1. A True Friend of His State
Jackson, Mississippi’s Memorials
to the Life and Work of
Medgar Wiley Evers
By Elizabeth Hines, Geography, UNCW

2. A True Friend of His State: Jackson, Mississippi’s Memorials to the Life and Work of Medgar Wiley Evers. Medgar Evers belonged to the vanguard of America’s Civil Rights activists. Shaped by a rural Mississippi childhood that ended with distinguished WWII service, he became Mississippi’s first NAACP Field Director. His tireless dedication made him a hero to Mississippi’s blacks but his highly visible opposition to all segregation, advocacy of voting rights, economic boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins, and his daring litigation for public school desegregation incurred animosity and death threats from some whites. His 1963 assassination went unpunished for 31 years until white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, after two hung juries, was finally convicted in a stranger-than-fiction third trial in Whites who came of age between the murder and the reopening of the case had grown up in the most benign racial climate that Mississippi had hitherto known and they had little memory of the man whose life and death had helped to bring it about. But Jackson’s African American community never forgot him. Among their tributes are a public library with a memorial park and statue, the renamed Delta Drive, the main branch of Mississippi’s Federal Post Office, the Medgar Evers Institute, and symposia and festivals dedicated to his memory. Medgar Evers’s early efforts in the Civil Rights struggle left an indelible imprint on Mississippi and America. The people of Mississippi have created a landscape of commemoration in their state capital to honor this great friend of their state. Elizabeth Hines, Department of Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Wilmington, NC

3. Medgar Wiley Evers,

4. Medgar Evers was born in Decatur, Newton County, MS, July 2, 1925 to James and Jessie Evers.

5. Medgar (and his brother Charles) heard a white supremacist speech by Theodore Bilbo, then running for the U.S. Senate, on Decatur’s court house steps in 1934.

6. If we sit with Negroes at our tables, if we attend social functions with them as our social equals, if we disregard segregation in all other relations, is it then possible that we maintain it fixedly in the marriage of the South's Saxon sons and daughters? The answer must be "No." By the absolute denial of social equality to the Negro, the barriers between the races are firm and strong. But if the middle wall of the social partition should be broken down, then the mingling of the tides of life would surely begin. It would be a slow process, but the result would be the same. And though the process be gradual, it would be none the less irresistible and inevitable. The lower strata of the white population would probably feel the first effects, and within the foreseeable future the middle and upper classes would be invaded. Then, the Southern White race, the Southern Caucasian, would be irretrievably doomed T. Bilbo, 1946

7. Medgar left the 11th grade in Newton County to join the Army during WWII, where he served in England and France.

8. He was politicized after being denied the right to vote in Decatur in He and Charles, also a veteran, were threatened by white toughs and chased from the Newton County Court House. He entered Alcorn State College in 1946, where he became a BMOC--played football, ran track, joined the debate club, sang in the choir, was editor of the yearbook, and was listed in Who’s Who Among College Students in America. He spent his summers working in Chicago.

9. He married Myrlie Beasley of Vicksburg in 1951 and they had three children.

10. He sold insurance to African-Americans for the Magnolia Insurance Agency from Mound Bayou in the Delta,

12. The geography of Medgar Evers’s life in Mississippi.

13. He and Charles considered forming a “Mississippi Mau Mau,” out of admiration for Jomo Kenyatta, 1953, an idea Medgar abandoned for non-violent methods.

14. He attempted to enroll in the University of Mississippi Law School in 1953, but was denied acceptance.
Ole Miss Law Students, 1957
(Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Mississippi)

15. He became Mississippi’s first NAACP Field Secretary, based in Jackson from 1954 to He advocated desegregation and voting rights, and condemned racist brutality via boycotts and sit-ins. Considerable social unrest, including violence and mass arrests resulted.

16. Arrested protesters, most of them high school, Jackson State and Tougaloo College students, were held in the cattle stockades of the Mississippi State Fair Grounds, shown here in 2003.

17. The NAACP’s office (left in the Masonic Temple building) was located next door to the office of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (right) on Lynch Street in the 1950s and 60s. Thus, it was convenient for the Sovereignty Commission to spy on the NAACP.

19. He investigated the lynchings of Emmett Till (shown with his mother) in 1955 in Money, MS and Mack Charles Parker (right) in Poplarville, MS in 1959 (right). He encouraged Mose Wright, Till’s uncle, to testify and then helped Mr. Wright leave Mississippi safely.

