African-American civil rights leader Medgar Evers was born July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi. His assassination for his work as field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi galvanized the civil rights movement.As a representative of the NAACP, Medgar Evers worked for the most established and in some ways most conservative African-American membership organization. He was, by all accounts, a hardworking, thoughtful, and somewhat quiet man. Yet the work Evers did was groundbreaking, even radical, in that he risked (and eventually lost) his life bringing news of his state's violent white supremacy to nationwide attention. When white racist Byron De la Beckwith assassinated Evers in his front yard, he became a symbol of the brutality with which the old South resisted the civil rights movement.
Raised in a small central Mississippi town, Evers absorbed his parents' work ethic and strong religious values early in his life. Friends, including his brother Charles, remember him as a serious child with an air of maturity about him. At 17, he left school to serve in the Army during World War II, where, according to writer Adam Nossiter, his experience fighting the Nazis made a lasting impression on him. After the war, Evers received his high school diploma and immediately entered Alcorn A & M College, where he played football, ran track, edited the campus newspaper, and sang in the choir. Upon graduation, Evers took a job with Magnolia Mutual Insurance, one of Mississippi's few Black-owned businesses.
Through his employer, Evers became involved with the NAACP, selling memberships at the same time he was selling insurance policies. Despite its moderate, systematic approach, the NAACP was still considered a radical organization by many in Mississippi. Too likely to become victims of harassment, assault, or murder for any kind of political action, Blacks in Mississippi's Delta region were often afraid even to talk about the NAACP. In 1954, when the national organization decided to hire field secretaries in the deep south, Evers moved to Jackson, the state capital, and went to work full-time for the NAACP. He had two main roles—to recruit and enroll new members, and to investigate and publicize the racist terrorism experienced by African-Americans.
It was a dangerous job. Evers was followed, mocked, threatened, and beaten while he traveled throughout Mississippi, a state that had seen more lynching than any other in the nation. Organizations like the White Citizens' Councils and the State Sovereignty Committee spied on him. In May 1963, a month before Evers was murdered, someone threw a bomb into his garage. Evers continued the NAACP's longstanding research on lynching, and he also worked on the legal front, filing petitions and organizing protests against the segregation that still made it impossible for African-Americans to go to movie theaters, to eat in restaurants, or to make use of public libraries, parks, and pools.
Throughout the spring of 1963, Evers was the leader of a series of boycotts, meetings, and public appearances that were designed to bring Mississippi out of its racist past. Just before midnight on June 11, 1963, when Evers was arriving home, Bryon de la Beckwith shot him in the back. Evers died a few minutes later. In two separate trials in 1963 and 1964, all-white juries could not decide Beckwith's fate. Free for more than 30 years after committing murder, Beckwith was finally convicted and jailed for the crime in 1994.
Reference:
African Americans/Voices of Triumph
by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
TimeLife, Inc., 1993