Medgar Evers

Medgar Wiley Evers was born in Decatur, Mississippi, on the second of July 1925. He served in the United States Army during the Second World War, fought at the Normandy invasion, took his undergraduate degree at Alcorn A&M, and in 1954 became the first NAACP field secretary in Mississippi — a position the organization had created specifically to mount a sustained civil-rights presence in the most violent of the segregated states.

For the next nine years he investigated lynchings, organized voter-registration drives across the Mississippi Delta, recruited James Meredith into his historic 1962 enrollment at the University of Mississippi, and reported the cases that became the legal foundation of much of the federal civil-rights enforcement of the 1960s. He survived multiple assassination attempts. His home in Jackson, Mississippi, was firebombed weeks before his death.

He was shot in the back outside his home on the twelfth of June 1963, having returned from an NAACP meeting at approximately 12:40 AM. He died at the hospital ninety minutes later. His three children, asleep inside the house, woke to the sound of the rifle round. He was thirty-seven.

His assassin, Byron De La Beckwith, was tried twice in 1964 — both juries hung. He went free for the next thirty years. Beckwith was retried in 1994 on the basis of new evidence, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 2001.

Medgar Evers' funeral was held at Arlington National Cemetery — the first time a private citizen had been so interred. His widow Myrlie Evers-Williams continued his work; she served as Chair of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998.

He is honored here as the field secretary whose nine years built Mississippi's modern civil-rights infrastructure.