Medgar Evers was routinely followed home by the FBI and local police, for his protection. Death was such a constant threat that he and his wife, Myrlie, trained their kids on how to respond in the case of a shooting. When Evers arrived at his home on the morning of his death, however, his usual protection wasn’t present: the reasons were never made clear by the FBI or local police, of course. The concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement certainly aren’t new, nor is the complicity of law enforcement in acts of terror against Black people.
Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council (and later of the Ku Klux Klan) was the murderer. Evans had long been active in the freedom movement and was in fact the NAACP’s state field secretary. An alum of Alcorn State University (HBCU), Evers and his wife moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a Black town developed by Black people, shortly after he graduated. Evers worked a salesman for T. R. M. Howard’s Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance, a Black insurance firm. Evers applied to the University of Mississippi’s law school as a test case, after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision found segregated schools to be unconstitutional. He was not admitted, obviously. As field secretary, Evers was directly responsible for a good deal of the activism and direction actions that were taking place around the state of Mississippi. Quite simply, Evers had to go.
De La Beckwith was the clearly the gunman but it didn’t matter. Blacks were still largely barred from voting in Mississippi in 1963 and thus couldn’t serve on juries. A white jury would not convict De La Beckwith and so he lived free for decades. Myrlie Evers pressed on. She waited until a new judge was assigned to the county to take the case back to court and in 1994, De La Beckwith was prosecuted by the state, based on new evidence. On February 5, 1994 De La Beckwith was convicted and he died in jail in 2001. After being murdered in cold blood, Medgar Evers was blatantly denied justice for some 30 years: this is America.
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