About Medgar Evers
Medgar Wiley Evers (; July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963) was an American civil rights activist who was the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi. A United States Army veteran who served in World War II, he was engaged in efforts to overturn racial segregation at the University of Mississippi, end the segregation of public facilities, and expand opportunities for African Americans, including the enforcement of voting rights, prior to his assassination. After college, Evers became active in the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Following the 1954 ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, he challenged the segregation of the state-supported public University of Mississippi. Evers applied to law school there, as the state had no public law school for African Americans. He also worked for voting rights, economic opportunity, access to public facilities, and other changes in the segregated society. In 1963, Evers was awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal. On June 12, 1963, Evers was murdered at his home in Jackson, Mississippi, now the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council in Jackson. Only hours earlier, Evers was listening to President John F. Kennedy's speech Report to the American People on Civil Rights. Evers' assassination and the resulting trials inspired civil rights protests. His life and death have inspired numerous works of art, music, and film. Although all-white juries failed to reach verdicts in the first two trials of De La Beckwith in the 1960s, he was convicted in 1994 based on new evidence. Evers' widow Myrlie became a noted activist in her own right and served as national chair of the NAACP. In 1969, after passage of civil rights legislation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medgar's older brother Charles was elected as mayor of Fayette, Mississippi. He was the first African American to be elected mayor of a Mississippi city in the post-Reconstruction era.
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