Evers, Medgar (1925–1963)

African American civil rights activist Medgar Wiley Evers was born in Decatur, Mississippi, on July 2, 1925, to James Evers, who worked at a sawmill, and his wife Jessie. As field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi in the 1950s and early 1960s, Evers critiqued racial inequality and encouraged black Mississippians to fight against it in the state in which segregation seemed most entrenched.

Evers grew up in segregated circumstances. In 1943, 17-year-old Evers left school to join the Army, serving in Europe. This relative equality he found there, as well as the example of Nazi fascism, inspired Evers to challenge segregation upon his return to the United States. He finished high school and entered Alcorn A&M College in 1948, graduating in 1952 and taking a job with Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. The company was owned by African Americans, and its secretary, Aaron Henry, was active in the NAACP. Evers soon became involved with the organization, selling NAACP memberships along with life insurance. In 1954, he gained statewide notoriety as the first African American to attempt, unsuccessfully, to enroll in University of Mississippi law school. Later that year, he was named Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP.

Evers and his wife, Myrlie, moved to Jackson in 1955 and opened the NAACP office there, but his work found him mostly on the road. He traveled across the state, adding to the membership ranks of the NAACP and exposing such cases of white supremacist violence as the 1955 murder of Emmet Till. Long before student activists penetrated the deep South in the 1960s, Evers prepared the way for them and refused to accept that Mississippi would never change. In 1962, he helped convince the NAACP to support James Meredith's successful efforts to integrate the University of Mississippi. The following year, he initiated a lawsuit to desegregate the public schools in Jackson. In May 1963, Evers was active in additional direct action protests to integrate public accommodations in the city.

As the leading critic of segregation in Mississippi for a time, Evers constantly faced police monitoring and the threat of violence. On the evening of June 11, 1963, Evers was shot and killed in his driveway by the white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. Two murder trials in the 1960s resulted in hung juries for Beckwith, but he was retried at the urging of Evers's widow in 1994 and found guilty. Beckwith died in prison in 2001.