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Jerry Mitchell: Why Medgar Evers should represent Mississippi in U.S. Capitol Statuary Hall

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mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2024-09-20 11:32:07

Editor’s note: Mississippi Today and the Mississippi Humanities Council cosponsored an event – “Reimagining Statuary Hall” – on Sept. 18 at The Station in Fondren. Several speakers suggested accomplished Mississippians to represent the state in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol. Currently, statues of staunch segregationists Jefferson Davis and J..Z. George represent Mississippi. What follows is Mississippi Today investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell’s pitch from the event.


Medgar Evers Credit: National Park Service

Medgar Evers dove onto the sand at Normandy. In the weeks following the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. He joined a million soldiers fighting to expand the beachhead. The Luftwaffe strafed and bombed them, hoping to push them back into the sea.

He was also part of the Red Ball Express, which provided fuel, food and other critical supplies as Allied troops pushed back the German forces.

As Allied forces freed more of France from Nazi occupation, Evers enjoyed life without the color line. He could eat in any restaurant he desired. He even fell in love with a French girl.

After battling the Nazis, he returned to Mississippi and fought racism all over again in the form of Jim Crow, which barred Black Americans from restaurants, restrooms and voting booths. When he tried to vote in his hometown of Decatur, Mississippi, he and other Black war veterans were turned away by an armed white mob.

After graduating from Alcorn College, he worked for his mentor, Dr. T.R.M. Howard, and was involved in passing out bumper stickers across the Delta that read, “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom.”

In January 1954, he tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi School of Law — only to be turned away. NAACP officials considered taking up his case but were so impressed with him they decided instead to hire him as the first field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP.

He investigated violence against African Americans, including the 1955 assassinations of the Rev. George Lee and Lamar Smith, who were killed because they helped Black Mississippians register to vote.

He worked with Dr. Howard on the lynching of Emmett Till and helped find new witnesses.

The economic threats and violence became so great that Dr. Howard and others left Mississippi, but Medgar Evers stayed.

He helped James Meredith enroll at Ole Miss, and he logged 40,000 miles a year traveling the roads, sometimes flooring it past 100 to escape those hell-bent on harming him. 

His telephone rang at all hours with threats. Some were short and emphatic: “We’re going to kill you, N-word.” Others described how they planned to torture him.

Evers told a CBS reporter, “They say I’m going to be dead soon, that they’re going to blow up my house, that they’re going to blow my head off. If I die, it will be a good cause. I’m fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.”

After the white mayor of Jackson chastised the civil rights movement in Mississippi in spring 1963, Evers won his FCC bid for “equal time” to respond. He talked on television about the mistreatment of Black Mississippians and in so doing he became even more of a target. The Evers’ home was firebombed.

Hours after President Kennedy told the nation that the grandchildren of those enslaved are “not yet freed from the bonds of injustice,” Evers was shot in the back as he stepped onto his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. His wife, Myrlie Evers, heard the shot, ran outside, saw the blood and screamed. When the children heard the scream, they ran outside and saw their father.

“Daddy, get up,” his 8-year-old daughter, Reena, said. “Daddy, get up.”

He never did.

On Evers’ birthday in 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act

Three decades later, his family finally saw his assassin convicted.

“All I want to say is, ‘Yay, Medgar, yay!’” Myrlie Evers declared as she wiped away tears. “My God, I don’t have to say accused assassin anymore. … what he failed to realize was that Medgar was still alive in spirit and through each and every one of us who wanted to see justice done.”

That justice inspired others. To date, 24 men have been convicted in civil rights cold cases.

A year after Evers’ killer went to prison, Myrlie Evers became chairman of the national NAACP and helped rescue the civil rights organization from the brink of bankruptcy.

She continues to break boundaries. She became the first lay person to deliver the inaugural invocation at Barack Obama’s second inauguration.

She cheered when Mississippi removed the Confederate emblem from the state flag, and she told me the reason we keep repeating its history is we don’t know our history.

Putting Medgar Evers in Statuary Hall would honor a fallen soldier in the war against hate and would help ensure that we know our history so that we don’t repeat it.

Jerry Mitchell on his Statuary Hall pick; Medgar Evers

READ MORE: Other Southern states removed white supremacist statues from Washington. Will Mississippi?

READ MORE: J.Z. George’s descendant advocates for removing the statue of the Confederate icon from the nation’s Capitol

READ MORE: Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis statue has new neighbor in U.S. Capitol: Arkansas civil rights leader

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

An ad supporting Jenifer Branning finds imaginary liberals on the Mississippi Supreme Court

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mississippitoday.org – Bobby Harrison – 2024-11-24 06:00:00

The Improve Mississippi PAC claims in advertising that the state Supreme Court “is in danger of being dominated by liberal justices” unless Jenifer Branning is elected in Tuesday’s runoff.

Improve Mississippi made the almost laughable claim in both radio commercials and mailers that were sent to homes in the court’s central district, where a runoff election will be held on Tuesday.

