Medgar Willie Evers

Medgar Wiley Evers

Medgar Wiley Evers (July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963) was an African American civil rights activist from Mississippi involved in efforts to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi. Evers got his high school diploma by walking twelve miles to school and twelve miles back each week day. During World War Two, he joined the American Army and was honourably discharged from it in 1946. He married classmate Myrlie Beasley on December 24, 1951, and completed work on his degree the following year.

Despite fighting for his country as part of the Battle of Normandy, Evers soon found that his skin color gave him no freedom when he and five friends were forced away at gunpoint from voting in a local election.

When his application was rejected, Evers became the focus of an NAACP campaign to desegregate the school, a case aided by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education 347 US 483 that segregation was unconstitutional. In December of that year, Evers became the NAACP's first field officer in Mississippi.

Despite several warnings from local white racist groups, Evers continued to organize protests against Jim Crow laws in Mississippi. On 11th June 1963 Lena Horne arranged to speak on the same platform as Medgar Evers. That night he was murdered in the driveway of his home. Horne said: "Nobody black or white who really believes in democracy can stand aside now; everybody's got to stand up and be counted.

Evers was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council. As a veteran, Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. His murder and the resulting trials inspired civil rights protests, as well as numerous works of art, music, and film.

The gifts of God should be enjoyed by all citizens in Mississippi.

 

"If we don't like what the Republicans do, we need to get in there and change it."

Our only hope is to control the vote.

 

You can kill a man but you can't kill an idea

I'd see the bus pass every day... But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world."  Rosa Parks

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. “ Martin Luther King Jr.