Civil Rights Events

Mississippi 1963

The Murder of Medgar Evers

 

By the time Medgar Evers was 28, he had lost a family friend to a lynch mob. He had been turned away from a voting place by a gang of armed white men. He had been denied admission to a Mississippi law school because he was black. Nevertheless, Medgar Evers loved Mississippi. He fought in World War II for the United States “including Mississippi,” he told people. And he returned from overseas with a commitment to steer his home state toward civilization.

That determination and a great deal of personal courage would carry him through many trials during the next nine years. Evers became the first NAACP Field Secretary for Mississippi, and he spent much of 1955 investigating racial killings. Evers’ research on the murders of George Lee, Lamar Smith, Emmett Till and others was compiled in a nationally distributed pamphlet called M is for Mississippi and for Murder.

There was immense danger and little glory attached to civil rights work in Mississippi—even for the NAACP’s highest state official. Medgar Evers was the one who arranged the safe escape of Mose Wright after the elderly black man risked death to testify against the white killers of Emmett Till. It was Medgar Evers who counseled James Meredith through the gauntlet of white resistance when Meredith became the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi. When there were no crises to respond to, there were long hours on the road organizing NAACP chapters (Bullard 1-2).

The Evers family lived under constant threat of violence.  I can recall that, in the days just preceding the Meredith-Oxford crisis in September,  1962 -- all sorts of legal maneuvers were going on in the Federal district  and Fifth Circuit courts -- my wife and I [Hunter Bear] went one Saturday night to the Evers home.  We knew Medgar was probably in New Orleans where the Fifth Circuit was then grinding away, and we thought we should see his wife, Myrlie.  We parked, went to the door, and knocked.  Medgar's police dog was barking in the back yard (fenced up).  There was no answer to our knock and I knocked again.  Then the door opened, only a crack, and I could see a gun.   I called my name and Medgar opened the door, instantly apologetic.  He had come to Jackson for the weekend.  Inside the Evers home, furniture was piled in front of all of the windows.  At least a half dozen firearms were in the living room and kitchen.  The children were in bed and Medgar and his wife and Eldri and myself visited for a good while.  The barricaded nature of the Evers home was not uncommon for a civil rights person in Mississippi; what was uncommon was the fact that both Medgar and his wife were mighty calm.  It was a very pleasant visit -- unusually so considering the fact that, next  perhaps to Meredith, no one was any more prime a target in the Deep South at that time than was Medgar.

… he was cool: I recall leaving Greenwood with him one night at midnight -- and we left at 90 mph -- with Medgar casually talking about a rumor he'd heard to the effect that a segregationist killer outfit in Leflore Co. had installed infra-red lights on the cars, which could allow them to see the highway, but which couldn't be spotted by whoever they were  following.  By the time he finished discussing this, we were going about 100 mph!  But he was driving easily and well and his talk was calm in tone, if not in content.

But Medgar did not take chances, and no one could seriously accuse him of consciously or unconsciously seeking martyrdom.  … Medgar always insisted on people not standing in the light; he, himself, stayed in the shadows -- took every safety precaution.  …

No matter how discouraged he might feel, Medgar was always able to communicate -- or at least made a hell of an effort to communicate -- enthusiasm to those with whom he was working.  In the early days of the Jackson Movement, our "mass" meetings were tiny affairs, yet Medgar always functioned as though the meetings were the last crucial ones before the Revolution broke in Mississippi: he met each person on an equal to equal basis, smiled, joked, gave them the recognition of human dignity that each human being warrants; by the time the meeting began even the little handful of faithful felt it was worth holding.  …

But Medgar Evers could, privately, get discouraged.  In his neighborhood for example, lived many teachers.  Most would scarcely talk to him -- they were scared to death to even see him.  Many of the clergymen in Jackson were afraid to exchange words with him.  One evening Medgar came out to our home at Tougaloo; he'd spent the day trying to draw some teachers into the NAACP.  They had turned thumbs down on it; had even told him, in effect, that the state's Negro community would be better off without him.  He had had it that day and, I recall, talked then -- as he always did when he got discouraged -- about giving up the NAACP field secretary job and getting into the Ole Miss law school in the fall.  … He'd get discouraged, privately -- never publicly, but a day or so later, he'd be back in form.