20. Medgar counseled James Meredith, who successfully integrated Ole Miss in 1962.

21. He was the first Black person to deliver a political speech on Mississippi TV, May 20, 1963.

22. He was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith, of Greenwood, MS on June 12, (Two all white hung juries in 1964).

24. The Evers’s Jackson
home at 2332 Guyne
Street, where he was shot
in the back. The street
has since been renamed
Margaret Walker
Alexander Drive.

25. Approximation of the assassin’s view, 2003.

27. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Medgar Evers’s funeral in Jackson
Martin Luther King, Jr. at Medgar Evers’s funeral in Jackson. Thousands marched to honor him and protest his murder.

28. Medgar Evers was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

29. Beckwith was tried a third time and convicted in 1994.
He died in the Hinds County Jail in 1998.

31. Assistant DA, Bobby DeLaughter, now Judge DeLaughter, successfully prosecuted Beckwith in 1994 with the assistance of Mrs. Evers-Williams.

32. Delta Drive was renamed Medgar Evers Boulevard
Delta Drive was renamed Medgar Evers Boulevard. There are two monuments to Medgar Evers and Dr. King at its intersection with Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive on opposite corners.

33. Jackson’s Delta Drive
Library
was renamed the
Medgar Evers Library.

34. A life-sized bronze statue of Medgar Evers was commissioned for the library’s grounds.

35. Myrtis Gregory led the drive to raise $90,000 for the statue.

36. The Jackson neighborhood where he lived and died became the Medgar Evers Historic Neighborhood.

37. His family’s home at 2332 Guyne Street was donated to Tougaloo College by Myrlie Evers-Williams and has become a museum dedicated to his life and work.

38. Myrlie Evers-Williams and Delores Bolton-Stamps, formerly a Dean at Tougaloo College, have organized the Medgar Evers Institute in downtown Jackson.

39. A state bill to name Mississippi’s main post office the Medgar Wiley Evers Building in his honor passed in 1994.

40. Jackson and others celebrate his life in many other ways.

41. Evers’s sites in Jackson

42. Excerpt from Medgar Evers’s speech of 5/20/63
Tonight the Negro plantation worker in the Delta knows from his radio and television what happened today all over the world. He knows what black people are doing and he knows what white people are doing. He can see on the 6:00 o'clock news screen the picture of a 3:00 o'clock bite by a police dog. He knows that Willie Mays, a Birmingham Negro, is the highest paid baseball player in the nation. He knows that Leontyne Price, a native of Laurel, [MS] is one of the greatest opera singers who ever lived. He knows about the new free nations in Africa and knows that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson he cannot event drive a garbage truck. He sees black prime ministers and ambassadors, financiers and technicians. Then he looks about his home community and what does he see to quote our Mayor, in this "progressive, beautiful, friendly, prosperous city with an exciting future?“ He sees a city where Negro citizens are refused admittance to the City Auditorium and the Coliseum; his children refused a ticket to a good movie in a downtown theater; his wife and children refused service at a lunch counter in a downtown store where they trade; students refused the use of the main public libraries, parks, playgrounds and other tax-supported recreational facilities.

43. Summary and Conclusions
Medgar Evers’s Civil Rights activities were heroic and inspirational
while he was alive.
His death galvanized the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi and
the rest of the country.
JFK’s and MLK’s subsequent assassinations overshadowed Medgar’s.
The belated prosecution and conviction of Beckwith in 1994 sanctioned and invigorated prosecution of many other Civil Rights era murderers.
The people of Jackson have made an indelible landscape that honors
this great friend of Mississippi.

44. Evers, Myrlie, For Us the Living, 1967
Suggested Readings
Evers, Myrlie, For Us the Living, 1967
Massengill, Reed, Portrait of a Racist: The Man Who Killed Medgar Evers, 1994
Nossiter, Adam, Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers, 1994
Vollers, Maryanne, Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South, 1995
Morris, Willie, The Ghosts of Medgar Evers: A Tale of Race, Murder, Mississippi, and Hollywood, 1998
DeLaughter, Bobby, Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case, 2001
Sources include the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
and the Tougaloo College Archives.
Most color photographs and maps by Elizabeth Hines.