# Medgar Evers Medgar Wiley Evers was the [[NAACP]]'s first field secretary in Mississippi. For most of a decade he investigated racial killings, pushed desegregation suits and ran voter registration drives in the state with the most thoroughly disenfranchised Black population in the country. He was shot in the back at his own home in Jackson shortly after midnight on 12 June 1963, at 37. ## Why it matters Evers worked at the exact point where [[Voter Suppression]] stopped being a matter of paperwork and became a matter of risk to life. Mississippi's [[Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890]] had put the legal machinery in place; by the 1950s the machinery was enforced by the [[Citizens' Councils]] in the boardroom and the bank, and by gunfire at the margin. Registering voters in that state was dangerous work, and Evers's death is the clearest statement of how dangerous. His killing also became one of the longest-running tests of whether a Southern court would convict a white man for killing a civil rights organizer. It took thirty-one years. ## Life Evers was born in Decatur, Mississippi, on 2 July 1925. He joined the U.S. Army in 1943 and served in segregated units in the European theatre during the Second World War; accounts of exactly where differ, and the National Park Service names England, Belgium and France. He was buried with full military honours at Arlington National Cemetery. > [!warning] One widely repeated detail is not settled > Evers is often said to have taken part in the Normandy campaign — the NAACP's own biography says he "had just returned from the Battle of Normandy." National Park Service accounts name other countries and do not mention Normandy, and the burial record gives a quartermaster unit rather than a combat assignment. His European service is well attested; the Normandy claim specifically rests on secondary accounts. Back home, he found that a uniform bought him nothing. He applied to the University of Mississippi law school after [[Brown v. Board of Education]] and was refused; the state would not admit a Black student until James Meredith in 1962. He became the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi in the mid-1950s and moved to Jackson, where he organized voter registration drives, pressed for school desegregation, and conducted public investigations into racial murders — most prominently the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old [[Emmett Till]]. See [[Murder of Emmett Till]]. His wife Myrlie Evers ran the NAACP's Jackson field office, drafted speeches and kept the operation going from the house itself, which functioned as an extension of the office. ## The house on Guynes Street The Evers home, bought in 1956 in Jackson's first modern subdivision built for middle-class Black families, was designed around the expectation of attack — a fact that tells the period's history more plainly than any statistic. - The couple turned down a corner lot as too exposed. - Unlike the other houses on the street, **theirs had no front door.** They entered through a side door sheltered by the carport. - Furniture was placed in front of windows to stop bullets. - Evers drilled his children to crawl along the floor to the bathroom if they heard a strange noise; the cast-iron tub was judged the safest place in the house. - After someone threw a Molotov cocktail onto the carport on 24 May 1963 — which police called a prank — the family slept on mattresses on the floor, below the window line, with guard dogs in the back yard. > [!quote] Myrlie Evers-Williams, on buying the house > "It may seem incredible to the average American homebuyer, but security from attack was a consideration we discussed at length." Myrlie Evers-Williams kept the house and its layout intact, gave it to Tougaloo College in 1993, and it is now a national monument. ## The killing and the trials Just after midnight on 12 June 1963 a single shot from across the street struck Evers in the back as he came from his car. He reached the steps, collapsed, and died within the hour. Fingerprints on the rifle left at the scene identified Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and a member of the [[Citizens' Councils]]; the NAACP's account also describes him as a Ku Klux Klan member. He was tried twice in 1964. Both all-white juries failed to reach a verdict, and he went free. In the early 1990s Myrlie Evers asked local prosecutors to reopen the case; a new grand jury indicted him in December 1990, and in 1994 a Mississippi jury convicted him of murder and he was sentenced to life in prison. Myrlie Evers-Williams later chaired the NAACP, from 1995 to 1998. ## Connections - [[Citizens' Councils]] — the organization his killer belonged to, and the main instrument of economic reprisal against Black registrants - [[Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890]] — the legal structure his voter drives were up against - [[Murder of Emmett Till]] · [[Emmett Till]] — the case that drew him in - [[Civil Rights Movement]] · [[Civil Rights Era Backlash Ecosystem]] · [[NAACP]] - [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]] — passed two years after his death - [[MS-Sen-2026]] — the Senate campaign that made his house the subject of its closing argument ## Sources - [NAACP — Medgar Evers](https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/civil-rights-leaders/medgar-evers) - [FBI — Medgar Evers](https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/medgar-evers) - [National Park Service — Evers House](https://www.nps.gov/memy/learn/historyculture/evers-house.htm) - [National Park Service — Medgar Evers](https://www.nps.gov/memy/learn/historyculture/medgar-evers.htm)