Medgar Evers — People — Black-History.com

Medgar Evers returned from World War II determined to claim the rights he had fought for abroad, and for nearly nine years he was the public face of the NAACP in Mississippi, the most violently segregated state in the nation. He documented lynchings and beatings, organized voter registration and boycotts, and led the 1963 Jackson Movement. His assassination in the driveway of his home on 12 June 1963 made him one of the movement’s most prominent martyrs, and the three-decade struggle to convict his killer became a test of whether Mississippi justice could change.

At a Glance

Born: 2 July 1925, Decatur, Mississippi
Died: 12 June 1963, Jackson, Mississippi
Birth name: Medgar Wiley Evers
Known for: First NAACP field secretary for Mississippi (from 1954–1955); investigation of the murder of Emmett Till (1955); the Jackson Movement (1963)
HBCU ties: Alcorn State University (Graduated, business administration, 1952)
Fields: Civil Rights · Organizing · Military
Era: Civil Rights Era

Early Life

Medgar Wiley Evers was born in Decatur, Mississippi, on 2 July 1925, the third of four children of James and Jessie Evers. His father worked at a sawmill and farmed. Evers grew up amid the routine terror of Jim Crow Mississippi, including a lynching in the community during his boyhood that he later described as formative.

He left school to enter the U.S. Army during World War II and served in a segregated port battalion of the Quartermaster Corps in England and France, reaching the rank of technician fifth grade before his discharge in 1946. That year he and his older brother Charles led a small group of Black veterans to the Newton County courthouse in Decatur to register and vote; armed white men turned them away. Evers finished high school and enrolled at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, where he majored in business administration, ran track, played football, edited the student newspaper, was named to Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges, and graduated in 1952. On 24 December 1951 he married a fellow student, Myrlie Beasley of Vicksburg.

Life and Work

After graduation the couple moved to the all-Black town of Mound Bayou, where Evers sold insurance for the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company, owned by the physician and activist T. R. M. Howard. He became active in Howard’s Regional Council of Negro Leadership, which organized a boycott of service stations that denied Black customers restrooms, and he helped organize local NAACP branches in the Delta. Traveling the plantation country as a salesman, he saw firsthand the poverty and disfranchisement of Black sharecroppers.

After the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Evers applied to the law school of the University of Mississippi and was rejected. The NAACP then hired him as its first field secretary for Mississippi, a post he took up at the turn of 1955, and he and Myrlie moved to Jackson, where she ran the office alongside him. Among his first assignments was the August 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in the Delta: Evers helped locate witnesses and publicize the case. For eight years he crisscrossed the state investigating killings and beatings, recruiting NAACP members, and encouraging voter registration, while enduring constant threats. He supported Clyde Kennard’s attempts to enroll at Mississippi Southern College and in 1962 assisted James Meredith’s successful effort to integrate the University of Mississippi.

In 1963 Evers helped lead the Jackson Movement, a campaign of boycotts, sit-ins, and marches against segregated stores, public facilities, and hiring. On 20 May 1963, after the Federal Communications Commission required the station to provide airtime in response to the mayor, he delivered a televised address on Jackson’s WLBT calling for an end to segregation in the city. In late May demonstrators at a Woolworth lunch counter were beaten by a white crowd, and hundreds of young protesters were arrested in the following days. That spring his home was firebombed.

Shortly after midnight on 12 June 1963, hours after President John F. Kennedy’s nationally televised address calling for civil rights legislation, Evers was shot in the back in the carport of his home as he returned from a meeting; Myrlie and their three children were inside. He died at University Hospital in Jackson. He was 37.

Legacy

After his funeral in Jackson on 15 June 1963, several thousand mourners marched through downtown, and a confrontation with police was defused only when Justice Department attorney John Doar intervened. Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on 19 June 1963. Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and white supremacist, was tried for the murder twice in 1964; both all-white, all-male juries deadlocked. After Myrlie Evers and journalists pressed for the case to be reopened, Beckwith was tried a third time in Jackson in 1994. Prosecutors introduced the rifle scope bearing his fingerprint, recovered from the murder weapon in 1963, along with new witnesses who testified that he had boasted of the killing, and a racially mixed jury convicted him on 5 February 1994. He was sentenced to life in prison and died there in 2001.

Myrlie Evers-Williams went on to chair the NAACP. Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York bears his name, and the family’s Jackson home is preserved as the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, established under legislation enacted in 2019 and administered by the National Park Service. President Joe Biden awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2024. According to the National Park Service, his assassination was the first murder of a civil rights leader to focus national attention on the movement; within days Kennedy sent his civil rights bill to Congress, the measure that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historians regard his work as the organizational groundwork on which the Mississippi movement of the 1960s was built.

For Educators

Evers did the dangerous, patient organizing that laid the groundwork for the Mississippi movement, and his assassination focused national attention on the struggle for civil rights. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

2 July 1925 Born in Decatur, Mississippi.
c. 1943–1946 Serves in the U.S. Army in England and France during World War II.
1946 Leads Black veterans in an attempt to vote in Decatur; they are turned away at gunpoint.
24 December 1951 Marries Myrlie Beasley.
1952 Graduates from Alcorn A&M College; begins selling insurance in Mound Bayou.
1954 Applies to the University of Mississippi law school and is rejected.
Turn of 1955 Becomes the NAACP’s first field secretary for Mississippi.
20 May 1963 Delivers a televised address on segregation in Jackson on WLBT.
12 June 1963 Assassinated in the carport of his home in Jackson.
5 February 1994 Byron De La Beckwith is convicted of his murder.

Sources and Further Reading

National Park Service, Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, “Medgar Evers.” Link
The National WWII Museum, “Medgar Evers: US Army Veteran and Civil Rights Leader.” Link
Mississippi Encyclopedia, “Evers, Medgar Wiley.” Link
Myrlie B. Evers with William Peters, For Us, the Living (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967).
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Medgar Evers College, CUNY, “Justice for Medgar Evers.” Link

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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.