Medgar Evers
#blackhistoryProfiles
Medgar Wiley Evers was born to a farming family in Decatur, Mississippi and fought in both France and Germany during World War II. Upon his return, he attended Alcorn College and briefly worked as an insurance salesman before getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement as part of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. The first action he led was a boycott against gas stations that refused to let Black people use their restrooms.
After the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Evers led efforts to desegregate the University of Mississippi Law School.
As the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, Evers organized voter-registration efforts and economic boycotts of segregationist companies, while leading efforts to desegregate schools, parks and beaches.
His work made him a target for white suprecists. Evers’ was murdered in 1963, fatally shot in the back outside his home in Jackson. Two all-white juries failed to convict KKK-member Byron De La Beckwith, but new evidence resulted in Beckwith murder conviction in 1994 by a mixed-race jury.