Improve Mississippi is an independent, third party political action committee created to aid state Sen. Jenifer Branning of Neshoba County in her efforts to defeat longtime Central District Supreme Court Justice Jim Kitchens of Copiah County.

The PAC should receive an award or at least be considered for an honor for best fiction writing.

At least seven current members of the nine-member Supreme Court would be shocked to know anyone considered them liberal.

It is telling that the ads do not offer any examples of “liberal” Supreme Court opinions issued by the current majority. It is even more telling that there have been no ads by Improve Mississippi or any other group citing the liberal dissenting opinions written or joined by Kitchens.

Granted, it is fair and likely accurate to point out that Branning is more conservative than Kitchens. After all, Branning is considered one of the more conservative members of a supermajority Republican Mississippi Senate.

As a member of the Senate, for example, she voted against removing the Confederate battle emblem from the Mississippi state flag, opposed Medicaid expansion and an equal pay bill for women.

And if she is elected to the state Supreme Court in Tuesday’s runoff election, she might be one of the panel’s more conservative members. But she will be surrounded by a Supreme Court bench full of conservatives.

A look at the history of the members of the Supreme Court might be helpful.

Chief Justice Michael Randolph originally was appointed to the court by Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, who is credited with leading the effort to make the Republican Party dominant in Mississippi. Before Randolph was appointed by Barbour, he served a stint on the National Coal Council — appointed to the post by President Ronald Reagan who is considered an icon in the conservative movement.

Justices James Maxwell, Dawn Beam, David Ishee and Kenneth Griffis were appointed by Republican Gov. Phil Bryant.

Only three members of the current court were not initially appointed to the Supreme Court by conservative Republican governors: Kitchens, Josiah Coleman and Robert Chamberlin. All three got their initial posts on the court by winning elections for full eight-year terms.

But Chamberlin, once a Republican state senator from Southaven, was appointed as a circuit court judge by Barbour before winning his Supreme Court post. And Coleman was endorsed in his election effort by both the Republican Party and by current Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, who also contributed to his campaign.

Only Kitchens earned a spot on the court without either being appointed by a Republican governor or being endorsed by the state Republican Party.

The ninth member of the court is Leslie King, who, like Kitchens, is viewed as not as conservative as the other seven justices. King, former chief judge on the Mississippi Court of Appeals, was originally appointed to the Supreme Court by Barbour, who to his credit made the appointment at least in part to ensure that a Black Mississippian remained on the nine-member court.

It should be noted that Beam was defeated on Nov. 5 by David Sullivan, a Gulf Coast municipal judge who has a local reputation for leaning conservative. Even if Sullivan is less conservative when he takes his new post in January, there still be six justices on the Supreme Court with strong conservative bonafides, not counting what happens in the Branning-Kitchens runoff.

Granted, Kitchens is next in line to serve as chief justice should Randolph, who has been on the court since 2004, step down. The longest tenured justice serves as the chief justice.

But to think that Kitchens as chief justice would be able to exert enough influence to force the other longtime conservative members of the court to start voting as liberals is even more fiction.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1968

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mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2024-11-24 07:00:00

Nov. 24, 1968

Credit: Wikipedia

Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver fled the U.S. to avoid imprisonment on a parole violation. He wrote in “Soul on Ice”: “If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.” 

The Arkansas native began to be incarcerated when he was still in junior high and soon read about Malcolm X. He began writing his own essays, drawing the praise of Norman Mailer and others. That work helped him win parole in 1966. His “Soul on Ice” memoir, written from Folsom state prison, described his journey from selling marijuana to following Malcolm X. The book he wrote became a seminal work in Black literature, and he became a national figure. 

Cleaver soon joined the Black Panther Party, serving as the minister of information. After a Panther shootout with police that left him injured, one Panther dead and two officers wounded, he jumped bail and fled the U.S. In 1977, after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, he returned to the U.S. pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of assault and served 1,200 hours of community service. 

From that point forward, “Mr. Cleaver metamorphosed into variously a born-again Christian, a follower of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a Mormon, a crack cocaine addict, a designer of men’s trousers featuring a codpiece and even, finally, a Republican,” The New York Times wrote in his 1998 obituary. His wife said he was suffering from mental illness and never recovered.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1867

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mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2024-11-23 07:00:00

Nov. 23, 1867

Extract from the Reconstructed Constitution of the State of Louisiana, 1868. Credit: Library of Congress

The Louisiana Constitutional Convention, composed of 49 White delegates and 49 Black delegates, met in New Orleans. The new constitution became the first in the state’s history to include a bill of rights. 

The document gave property rights to married women, funded public education without segregated schools, provided full citizenship for Black Americans, and eliminated the Black Codes of 1865 and property qualifications for officeholders. 

The voters ratified the constitution months later. Despite the document, prejudice and corruption continued to reign in Louisiana, and when Reconstruction ended, the constitution was replaced with one that helped restore the rule of white supremacy.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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