"You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea. As long as God gives me strength to work and try to make things real for my children, I'm going to work for it—even if it means making the ultimate sacrifice."
Medgar Evers, born July 2, 1925, was a native of Decatur, Mississippi. In 1943, he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army and fought in Europe during World War II. Despite participating in the Normandy invasion, he and five friends were later forced away from voting in a local election at gunpoint. Evers graduated from Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University), a historically black college, in 1950. Following the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Bd. of Education, he applied to the University of Mississippi Law School in February 1954. The University did not admit Black students, and his application was rejected.
In December 1954, Evers became the NAACP’s first field officer in Mississippi. In this capacity, he traveled throughout Jim Crow Mississippi encouraging poor African Americans to register to vote, recruiting them into the civil rights movement, and pushing for school integration. He also organized high-profile boycotts of merchants and was instrumental in securing witnesses and evidence concerning the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. In 1962, Evers helped James Meredith become the first African American to integrate the all-White University of Mississippi, the institution that summarily rejected Evers years before.
Medgar Evers was a dynamic, courageous, and inspirational leader. White supremacists attempted to kill him multiple times. Among other things, his home was firebombed in early 1963. Regarding the threats on his life, Evers said, "I'm looking to be shot any time I step out of my car.… If I die, it will be in a good cause." Months after the firebombing, as Evers returned home from an NAACP meeting on June 12, 1963, he was ambushed and killed in front of his home by a member of the Ku Klux Klan only a few hours after President John F. Kennedy addressed the nation calling resistance to civil rights "a moral crisis."
Evers was murdered at 37 years old, and his death was an important catalyst for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although the assailant's identity was known almost immediately, the killer was only brought to justice in 1994, after 31 years and three trials. The final trial is depicted in the 1996 film, The Ghosts of Mississippi.
Read more about Medgar Evers here and here
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