Medgar Evers

On June 12, 1963, WWII veteran Medgar Evers was murdered in the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

As a field worker for the NAACP, Evers had traveled through his home state encouraging African Americans to register to vote. He was instrumental in getting witnesses and evidence for the Emmett Till murder case and others, which brought national attention to the terrorism used against African Americans. 

Profile by Dernoral Davis. Reprinted from the Mississippi Historical Society, Mississippi History Now.

Between 1952 and 1963, Medgar Wiley Evers was one of Mississippi’s most impassioned activists, orators, and visionaries for change. He fought for equality and fought against brutality.

Born July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, Medgar was one of four children born to James and Jesse Evers. His father worked in a sawmill and his mother was a laundress. Evers’s childhood was typical in many ways of black youths who grew up in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression of the 1930s and in the years preceding World War II. As a youth, Evers’s parents showered him with love and affection, taught him family values, and routinely disciplined him when needed. The Evers home emphasized education, religion, and hard work.

Among his siblings, Evers spent the most time with Charles, whom he idolized. As Evers’s older brother, Charles protected him, taught him to fish, swim, hunt, box, wrestle, and generally served as a sounding board for many of Medgar’s early experiences. He attended all-black schools in the dual and segregated public educational system of Newton County. Segregated public education meant long walks to school for the Evers children. The schools had few resources and operated with outdated textbooks, few teachers, large classes, and small classrooms without laboratories and supplies for the study of biology, chemistry, and physics.

Medgar Evers is interviewing Beulah Melton about the murder of her husband, Clinton Melton, in 1955. Mrs. Melton died (likely killed) before she could testify. Click photo to learn more. This is one of many murder cases Evers investigated. Photo: Library of Congress.

Besides his under-funded public education, Evers on occasion saw and witnessed acts of raw violence against blacks. On these occasions, Evers’s parents and older brother could not shield him from the realities of a society built on racial discrimination. At about age 14, Evers observed to his horror the dragging of a black man, Willie Tingle, behind a wagon through the streets of Decatur. Tingle was later shot and hanged. A friend of Evers’ father, Tingle was accused of insulting a white woman.

Evers later recalled that Tingle’s bloody clothes remained in the field for months near the tree where he was hanged. Each day on his way to school Evers had to pass this tableau of violence. He never forgot the image.

A World War II Soldier

At the end of his sophomore year of high school and several months before his eighteenth birthday, Evers volunteered and was inducted into the United States Army in 1942. During his tour of duty in World War II, Evers was assigned to and served with a segregated port battalion, first in Great Britain and later in France. Though typical at the time, racial segregation in the military only served to anger Evers.

Roy Wilkins and Medgar Evers being arrested on June 1, 1963 in Jackson, Miss. Evers was murdered just 11 days later. Photo: Corbis Images.

By the end of the war, Evers was among a generation of black veterans committed to answering W. E. B. Du Bois’s clarion call of nearly three decades earlier: “to return [home] fighting” for change.

Upon returning home, the initial “fight” for Evers was to register to vote. For Evers voting was an affirmation of citizenship. Accordingly, in the summer of 1946, along with his brother, Charles, and several other black veterans, Evers registered to vote at the Decatur city hall. But on election day, the veterans were prevented by angry whites from casting their ballots. The experience only deepened Evers’s conviction that the status quo in Mississippi had to change. Continue reading. 

Related Resources

Classroom Lesson

Meet Medgar Evers. By Teaching for Change. 
An introductory lesson for middle and high school students on Medgar Evers’ life and legacy.

Links to Key Investigations and Events

Below are links to the Veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement and other websites with descriptions of some key organizing and advocacy efforts by Medgar Evers. These provide an introduction to the wide range of issues and tactics addressed by Medgar Evers and the southern freedom movement at the time.

Rev. George Lee Murder Investigation: Medgar Evers insisted on an investigation of the May 7, 1955, murder of voting rights activist Rev. George Lee. It remained a cold case, however, it received more attention than it would have otherwise thanks to the brave work of Evers.

Emmett Till Murder Investigation: Medgar Evers played a key role in securing the involvement of the NAACP in the effort to publicize and bring to justice the case of the August 1955 murder of 14 year old Emmett Till. He also helped secretly secure witnesses for the case.

Clinton and Beulah Melton Murder Investigation: Medgar Evers investigated the murder of Clinton Melton on Dec. 3, 1955. Clinton’s wife died, likely murdered, a week before she was to testify in the case.

James Meredith’s Fight to Desegregate Ole Miss: Medgar Evers helped James Meredith in his effort to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962. He secured the NAACP’s legal team, headed by Thurgood Marshall, to assist Meredith. Evers himself had been denied admission to Ole Miss law school in 1954.

Jackson, Mississippi Boycotts of 1962-63: These include boycotts of the segregated county fair and business district.

Films

Medgar Evers: An Unsung Hero

Directed by Michael Cory Davis. 2010. 1 hour 11 min.
This two-part documentary on Medgar Evers, produced by the Mad Men TV series, provides extensive interviews with Myrlie Evers-Williams (widow), Charles Evers (brother), Reena Evers-Everette (daughter), Kestin Boyce, Derrick Johnson, and more. It is too long for classroom use, however, it provides useful background information for teachers and clips of the interviews could be shared with students.

