Medgar Evers

Medgar Evers was the third of five children on a small Decatur, Mississippi, farm, and he and his siblings walked 12 miles round trip to reach the segregated school that was open to them. He enlisted in the Army at 17 in 1943 and served in a segregated port company that came ashore at Normandy in June 1944 and then ran supply convoys through France on the Red Ball Express. What he saw there — Black American soldiers still treated as inferior while Free French troops of the same color were not — set the direction of the rest of his life. He came home, finished a business degree at Alcorn A&M in 1952, and married a classmate, Myrlie Beasley, that December.

For nine years he ran the NAACP's entire Mississippi operation from a Jackson storefront, building new chapters and pushing voter drives into towns where that alone could get a man killed. A sniper ended it in his own carport just after midnight, and two juries in a row could not agree on a verdict. BriefHistory covers the killing, the hung juries, and the 1994 trial. What follows is the man before that office existed, and what a threat like that one cost his family while he was still alive to feel it.

The danger was not abstract, and the household was built around it. Myrlie and the children rehearsed what to do at the sound of gunfire or an unfamiliar car in the drive — get down, stay away from windows and doors. On May 28, 1963, someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the family's carport — ten days later a car swerved at him as he left the NAACP office. Years earlier, insurance sales work at Mound Bayou had doubled as cover for T.R.M. Howard's Regional Council of Negro Leadership, driving unmarked back roads through the Delta to organize sharecroppers who could be killed for registering to vote. On the last night of his life, he told Myrlie he felt more exposed than usual. He was right.

Two institutions carry his name: Medgar Evers College, founded in Brooklyn in 1969 — the same year his brother Charles was elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, one of the first Black mayors in the Deep South since Reconstruction — and Jackson's international airport, renamed for him in 2004. Myrlie Evers-Williams chaired the NAACP's national board from 1995 to 1998, and in 2013 became the first woman and first layperson to deliver the invocation at a presidential inauguration, at Barack Obama's second. In May 2024, sixty-one years after the murder, President Biden awarded Evers a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Medgar Evers's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Mississippi NAACP field office mission
  Built from nothing into the state's largest civil rights organizing operation 1954
• University of Mississippi Law School test case case
  His own rejected application opened the legal fight to integrate the university 1954
• Emmett Till murder investigation case
  Gathered evidence and witness accounts after Till's killing near Money, Mississippi 1955
• Mississippi voter registration campaigns mission
  Organized drives statewide despite bombings and constant threats 1962
• Medgar Evers College building
  Founded in Brooklyn and named for him after his death 1969

• July 2, 1925 aged 0 Born in Decatur, Mississippi
• c. 1930s aged ~10 Walks 12 miles round trip to a segregated school
• 1943 aged ~18 Enlists in the U.S. Army at seventeen
• June 1944 aged 18 Comes ashore at Normandy with a segregated port company
• December 24, 1951 aged 26 Marries Myrlie Beasley
• 1952 aged ~27 Graduates Alcorn A&M with a degree in business administration
• November 24, 1954 aged 29 Named the NAACP's first field secretary for Mississippi
• May 28, 1963 aged 37 A Molotov cocktail is thrown into the family's carport
• June 12, 1963 aged 37 Assassinated outside his home in Jackson

• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. marched at his funeral
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. addressed the nation on civil rights hours before the murder
• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. NAACP colleague
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. inherited the same fight, a century later
• Ida B. Wells 1862–1931
  Journalist and anti-lynching crusader whose investigative reporting exposed racial terror in the South. anti-lynching predecessor