Medgar Evers
A native of Decatur, Mississippi, Medgar Wiley Evers (1925 – 1963) grew up and attended school amidst racism and Jim Crow laws that required him to walk 12 miles every day to attend a dilapidated segregated school for blacks rather than the better-funded school closer to his home that was reserved for white students. After graduating high school, Evers was inducted into the US Army in 1943 and sent to the European Theater of Operations. There, he fought in the Normandy Campaign, and served throughout the remainder of the war in France and Germany, before being honorably discharged at war’s end as a sergeant.
Despite risking his life to free others from a racist tyranny overseas, Evers returned after war’s end to a racial tyranny at home that denied him basic freedom and equality because of the color of his skin. He became a civil rights activist who protested the racism of his era and area by organizing demonstrations and drawing attention to the grave injustices stemming from the Jim Crow laws.
He also organized boycotts of companies that practiced discrimination, sought to end segregation in public places, and strove to integrate state-funded schools. He applied to the segregated University of Mississippi Law School in 1954, and when his application was rejected, he fought in the courts. Helped by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools that year, Evers became the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi’s law school. He also worked to overcome the disenfranchisement of blacks in Mississippi by organizing voter registration drives.
Protesting injustice and rocking the boat never being popular, Medgar Evers was murdered for his troubles, shot to death in his driveway in 1963 by a Klansman. As a World War II veteran, Medgar Evers was buried with military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, but he was not honored by the justice system. Despite the Klansman’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, and notwithstanding that he had publicly boasted of the murder, all-white juries twice deadlocked in 1964 and failed to reach a verdict. Evers’ killer remained free until 1994, when a third trial, this time before a racially mixed jury, finally secured a murder conviction.