Medgar Evers

Mississippi used to be one of the most segregated states in the country. But this all changed as one Black man stood up to stop the madness. This man was Medgar Wiley Evers, a political activist that propelled the Civil Rights Movement further than he knew he could. He dedicated his whole life to the Civil Rights Movement which also led to his untimely death.

On July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, Medgar Evers became one of the four children of James and Jessie Evers. During Medgar’s childhood, his parents showered him with love and joy even though his father worked in a sawmill and his mother was a laundress. Because of this, the family didn’t make much profit, but nevertheless, his family was strict about education, religion, and hard work.

During Medgar Evers’ childhood, he witnessed many tragic things that would leave him scarred for life and would cause him to rebel in the future. At only the age of fourteen, Medgar witnessed a horrible and tragic event. A friend of Medgar’s father, Tingle, was dragged behind a wagon through the streets of Decatur. He was later shot and hanged in accusation of insulting a White woman. Everyday that Medgar would go to his under-funded school, he would pass by the tree from which Tingle was hanged, and he would recall the bloody clothes and the tragic death of his father’s friend. He would never forget it.

At the age of seventeen in 1942, Medgar volunteered and was inducted into the United States Army where he fought in World War II. He was assigned to a segregated port battalion, which was normal at the time, but this only maddened him. Once he made it home safely from the war, he wanted to vote against the segregated battalions. So, in the summer of 1946, Medgar, his brother Charles, and many other Black veterans registered to vote at the Decatur city hall. But when Election Day came around, Medgar and the other veterans were forced away at gunpoint from casting their ballots by a mob of angry White people. This angered Medgar even more and this was when his tension snapped. This is the key event that finally sparked his rebellion.

Back in Medgar Evers’ time, Black people and White people weren’t allowed to be “separate but equal” in the south. Medgar Evers did not support segregation, and did many things to oppose it by helping the Civil Rights Movement. He participated in many boycotts, desegregated the University of Mississippi, and even became the first NAACP (National Association of the Advancement of Colored People) field officer in Mississippi. Along with all of the things listed above, Medgar also helped with the public investigations of Emmett Till, a young Black boy that was kidnapped and murdered after being accused of “flirting” with the wife of a White grocery shop owner named Roy Bryant, by disguising himself as a cotton picker, to see if he could gather some information on where Emmett Till might have been after he had gone missing. All of these things made Medgar very popular in the quest for equal rights between Black and White Americans, but it also made him a popular target for many segregationists.