…

As the boycott went on into the spring, we broadened it into an all-out desegregation campaign -- picketing, sit-ins, massive marches.  This was in May and June, 1963.  It was the first widespread grassroots challenge to the system in Mississippi -- was the Jackson Movement -- and there was solid opposition from [Governor] Barnett right on down.  Mass arrests and much brutality occurred each day; lawmen  from all over the state poured into Jackson to join the several hundred Jackson regulars, the Jackson police auxiliary, state police, etc.  Hoodlums from all over the state -- Klan-types, although the KKK as an organization was just formally beginning in Mississippi -- poured into Jackson.  The National Office of the NAACP, which had reluctantly agreed to support our Jackson campaign, became frightened -- because of the vicious repression and because it was costing money -- and also the National Office was under heavy pressure from the Federal government to let Jackson cool off.  A sharp split occurred on the strategy committee.  Several of us, the youth leaders, myself, Ed King and a few others, wanted to continue, even intensify the mass demonstrations; others, such as the National Office people and conservative clergy wanted to shift everything into a voter registration campaign  (meaningless then, under the circumstances.) There was very sharp internecine warfare between our militant group and the conservatives. Medgar was caught in the middle.  As a staff employee of the National Office, he was under their direct control; as a Mississippian, he knew that only massive demonstrations could crack Jackson.  (And we knew if we cracked Jackson, we had begun to crack the state.) The stakes were high and everyone -- our militant faction on the strategy committee, the conservative group, the segregationists, Federal government -- knew it.

The NAACP National Office began to cut off the bail bond money; and also packed the strategy committee with conservative clergy.  It was a hell of a situation.  Despite everything that I and Ed and the youth leaders could do, the National Office was choking the Jackson Movement to death.  It waned almost into nothing in the second week in June.

I saw Medgar late one afternoon, Tuesday, June 11.  He was dead tired and really discouraged -- sick at what was happening to the Jackson Movement, but too much a staff man to openly challenge it.  …  We had a long talk and, despite the internal situation, an extremely cordial one.  But he was more disheartened than I had ever known him to be.  Later that evening, we were all at a little mass meeting… it was announced by the National Office people that the focus of the Jackson Movement was now officially voter registration -- no more demonstrations.  The boycott, out of which it had all grown, would continue -- but no more demonstrations.  NAACP T-shirts were being sold.  It was a sorry mess.  Medgar had no enthusiasm at all; said virtually nothing at the meeting; looked, indeed, as though he was ready to die (Bear Letter 1-7).

On the night of June 12 President Kennedy announced that he would be sending to Congress legislation that would make it illegal to refuse service to people of color at any "public accommodations," including hotels, restaurants and places of entertainment. "It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service … without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street," Kennedy told a nationwide television audience. "[W]hen Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only.  … Next week," he declared, "I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law" (O’Brien 2-4).

Interviewed in 1986 Sam Block stated: Medgar had just left us, you see, the same night that he was shot. He bid us farewell and told us that he had just stopped by, he had heard about all of the great things that were going on here in Greenwood and he stopped by to let us know that he was 200 percent with everything that was going on and if there was anything to do just let him know and he will come running anytime day or night and he would be there. He let us know that he loved us and keep up the good work. It was a short speech and he left and went into Jackson and later on that same night ... I guess he had just gotten home (Interview Block 51).

Evers watched the presidential address with other NAACP officials. Greatly encouraged, they held a strategy session lasting late into the night. When Evers finally arrived home, it was after midnight. He pulled into his driveway, gathered up a pile of NAACP T-shirts reading “Jim Crow Must Go,” and got out of his car.

Myrlie Evers had let her children wait up for their father that night. They heard his car door slam. “And in that same instant, we heard the loud gunfire,” Mrs. Evers recalled. “The children fell to the floor, as he had taught them to, and I made a run for the front door, turned on the light and there he was. The bullet had pushed him forward, as I understand, and the strong man that he was, he had his keys in his hand, and had pulled his body around the rest of the way to the door. There he lay" (Bullard 4-5).

The bullet had struck Evers in the back, just below his shoulder blade.

 

Across the street on a lightly wooded hill, another man jumped … in pain. The recoil from the Enfield rifle he had just fired drove the scope into his eye, badly bruising him. He dropped the weapon and fled (Medgar 1).

Neighbors lifted Evers onto a mattress and drove him to the hospital, but he was dead within an hour after the shot.

…

Myrlie Evers had often heard her husband counsel forgiveness in the face of violence. But the night he was killed, there was only room for grief and rage in her heart. “I can’t explain the depth of my hatred at that point,” she said later. The next night, with newfound strength, she spoke before 500 people at a rally. She urged them to remain calm and to continue the struggle her husband died for (Bullard 5-6).

Interviewed later, Hunter Bear provided this information.

Our role was clear. Our militant group met immediately. We were up all night and into the next day. The national office people came back, but for the moment we had the momentum. We began having very substantial demonstrations. And all of this was pointing ultimately toward a funeral, which would be held on Saturday, June the 15th.

On one of the demonstrations the police charged several of us who were standing there. Most of the demonstrators were Tougaloo students of mine or Youth Council kids, or their parents. It was on Rose Street. I was standing right next to them. The police charged me particularly, and several people with me, but not the demonstrators, who had been arrested. Several people who were with me at that point ran, but I refused to run … I faced them, they surrounded me and clubbed me into unconsciousness in a bloody mud puddle on Rose Street.

