Medgar Evers Assassinated (1963)
Shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Wiley Evers pulled into his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, carrying T-shirts printed with the slogan "Jim Crow Must Go." A bullet from a high-powered rifle — fired from an ambush across the street — struck him in the back. He died less than an hour later at the age of 37. Evers was the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi and one of the most effective civil rights organizers in the most dangerous state in the South. His assassination occurred just hours after President Kennedy's first televised address on civil rights.
A Life of Courage
Medgar Wiley Evers was born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, one of five children. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, landing at Normandy on D-Day and participating in the liberation of France — an experience that made the racism he returned to at home feel all the more intolerable. He attended Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College on the GI Bill, where he met his future wife Myrlie. In 1952, Evers applied to the University of Mississippi Law School; his application was rejected on racial grounds. He joined the NAACP and in 1954 was appointed Mississippi's first field secretary — a job that required him to investigate racial murders and lynchings, organize voter registration drives, and coordinate legal challenges to segregation in the most violently resistant state in the nation. He received death threats constantly. The family's home was firebombed in May 1963. Evers taught his children to drop to the floor when they heard a loud noise. He knew he might be killed; he continued anyway.
Did You Know?
Medgar Evers's killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was a fertilizer salesman and Ku Klux Klan member who was tried twice for the murder in the 1960s. Both trials ended in hung juries — all-white juries who could not agree to convict. Beckwith lived freely for decades, even boasting about the killing. In 1994 — thirty years after the murder — he was tried a third time using new evidence and testimony. He was convicted of murder at age 73 and died in prison in 2001. Medgar Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
The Night of the Assassination
On the evening of June 11, 1963, Evers watched President Kennedy's televised address calling for civil rights legislation — the speech in which Kennedy said, "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue." Evers left a meeting at a local church and drove home. As he stepped out of his car carrying armloads of T-shirts, Byron De La Beckwith fired a single shot from a rifle hidden in a honeysuckle thicket across the street. The bullet passed through Evers, broke a window, struck the front door, bounced off the refrigerator, and came to rest on the kitchen counter. His wife Myrlie and their children ran out to find him dying in the driveway, his keys still in his hand. He died at the University of Mississippi Medical Center at approximately 1:14 AM on June 12. In the days that followed, protests erupted in Jackson; marchers were met with police dogs and fire hoses. Evers was buried with military honors at Arlington on June 19, 1963 — forty-four years before Juneteenth would become a federal holiday commemorating emancipation.
The Legacy That Outlasted His Killers
Medgar Evers's death galvanized the civil rights movement and helped build momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His funeral in Jackson drew thousands of mourners; the procession sparked confrontations with police that required the intervention of Justice Department officials. Bob Dylan wrote "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about the murder; Nina Simone wrote "Mississippi Goddam" in response to both Evers's killing and the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Myrlie Evers became a major civil rights figure in her own right, eventually serving as chairman of the NAACP in the 1990s. The family's former home in Jackson — where the driveway where Medgar fell is still visible — was designated a National Historic Landmark. Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, founded in 1969, is named in his honor. His story is a reminder that the civil rights movement was not made only by famous names at famous marches; it was built, day by day, in the most dangerous places, by people who understood that justice demanded everything they had.