Myrlie Evers addressing a NAACP Freedom Rally at Howard University. At far left is Evers’ son Darrell. 8/25/1963. Photo: ©Bettmann Corbis.

About Myrlie Evers-Williams

Myrlie Evers-Williams has long been a pioneer in the struggles for racial justice and women’s equality. She fought for decades to gain justice in the assassination Medgar Evers, worked tirelessly for civil rights, ran for political office, and from 1995-1998, served as chair of the NAACP. She raised three children, Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise, and James Van Dyke.

Evers-Williams has co-written three books: For Us, The Living; Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be; and The Autobiography of Medgar Evers.

She is currently serving as a distinguished scholar-in-residence at Alcorn State University and directing the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute.

See interview with Myrlie Evers on the National Visionary Leadership Project website.

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Roudanez, a visionary free Black man, was a doctor and journalist. Greatly influenced by revolutions in Saint Domingue and France, and angered by slavery and racial injustice, he took up the cause of equality during the Civil War and Reconstruction era.

With his Tribune colleagues and a dynamic community of free and freed persons of African descent, Roudanez courageously attacked racism in the face of some of the nation’s worst violence. He was the guiding force behind one of the most radical and influential journals of its time. The Tribune’s crusade led to Black enfranchisement, the creation of a groundbreaking State constitution with strong equal rights provisions, and the election of many Black representatives. The vision of Roudanez, articulated in print and manifested in social protest, forged one of the most important civil rights campaigns in U.S. history.

Visit the Roudanez website to explore the history of the New Orleans Tribune which features an in-depth history of the Tribune, a virtual tour of historic sites, articles about the importance of the paper, extracts, a timeline of significant events in the Tribune’s past, and a video and photo gallery.

The information for this post was provided by Mark Charles Roudané, retired elementary school teacher and great-great-grandson of Charles Roudanez. We highly recommend Roudané’s October, 2015 article in The Atlantic, “Grappling With the Memory of New Orleans: A family’s story traces the roots of the eclectic city, the country’s first black daily newspaper, and the evolution of racial injustice.” Roudané developed and maintains the Roudanez website.

Learn about the people’s history of the media in News for All the People.

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Teacher, journalist, and political activist Jovita Idár.

On Sept. 14, 1911, el Primer Congreso Mexicanista (First Mexicanist Congress) met in Laredo, Texas in order to discuss social, labor, educational, and economic issues facing Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States. At the meeting, Jovita Idár was elected president of El Congreso’s Women’s League.

As its president, Idár organized the Women’s League to provide education for poor children. Idár also worked as a journalist for her family’s paper, La Crónica, criticizing discrimination against Mexican Americans and advocating for women’s rights, including the right to vote.

In 1913, after traveling to Mexico to work as a nurse for the revolutionary forces, Idár returned to Laredo and joined the staff of another paper, El Progreso. When Texas Rangers first tried to destroy the paper’s headquarters after an editorial protesting President Woodrow Wilson’s dispatch of U.S. troops to the U.S.–Mexico border, Idár physically blocked them from entering the building.

Read more about Jovita Idár at the Texas State Historical Association’s website. 

This #tdih post was prepared by Abby Saul.

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Joseph Welch.

On June 9, 1954, Special Counsel for the U.S. Army Joseph N. Welch confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy had attacked a member of Welch’s law firm, Frederick G. Fisher, as a communist due to Fisher’s prior membership in the National Lawyers Guild. The Guild was the nation’s first racially integrated bar association.

Welch was outraged:

Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness . . . . Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

The film “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” describes the backdrop to this exchange in detail. Attorney Roy Cohn served as a chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. (It should be noted that Cohn would later become a leading mob attorney, represented Donald Trump for years, and once claimed he considered Trump to be his best friend.)

Read the transcript of the full exchange.

Reflection Questions

Here are some suggested questions for reflection on the topic of McCarthyism:

What was the intended/actual impact of the McCarthy attacks on the labor movement and the Civil Rights Movement?

What was the role of the media and why?

Is the McCarthy era really an era or do we still live with McCarthyism today?

Below are resources for teaching about McCarthyism, including a historical fiction chapter book for middle school.

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People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. — Studs Terkel

On this anniversary of the birth of Studs Terkel born on May 16, 1912, below are resources for teaching about and with his oral history interviews.

Studs Terkel in 1992, taking a bus home after working on his show at WFMT radio in Chicago. Chris Walker/The Chicago Tribune, via Associated Press.

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On May 11, 1973, U.S. District Court Judge William Byrne Jr. in the Pentagon Papers trial dismissed all charges against Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo.

Byrne ruled,

The totality of the circumstances of this case which I have only briefly sketched offend a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case.

A continuation of the government’s investigation is no solution with reference to this case . . . each passing day indicates that the investigation is further from completion as the jury waits. Moreover, no investigation is likely to pro­vide satisfactory answers where improper government conduct has been shielded so long from public view and where the government advises the Court that pertinent files and records are missing or destroyed. . . .

