3. A Pioneering Civil Rights Activist
Medgar Wiley Evers (1925 – 1963) was a native of Decatur, Mississippi, who grew up and attended school in the days of Jim Crow. Racist laws required him to walk 12 miles every day to 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 the war’s end as a sergeant.