Today my book A Thousand Never Evers, whose title is a tribute to civil rights leader Medgar Evers, will be released in bookstores nationwide. And tomorrow night, just after midnight, is the forty-fifth anniversary of Medgar Evers’s murder by a racist assassin.
In the first chapter of my book, Addie Ann Pickett, the twelve-year-old African American protagonist, can’t understand why her older brother and mother are so shook up by Medgar Evers’s death. “If he ain’t a friend and he don’t owe you money, what’s a matter?” she asks her brother.
What Addie Ann will come to learn is that her community—and the world—lost a hero. Medgar Evers was the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi from 1954 to June 12, 1963, when he was shot and killed in the driveway of his home.
Every single day, he knew his life was at risk. Just weeks before his murder, a bomb had been thrown into the carport of his home. His three kids slept on mattresses on the floor, below the level of their bedroom windows through which bullets had flown. There was no street number on the house to make it harder for his persecutors find.
But Medgar Evers lived by this motto: “The things that I don’t like I will try to change.”
And living as a black man in the South, there were a lot of things Medgar Evers didn’t like: When he was a
young boy, he did not like walking twelve miles each way to the Negro high school, when there was a perfectly good school closer by. He did not like that after he fought for the U.S. in World War II, he came back to Mississippi and couldn’t sit down and order a hamburger in a restaurant. He did not like that most of his Negro friends and neighbors were prevented from voting by discriminatory tools, such as the poll taxes and unfair voter registration tests. He did not like that blacks were being lynched and people stood silent.
Medgar Evers spearheaded voter registration drives. He pressed for integration in the schools. And he documented civil rights abuses, pushed for justice, and exposed the horrors of the segregated South to the media and the world.
The lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 is now considered to be a landmark event in the fight for civil rights. What many people don’t know is that Medgar Evers went undercover as a regular field hand to talk to residents of the Delta and uncover the true facts of the case. In 1968, NAACP Field Organizer Howard Spence said:
Had it not been for Medgar Evers, who was NAACP secretary at the time…it would have just been another ‘case’ that’s been forgot….The Emmett Till case was the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott. It was the beginning of a lot of incidents in the South that began to make the Negro aware of the fact that he would have to get out and expose himself to these racists—to these people that were gonna kill him.
Today, as I think about Medgar Evers, I think about these words he once said at a dinner to honor the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that eventually led to the end of legal segregation in the public schools:
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what we do here.
Resources:
While writing my book, I often took advice from Minnie White Watson, Curator of the Medgar Evers House and Museum, and an old family friend of the Evers’s. I had the privilege of interviewing her for my website too. You can read her comments here.
To get a first-hand look at the work of Medgar Evers, check out The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches, edited by Myrlie Evers-Williams & Manning Marable.