| Revision as of 17:55, 8 March 2013 editMattSH (talk | contribs)189 edits →Assassination: The charge was not entirely unrelated, as it was also white-supremacist in nature and was used in Beckwith's 1994 conviction← Previous edit | Revision as of 23:29, 9 March 2013 edit undoJohnny Squeaky (talk | contribs)2,359 editsm →In popular cultureNext edit → | ||
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| In October 2009, ] ] ], a former ] ], announced that {{USNS|Medgar Evers|T-AKE-13}}, a {{Sclass|Lewis and Clark|dry cargo ship}}, would be named in the activist's honor.<ref>Mabus, Ray. "The Navy Honors a Civil Rights Pioneer." The White House Blog. 9 Oct 2009. Accessed: 2 Sep 2010. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/The-Navy-Honors-a-Civil-Rights-Pioneer</ref> The ship was christened by Myrlie Evers-Williams on November 12, 2011.<ref>"A Memorial for Medgar", ''San Diego Union-Tribune,'' November 13, 2011</ref> | In October 2009, ] ] ], a former ] ], announced that {{USNS|Medgar Evers|T-AKE-13}}, a {{Sclass|Lewis and Clark|dry cargo ship}}, would be named in the activist's honor.<ref>Mabus, Ray. "The Navy Honors a Civil Rights Pioneer." The White House Blog. 9 Oct 2009. Accessed: 2 Sep 2010. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/The-Navy-Honors-a-Civil-Rights-Pioneer</ref> The ship was christened by Myrlie Evers-Williams on November 12, 2011.<ref>"A Memorial for Medgar", ''San Diego Union-Tribune,'' November 13, 2011</ref> | ||
| ==Trivia== | |||
| ==In popular culture== | |||
| The murder and subsequent trials caused an uproar. Musician ] wrote his 1963 song "]" about Evers and his assassin. ] wrote and sang "]". Phil Ochs wrote the songs, "Too Many Martyrs" (also titled "The Ballad Of Medgar Evers") and "Another Country," in response to the killing. He also mentioned Evers in the song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal." ] and the ] Freedom Singers paid tribute to Evers in their haunting version of Ochs' "The Ballad of Medgar Evers". ] short story "Where Is the Voice Coming From," in which the speaker is the imagined assassin of Medgar Evers, was published in ''The New Yorker''. | *The murder and subsequent trials caused an uproar. Musician ] wrote his 1963 song "]" about Evers and his assassin. ] wrote and sang "]". Phil Ochs wrote the songs, "Too Many Martyrs" (also titled "The Ballad Of Medgar Evers") and "Another Country," in response to the killing. He also mentioned Evers in the song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal." ] and the ] Freedom Singers paid tribute to Evers in their haunting version of Ochs' "The Ballad of Medgar Evers". ] short story "Where Is the Voice Coming From," in which the speaker is the imagined assassin of Medgar Evers, was published in ''The New Yorker''. | ||
| Medgar Evers' story inspired a 1991 episode of the NBC TV series ], entitled "]", written by author ]. The story tells of a murder of a young black man and the elderly white man, played by actor ], who seems to have gotten away with the 40-year-old murder. (The TV episode preceded by several years the trial that convicted Beckwith.) ''In the Heat of the Night'' won its first ] for ''Best Dramatic Series'' that season.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.imdb.com/event/ev0000345/1992 | title = Image Awards | publisher = imdb.com | year = 1992 | accessdate = 12 September 2011}}</ref> | *Medgar Evers' story inspired a 1991 episode of the NBC TV series ], entitled "]", written by author ]. The story tells of a murder of a young black man and the elderly white man, played by actor ], who seems to have gotten away with the 40-year-old murder. (The TV episode preceded by several years the trial that convicted Beckwith.) ''In the Heat of the Night'' won its first ] for ''Best Dramatic Series'' that season.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.imdb.com/event/ev0000345/1992 | title = Image Awards | publisher = imdb.com | year = 1992 | accessdate = 12 September 2011}}</ref> | ||
| The ] ''],'' directed by ], tells the story of the 1994 retrial of Beckwith, in which prosecutor DeLaughter of the US ] office secured a conviction in federal court. Beckwith and DeLaughter were played by ] and ], respectively; ] played Myrlie Evers. Evers was portrayed by ]. | *The ] ''],'' directed by ], tells the story of the 1994 retrial of Beckwith, in which prosecutor DeLaughter of the US ] office secured a conviction in federal court. Beckwith and DeLaughter were played by ] and ], respectively; ] played Myrlie Evers. Evers was portrayed by ]. | ||
| ] wrote a first-person narrative article titled "Mississippi Justice" published in ''Reader's Digest'', and a book, ''Never Too Late,'' (2001) based on his experiences. | *] wrote a first-person narrative article titled "Mississippi Justice" published in ''Reader's Digest'', and a book, ''Never Too Late,'' (2001) based on his experiences. | ||
| ==Audio material== | ==Audio material== | ||
Revision as of 23:29, 9 March 2013
| Medgar Evers | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Medgar Wiley Evers (1925-07-02)July 2, 1925 Decatur, Mississippi U.S. |
| Died | June 12, 1963(1963-06-12) (aged 37) Jackson, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Occupation | Civil rights activist |
| Spouse | Myrlie Evers-Williams 1933 - |
| Children | Three |
| Parent | James Evers (father) |
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. After returning from overseas military service in World War II and completing his secondary education, he became active in the civil rights movement. He became a field secretary for the NAACP.
