Medgar Evers died on June 12, 1963, a World War II veteran who fought in the Battle of Normandy.
But the battlefield he was killed in wasn’t overseas, but at home in the United States.
The first field officer in Mississippi for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Evers was returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers the day he was killed. Pulling into his driveway, he got out of his car carrying NAACP T-shirts that read, “Jim Crow Must Go,” according to the NAACP’s biography page for Evers. Then, he was shot in the back with a bullet that ricocheted into his home. He died 50 minutes later at the local hospital.
As a veteran, Evers was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors in front of more than 3,000 people. On Friday, the cemetery shared a picture of his grave on their Twitter account.
Today, we honor the life of Medgar Evers, WWII veteran and civil rights icon, on the anniversary of his murder, June 12, 1963. Evers fought for freedom in Europe, but it was his work as a civil rights leader in Mississippi that cost him his life. He is laid to rest in Section 36. pic.twitter.com/ZSXasY4bLE
— Arlington National Cemetery (@ArlingtonNatl) June 12, 2020
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Within a couple weeks, law enforcement arrested Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan. He had been asking for Evers’ home address before the shooting. A number of police, FBI experts and others testified against Beckwith, whose fingerprint was on the weapon, according to the FBI’s online page on Evers.
“But this was the 1960s, and in both trials, all-white juries did not reach a verdict. Beckwith went free,” the page reads. The case was reopened three decades later, and in 1994 Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
After the verdict was announced in court, Evers’s wife, Myrlie, told the Los Angeles Times she wept, jumped for joy, shouted and raised her eyes to the heavens.
“I have prayed for either hearing [Beckwith] say he was guilty or a jury saying he was guilty,” she said. “It’s been a long journey, and it’s been a lonely one.”
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As a prominent member of the civil rights movement, Evers had received death threats before his death, the case revealed. Local television station WLBT reported dozens of telephone calls, some threatening bodily harm to Evers, both during and after he spoke on television. A few days before his murder, Evers was nearly run down by a car leaving the Jackson NAACP office. A week earlier, a molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home.
Still, he maintained his vocal support of Clyde Kennard, another veteran who tried repeatedly to enroll at the all-white Mississippi Southern College, and public investigation into Emmett Till’s murder. Evers himself had been rejected by the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in 1954, the same year of the Brown v. Board of Education challenge, and was part of a campaign to desegregate the school.
One of four children, Evers was born July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Miss. He volunteered to serve in the army in 1942 after his sophomore year of high school. But when he returned, he was barred from exercising the right to vote that he had defended. He died at 37, leaving behind his wife and three children, fighting to realize the same rights and freedoms that many protesters today have taken to the streets to demand after another black man, George Floyd, was killed.
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