… I was thrown into a paddy wagon, and there was a kid in there who wanted to try to escape and I said don't do it, they'll kill you. And so I kept him from doing that, which would have been very foolish, — ill timed.

… And lots of people were arrested in that Rose Street march. The police had turned out en masse, and so as they were arresting [the marchers], you also had this flying wedge of cops who focused on me. And we all wound up together in the fairgrounds.

An odd thing happened. I was lying in the paddy wagon and they turned the heat up, closed the windows, turned the heat up as high as it could go. And a man came and opened the door to let air in. It was M.B. Pierce, the chief of detectives. And he said to me very quietly, he said, "Professor, I'm sorry about this whole thing." And this was the first indication that something was reaching the other side. …

I was then taken to a hospital and later to the city jail and bonded out pretty quickly, — many stitches and bloody shirt. I made a very dramatic entrance at the Blair Street AME Church and spoke briefly to a cheering throng. But the real action occurred in the pastor's study, when Bill Kunstler and I called Martin King and asked if Dr. King could come to the funeral. And Dr. King said he could and would.

…

On Saturday, I picked up Dr. King at the airport. Kunstler rode with me and Dr. King, and I think Ralph Abernathy was in our car. Wyatt Walker and some others were in another car. We were given a grudging police escort, it was two miles to the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street where the funeral was being held. Jackson was inflamed, the whole state was inflamed, everything was ablaze, so to speak in that sense. Metaphorically.

As I drove my little Rambler with Dr. King sitting on the front seat, I was struck by how cool he was, — how cool we all were. The police hated us with a passion. The escort was very grudging. Snipers could be anywhere. We had a very interesting, matter of fact conversation. We might have been driving from say, Salina Kansas to Abilene or something like that. So we were all very cool. What else could we be?

So I let Dr. King off at the Masonic Temple, and the street was full of Black people going in. I let him and his party off, and Kunstler and so forth, and I went down a ways and parked and came back. By the time I got there, there was no space for me. I went upstairs, where a number of our militant wing of the strategy committee were gathered in a kind of attic that could look down and so we could see the situation. What we didn't see was this deplorable scene where the NAACP national officers tried to keep Martin King off the platform. … eventually they had to let him go up there.

So it was a dramatic funeral. As it developed, there were 5,000-6,000 people who had come from all over the state. Many notable luminaries from afar, — Ralph Bunche was there, others. We had a march then for about two miles, from the Masonic Temple to the Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street. It was very hot, there were police at every intersection, every juncture.

…  it was a legal march. The Mayor had grudgingly, — the day before, — announced that he'd give a parade permit.

We marched for two miles, there are many photos of it. I was in one of the very first ranks, Dr. King was pretty much right in front of me. And Kunstler behind. I'm wearing bandages from the police beating. It was very hot. When we went through the Black neighborhoods, people were out in force. Some joined the march. They certainly were not intimidated by what was happening.
 

When we went through the white neighborhoods, the people watched up from their porches, — they were scared, frightened. For our part, we were a well-dressed group of people, there just happened to be five or six thousand of us marching through Jackson, Mississippi.

We got to the Collins Funeral Home and people had massed in front. Space was limited on Farish Street, but there were people on all the side streets. Nobody wanted to go home. Bill [Kunstler] came up to me and said Dr. King had to get back to where he was, and so Bill borrowed my car and took King and the others to the airport. It was obvious that there wasn't going to be any chance of his joining us. [Bear believed that the national NAACP had put pressure on him to leave].

… we stayed. It was very hot. You had several thousand people gathered there and it was very hot. You had the police all around the edges.

We started to sing, "Oh Freedom," and then everyone began to sing. And then one large group broke from the mass, and we, — I say "we," because I was part of it, — left and went down Farish Street toward Capitol Street. Now we moved down toward Capitol Street, with the police running from our demonstration, running...

Away from us, — they were scared. The police were running and then they massed down there. When we had crossed Capitol in the funeral march, the police were massed on both sides so we couldn't turn onto Capitol Street, — they were afraid of that. And in this second demonstration there was a great deal of interaction. There was very little violence in the mass crowd. There were hundreds, — there may have been much more than that, — I can only give you a sense that there were a hell of a lot of people but not the whole group that had been in the funeral march. And the police were heavily massed down there in all kinds of blue helmets, brown helmets, this and that, and so forth. We had a large, singing, surging demonstration.

[Rev.] Ed King, who'd been actively involved in things was there. The police massed down there, and they began to start pushing us back. They couldn't arrest everybody, they picked out 29 people, including me and Ed King, and 27 others and threw us in the paddy wagons. So from the paddy wagon I was able to look out this little barred window and had a bird's eye view of what was occurring.