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.
Early life
Evers was born July 2, 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi, third of the five children (including older brother Charles Evers) of James and Jesse Evers; the family also included Jesse's two children from a previous marriage. The Evers owned a small farm and James worked at a sawmill. Evers walked twelve miles to school to earn his high school diploma. From 1943 to 1945 he fought in Europe with the army, and was discharged honorably as a sergeant.
In 1948 Evers enrolled at Alcorn College (a historically black college, now Alcorn State University) majoring in business administration; he also competed on the debate, football, and track teams, sang in the choir, and was junior class president. On December 24, 1951 he married classmate Myrlie Beasley, with whom he eventually had three children, and received his BA the following year.
Activism
The couple moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where Evers became a salesman for T. R. M. Howard's Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company. Howard was also president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL); Evers helped organize the RCNL's boycott of filling stations which denied blacks use of the stations' restrooms. Evers and his brother Charles also attended the RCNL's annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954, which drew crowds of ten thousand or more.
Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in 1954 but his application was rejected. He submitted his application in concert with the NAACP as a test case.
In late 1954 Evers' was named the NAACP's first field secretary for Mississippi. In this position, he helped organize boycotts and set up new local chapters of the NAACP. He was involved with James Meredith's efforts to enroll in the University of Mississippi in the early 1960s.
Evers’ civil rights leadership and investigative work made him a target of white supremacists. In the weeks leading up to his death, the hostility directed towards him grew. His public investigations into the murder of Emmett Till and his vocal support of Clyde Kennard had made him a prominent black leader. On May 28, 1963, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home. On June 7, 1963, Evers was nearly run down by a car after he emerged from the Jackson NAACP office.
Assassination
In the early morning of June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy's speech on national television in support of civil rights, Evers pulled into his driveway after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go," Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Enfield 1917 rifle; it ricocheted into his home. He staggered 9 meters (30 feet) before collapsing. He died at a local hospital 50 minutes later.
Mourned nationally, Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery, where he received full military honors before a crowd of more than 3,000.
On June 21, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens' Council (and later of the Ku Klux Klan), was arrested for Evers' murder.
District Attorney and future governor Bill Waller prosecuted De La Beckwith. Juries composed solely of white men twice that year deadlocked on De La Beckwith's guilt.
In 1994, 30 years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, De La Beckwith was brought to trial based on new evidence. Bobby DeLaughter was the prosecutor. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy. De La Beckwith was convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after having lived as a free man for much of the three decades following the killing (he was imprisoned from 1977 to 1980 for conspiring to murder A.I. Botnick). De La Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died at age 80 in prison in January 2001.
Legacy
Evers' legacy has been kept alive in a variety of ways. The writer Minrose Gwin notes that after his death, Evers was memorialized by leading Mississippi and national authors, both black and white: Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Margaret Walker and Anne Moody. In 1963, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. In 1969, Medgar Evers College was established in Brooklyn, New York as part of the City University of New York. In 1983, a made-for-television movie, For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story, starring Howard Rollins, Jr. and Irene Cara as Medgar and Myrlie Evers, aired on PBS, to celebrate his life and career. On June 28, 1992, the city of Jackson, Mississippi erected a statue in honor of Evers. All of Delta Drive (part of U.S. Highway 49) in Jackson was renamed in Evers' honor. In December 2004, the Jackson City Council changed the name of the city's airport to "Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport" (Jackson-Evers International Airport) in honor of him.
His widow Myrlie Evers became a noted activist in her own right later in life, eventually serving as chair of the NAACP. Medgar's brother Charles Evers returned to Jackson in July 1963 and served briefly in his slain brother's place. He remained involved in Mississippi civil rights activities for years to come and resides in Jackson.
On the 40-year-anniversary of Evers' assassination, hundreds of civil rights veterans, government officials, and students from across the country gathered around his grave site at Arlington National Cemetery to celebrate his life and legacy. Barry Bradford and three students—Sharmistha Dev, Jajah Wu and Debra Siegel, formerly of Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois—planned and hosted the commemoration in his honor. Evers was the subject of the students' research project.
In October 2009, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former Mississippi governor, announced that USNS Medgar Evers (T-AKE-13), a Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship, would be named in the activist's honor. The ship was christened by Myrlie Evers-Williams on November 12, 2011.
