Medgar Evers, The Man Who Stayed

On the night of June twelfth, nineteen sixty-three, Medgar Evers pulled into his driveway on Guynes Street in Jackson, Mississippi, returning from an NAACP rally at the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street. He was carrying a stack of T-shirts that read Jim Crow Must Go. A bullet fired from an Enfield rifle struck him in the back. He died less than an hour later at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He was thirty-seven years old.

Evers had been the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, appointed in nineteen fifty-four, the same year the Supreme Court decided Brown versus Board of Education. He had grown up in Decatur, in Newton County, had served in World War Two at Normandy, and had returned home to find that the country he fought for considered him a second-class citizen. He applied to the University of Mississippi law school and was rejected. He chose to fight differently.

For nine years he organized voter registration drives, investigated racial killings, documented the murder of Emmett Till, and survived multiple attempts on his life. The White Citizens Council of Mississippi made no secret of its view that he needed to be stopped. Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and Citizens Council member from Greenwood, was arrested for the murder within days. He was tried twice in nineteen sixty-four; both all-white juries deadlocked. He walked free.

De La Beckwith lived openly in Mississippi for three more decades, occasionally boasting of the killing, until a third trial, built on new evidence assembled by journalist Myrlie Evers-Williams and the Hinds County district attorney's office, ended in conviction on February fifth, nineteen ninety-four. Beckwith was seventy-three years old. He died in prison in two thousand one.

Medgar Evers is buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. His home in Jackson is a National Historic Landmark. The street he died on has been renamed in his honor.