Medgar Evers, The Carport

Medgar Wiley Evers was born on July second, nineteen twenty-five, in Decatur, Mississippi. He served in the United States Army in Europe during World War II, came home, tried to vote in the Democratic primary on July second, nineteen forty-six, his twenty-first birthday, and was turned away by a white mob at the courthouse steps. He tried again the following year. He was turned away again.

He became the first field secretary the NAACP had ever stationed in Mississippi, beginning in November nineteen fifty-four. His office was in Jackson. His territory was the entire state. He drove its roads in the years when a Black man driving through rural Mississippi alone at night could disappear and no one would say what happened. He organized chapters, registered voters, investigated murders, including the murder of Emmett Till in nineteen fifty-five. He received constant death threats. His name appeared on lists.

The house he and his wife Myrlie and their three children lived in, at two thousand three hundred thirty-two Margaret Walker Alexander Drive in the Elraine Subdivision, was the first post-World War II subdivision built for middle-class African Americans in Mississippi. He chose a house at the end of a carport, which afforded some protection. He had thought about the angles.

On the night of June twelfth, nineteen sixty-three, Evers returned from a meeting at approximately twelve thirty in the morning. He stepped out of his car in the carport. A rifle shot came from behind a hedge across the street. Evers was struck in the back and fell in the driveway. Myrlie and the children heard the shot and came out the front door. He was taken by neighbors to a local hospital, where he died approximately fifty minutes after the shooting.

Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman from Greenwood, a member of the White Citizens' Council, was arrested with his fingerprints on the murder weapon's riflescope. He was tried twice in nineteen sixty-four. All-white juries failed to convict on both occasions. He went free.

The house where Medgar Evers was killed is now a National Monument. It is the same house. The carport is still there.