses placed him in the area—Beckwith denied shooting Evers. He maintained that the gun had been stolen, and produced several witnesses to testify that he was elsewhere on the night of the murder.

Two trials followed; Beckwith received the support of some of Mississippi's most prominent citizens; then-Governor Ross Barnett appeared at Beckwith's first trial to shake hands with him in full view of the jury. In 1964, Beckwith was set free after two all-white juries deadlocked.
After the second trial, Myrlie Evers moved with her children to California, where she earned a degree from Pomona College and was later named to the Los Angeles Commission of Public Works. Convinced that her husband's killer had not been brought to justice, she continued to search for new evidence in the case.

In 1989, the question of Beckwith's guilt was again raised when a Jackson newspaper published accounts of files from the now-defunct Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, an organization that helped the maintenance of segregation. The accounts showed that the commission helped Beckwith's lawyers screen potential jurors, but a review by the Hinds County District Attorney's office found no evidence of jury tampering. The DA's office did locate a number of new witnesses, including several individuals who would testify that Beckwith bragged about the murder.

In December 1990, Beckwith was once again indicted for the murder of Medgar Evers. After a number of appeals, the Mississippi Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of a third trial in April 1993. Ten months later, testimony began before a racially mixed jury of eight blacks and four whites. In February 1994, nearly 31 years after Evers' death, Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died in January 2001 at the age of 80.

It took thirty years for justice to be served. That is unconscionable.