I have decided to declare a mistrial and grant the motion for dismissal.

Learn more from the archived New York Times article, “Pentagon Papers Charges Are Dismissed; Judge Byrne Frees Ellsberg and Russo, Assails Improper Government Conduct.”

Below are lessons for teaching about the case, the Vietnam War, and whistleblowing based on the film The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

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The documents revealed the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program — COINTELPRO — which was a series of covert, and often illegal, activity. The FBI conducted surveillance, infiltration, discreditation, and the disruption of domestic political organizations — including actions that led to murder. (Learn more about from Democracy Now!’s interview with three of the people who broke in.)

Here is just one of the documents:

On December 7, 1955 the FBI’s Mobile office began forwarding information on the bus boycott to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The special agent in charge of the office reports that someone, probably a member of the Montgomery police department, had been assigned to find “derogatory information” about King.

The Citizen’s Commission members involved in the break-in were never caught nor revealed their names until 2014. In 2015, a documentary film, 1971, was released on the case.

1971 Film Trailer

As for what students learn about COINTELPRO, high school teacher Ursula Wolfe-Rocca notes:

My students had little way of knowing about this story behind the story because mainstream textbooks almost entirely ignore COINTELPRO. Though COINTELPRO offers teachers a trove of opportunities to illustrate key concepts, including the rule of law, civil liberties, social protest, and due process, it is completely absent from my school’s government book, Magruder’s American Government (Pearson).

Wolfe-Rocca wrote a lesson for her students drawing on primary documents from COINTELPRO. Find the lesson and her article on teaching about COINTELPRO and other resources on the links below.

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On July 4, 1917, The Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro—the first newspaper of the “New Negro Movement,” edited by Hubert H. Harrison—made its debut at a rally at the Metropolitan Baptist Church at 120 W. 138th Street, between Lenox and Seventh Avenues in Harlem.

The rally was called by Harrison’s Liberty League (which was the first organization of the “New Negro Movement” and which Marcus Garvey and many other activists joined) and drew national attention as it protested against lynching, segregation, and disfranchisement.

The protest rally came in the wake of two white supremacist pogroms (from May 27–May 30 and July 1–3, 1917) against the African American community of East St. Louis, Illinois. Estimates of the number of African Americans killed in East St. Louis ranged from 39 to 250 and the attacks were widely attributed to “white” labor’s opposition to Black workers.

The front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of July 3, 1917, with a photograph of Blacks leaving East St. Louis and an article by reporter Carlos F. Hurd describing the carnage.

At the rally, one of the speakers reportedly said, “They are saying a great deal about democracy in Washington now,” but, “while they are talking about fighting for freedom and the Stars and Stripes, here at home the whites apply the torch to the Black men’s home, and bullets, clubs and stones to the body.”

As president of the Liberty League, Harrison advised Black people who faced mob violence in the South and elsewhere to take direct action and “supply themselves with rifles and fight if necessary, to defend their lives and property.”

According to the New York Times, Harrison received great applause when he declared that “the time had come for the Negroes [to] do what white men who were threatened did, look out for themselves, and kill rather than submit to be killed.” He was quoted as saying, “We intend to fight if we must . . . for the things dearest to us, for our hearths and homes,” and he encouraged Black people everywhere who did not enjoy the protection of the law “to arm for their own defense, to hide their arms, and to learn how to use them.”

He also called for a collection of money to buy rifles for those who could not obtain them, emphasizing that “Negroes in New York cannot afford to lie down in the face of this” because “East St. Louis touches us too nearly.”

As he later put it, “‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ and sometimes two eyes or a half dozen teeth for one is the aim of the New Negro.”

Harrison stressed that it was imperative to “demand justice” and to “make our voices heard.”

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Inspired by the suggestion of her aunt, she sets out to create her own museum with objects that illustrate her family’s history. As curator and docent, she reclaims and honors that history.

Milo’s Museum will inspire many young readers to create their own museums and to look at field trips and museums with a more critical eye. [Review by Rethinking Schools.]

ISBN: 9781537580968 | Rosetta Press

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With his Tribune colleagues and a dynamic community of free and freed persons of African descent, Roudanez courageously attacked racism in the face of some of the nation’s worst violence. He was the guiding force behind one of the most radical and influential journals of its time. The Tribune’s crusade led to Black enfranchisement, the creation of a groundbreaking State constitution with strong equal rights provisions, and the election of many Black representatives. The vision of Roudanez, articulated in print and manifested in social protest, forged one of the most important civil rights campaigns in U.S. history.

Visit the website to explore the history of the New Orleans Tribune which features an in-depth history of the Tribune, a virtual tour of historic sites, articles about the importance of the paper, extracts, a timeline of significant events in the Tribune’s past, and a video and photo gallery. [Website description.]

This website was developed and is maintained by Mark Charles Roudané, retired elementary school teacher and great-great-grandson of Charles Roudanez. We highly recommend Roudane’s October, 2015 article in The Atlantic, “Grappling With the Memory of New Orleans: A family’s story traces the roots of the eclectic city, the country’s first black daily newspaper, and the evolution of racial injustice.”

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