Trivia
- The murder and subsequent trials caused an uproar. Musician Bob Dylan wrote his 1963 song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about Evers and his assassin. Nina Simone wrote and sang "Mississippi Goddam". Phil Ochs wrote the songs, "Too Many Martyrs" (also titled "The Ballad Of Medgar Evers") and "Another Country," in response to the killing. He also mentioned Evers in the song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal." Matthew Jones and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers paid tribute to Evers in their haunting version of Ochs' "The Ballad of Medgar Evers". Eudora Welty's short story "Where Is the Voice Coming From," in which the speaker is the imagined assassin of Medgar Evers, was published in The New Yorker.
- Medgar Evers' story inspired a 1991 episode of the NBC TV series In the Heat of the Night, entitled "Sweet, Sweet Blues", written by author William James Royce. The story tells of a murder of a young black man and the elderly white man, played by actor James Best, who seems to have gotten away with the 40-year-old murder. (The TV episode preceded by several years the trial that convicted Beckwith.) In the Heat of the Night won its first NAACP Image Award for Best Dramatic Series that season.
- The 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi, directed by Rob Reiner, tells the story of the 1994 retrial of Beckwith, in which prosecutor DeLaughter of the US District Attorney's office secured a conviction in federal court. Beckwith and DeLaughter were played by James Woods and Alec Baldwin, respectively; Whoopi Goldberg played Myrlie Evers. Evers was portrayed by James Pickens, Jr..
- Robert DeLaughter wrote a first-person narrative article titled "Mississippi Justice" published in Reader's Digest, and a book, Never Too Late, (2001) based on his experiences.
Audio material
References
- per Charles Evers bio "Have no Fear" page 5
- “State of Siege: Mississippi Whites and the Civil Rights Movement.” Kate Ellis and Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks. 2011. Accessed: 19 Feb 2011. http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/mississippi/
- ^ Baden, M.M. (2006): Chapter III: Time of Death and Changes after Death. Part 4: Exhumation. In: Spitz, W.U. & Spitz, D.J. (eds): Spitz and Fisher’s Medicolegal Investigation of Death. Guideline for the Application of Pathology to Crime Investigations (Fourth edition), Charles C. Thomas, pp.: 174-183; Springfield, Illinois.
- ^ Williams, Reggie. (2005, July 2). Remembering Medgar. Afro king - American Red Star, p. A.1. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from Black Newspapers.
- Sina. “Freedom Hero: Medgar Wiley Evers.” The My Hero Project. 2005. Accessed: 25 Oct 2009. http://www.myhero.com/myhero/hero.asp?hero=Evers_NW
-
Evers-Williams, Myrlie (2005). The Autobiography Of Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches. Basic Civitas Books. ISBN 0-465-02177-8.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - Padgett, John B. “Medgar Evers.” The Mississippi Writers Page, University of Mississippi. 2008. Accessed: 2 Sep 2010. http://www.olemiss.edu/mwp/dir/evers_medgar/index.html
- David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 75, 80-81.
- Myra Ribeiro (1 October 2001). The Assassination of Medgar Evers. The Rosen Publishing Group. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-8239-3544-4. Retrieved 27 September 2012.
- ^ Nikki L. M. Brown; Barry M. Stentiford (30 September 2008). The Jim Crow Encyclopedia: Greenwood Milestones in African American History. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 277–8. ISBN 978-0-313-34181-6. Retrieved 27 September 2012.
- Birnbaum, p. 490
- Dufresne, Marcel (1991). "Exposing the Secrets of Mississippi Racism". American Journalism Review.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - Minrose Gwin"Mourning Medgar: Justice, Aesthetics, and the Local", Southern Spaces, 2008
- NAACP Spingarn Medal
- "Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport". Jackson Municipal Airport Authority. 2013. Retrieved 22 January 2013.
- NAACP Chairwoman Myrlie Evers-Williams Will Not Seek Re-Election
- "Medgar Evers", Arlingon Cemetery. Note: Bradford later was notable for his work in helping reopen the Mississippi Burning and Clyde Kennard cases.
- Lottie L Joiner. (2003, July). "The nation remembers Medgar Evers", The Crisis, 110(4), 8. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from Research Library Core.
- Mabus, Ray. "The Navy Honors a Civil Rights Pioneer." The White House Blog. 9 Oct 2009. Accessed: 2 Sep 2010. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/The-Navy-Honors-a-Civil-Rights-Pioneer
- "A Memorial for Medgar", San Diego Union-Tribune, November 13, 2011
- "Image Awards". imdb.com. 1992. Retrieved 12 September 2011.
External links
- Myrlie Evers (28 June 1963). 'He said he wouldn't mind dying - if...'. LIFE. pp. 34–47.
- Gwin, Minrose. "Mourning Medgar: Justice, Aesthetics, and the Local" March 11, 2008. Southern Spaces http://southernspaces.org/2008/mourning-medgar-justice-aesthetics-and-local
- Medgar Evers in the U.S. Federal Census American Civil Rights Pioneers
- Medgar Evers biography at africawithin.com
- Medgar Evers at IMDb
- http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0251350/bio
- Medgar Evers at Find a Grave Retrieved on February 22, 2010
- 1925 births
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