Mississippi Boy, WWII Veteran, Rejected Voter
Medgar Wilie Evers was born in Decatur, Mississippi, in 1925. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, including the Normandy invasion. When he returned home in 1946, he and a group of veterans tried to vote in the Democratic primary. A white mob turned them away at gunpoint. He had just fought for American democracy in France. The experience defined the rest of his life.
He enrolled at Alcorn State College (a historically Black college in Mississippi), graduated in 1952, and applied to the University of Mississippi Law School. His application was rejected on racial grounds. He became the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi in 1954 — the year Brown v. Board of Education was decided.
Investigating Murders, Organizing Voters
As NAACP field secretary, Evers investigated racial murders — including the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, for which he helped gather evidence and witnesses. He organized voter registration campaigns in one of the most dangerous states in the country for that work. He investigated bombings, shootings, and economic reprisals against Black Mississippians who attempted to exercise their rights.
"You can kill a man but you can't kill an idea."
He drove a car with no trunk lock so that if a bomb were placed there, it would fall out when he opened it. His family practiced air raid drills — where to lie on the floor when shots came through the windows. Shots did come through the windows. He knew he was going to be killed. He kept working.
Killed June 12, 1963 — Killer Convicted in 1994
On June 12, 1963 — hours after President Kennedy's televised address on civil rights — Byron De La Beckwith shot Evers in the back with a rifle as he got out of his car in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. His wife Myrlie and their three children were inside. He died in the driveway.
De La Beckwith was tried twice in 1964. Both all-white juries deadlocked — no conviction. He lived free for 30 more years, openly boasting about the murder at Ku Klux Klan rallies. In 1994, a third trial with new evidence and a racially mixed jury convicted him. He was sentenced to life in prison and died there in 2001, at 80.
The 31-year gap between murder and conviction is not an aberration. It is the documented operating speed of the justice system when the victim is Black and the perpetrator is white in the American South. Medgar Evers' life and death are both part of the same history this archive documents.