I saw hundreds of police coming now back up Farish Street to regain lost ground. I watched police dogs, — which were inflamed, — biting the policemen. Tear gas was all over, the cops were firing shots. All sorts of things were happening. It was not a riot on our part. Non-violence had been preserved even if by the barest of threads sometimes, but we encouraged non-violence, and fought for tactical non-violence. We certainly didn't want people to play into the hands of our enemies who were only too happy to have a Sharpeville if they could have had it. That's what they wanted. [In 1960 police in the South African township of Sharpeville opened fire on a peaceful protest march and killed 69 men, women, and children.]

… The police accused me of inciting to riot and things of that sort. When we got out early in the evening and got back to Tougaloo, we learned that there had been an emergency strategy meeting, which the national office had nominated. And I had been blamed, along with Ed King and some other people, of inciting the "riot."

… all that had happened had been that a few kids had thrown some stones at the police. At that point Doar had come forward in something that was later grossly exaggerated to his advantage, and quote "calmed the throng" unquote. All this had been just a few rocks thrown by some angry kids. No matter what anybody may say to the contrary, that was it, — it was not a riot. And the kids were throwing rocks only after people had been beaten and slugged right and left. And horribly mistreated, and as far as they knew, people had been shot, I mean, it could have happened. I don't think it did, but given the shooting that was going on, it was only by a miracle.

So Doar persuaded people to disperse and go home. And from that point on, it was clear that we had profoundly serious problems. Many people were afraid of what happened, the Governor sent the National Guard into Jackson that night, and they were patrolling the streets along with the other hordes of folk, — enemies. There was an uneasy strategy committee meeting on Monday, where we heard about Federal involvement very openly, — that the President and the Attorney General were going to become involved (Interview Bear 22-29).

Leading the investigation, the local police immediately found the rifle and determined that it had been recently fired. Back at the station, a fingerprint was recovered from the scope and submitted to the FBI (Medgar 2).

On June 23, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for Evers’ murder (NAACP 4).

With the obvious motive, his fingerprint on the weapon, the injury around his eye, his planning, and other factors, Beckwith clearly appeared to be the killer (Medgar 2).

During the course of his first 1964 trial, De La Beckwith was visited by former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and one time Army Major General Edwin A. Walker.

All-white juries twice that year deadlocked on De La Beckwith’s guilt, allowing him to escape justice.

In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence concerning statements he made to others [such as how he had bragged about killing Medgar Evers]. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly excellent state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was convicted on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the murder. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January of 2001 (NAACP 4-5).

The horrific murder, after Kennedy's impassioned plea for reason and civility, stunned the nation. Evers's funeral attracted more than 5,000 mourners and hundreds more greeted his body in Washington, DC, where it had been transported by train for a hero's burial at America's final resting place, Arlington National Cemetery. Evers had been a decorated soldier in World War II, and his widow, Myrlie Evers, had been coaxed by NAACP officials into allowing him to be buried in that most hallowed of spaces to make a statement about the vast injustices being committed on American soil.

It was on the very day that Evers was laid in the ground that President Kennedy sent his civil rights legislation to Congress, leveraging whatever empathy that moment inspired to make good on his promise from the week before. The next day, he invited Evers' widow and her children to visit him at the White House to express to them personally his sympathies for the loss of their beloved husband and father. He handed Mrs. Evers a copy of the just-delivered bill, which would ultimately become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (O’Brien 3-4).

A year before his death, Evers told an interviewer why he devoted his life to the struggle for civil rights: “I am a victim of segregation and discrimination and I’ve been exposed to bitter experiences. These things have remained with me. But I think my children will be different. I think we’re going to win” (Bullard 7).

 

Works cited:

Bear, Hunter.  “Letter to Ms. Polly Greenberg, New York September 27, 1966.”  Medgar Evers: Reflection and Appreciation.  Web.  http://hunterbear.org/medgar_w.htm

Bullard, Sara.  “Medgar Evers.”  Teaching Tolerance.  Web.  https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-resources/texts/medgar-evers

“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).”  Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm

“Interview with Sam Block.”  Digital Education Systems.  December 12, 1986.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/nars/js_block_oh-r.pdf  pages 51-53

 

“Medgar Evers,” FBI, History.  Web.  https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/medgar-evers

“NAACP History: Medgar Evers.”  NAACP.  Web.  https://www.naacp.org/naacp-history-medgar-evers/

O’Brien, M. J.  “Medgar Evers & Civil Rights Act of 1964 Linked.”  Clarion Ledger.  July 1, 2014.  Web.  https://www.clarionledger.com/story/journeytojustice/2014/07/01/medgar-evers-civil-rights-act-1964/11949425/