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Medgar Evers will receive Presidential Medal of Freedom

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Medgar Evers will receive Presidential Medal of Freedom

At her husband’s funeral in 1963, Myrlie Evers heard NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins declare, “Medgar Evers believed in his country. It remains to be seen if his country believes in him.”

Later today, his country will declare its belief in him when the family of the slain Mississippi NAACP leader receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor.

But Medgar Evers was more than a civilian. He fought the Nazis in World War II, only to return home and fight racism, this time in the form of Jim Crow, which barred Black from the ballot box.

On his 21st birthday, he and other Black of the war went to vote at the courthouse in Decatur, where they were met by white men with guns.

Afterward, he vowed he would never be defeated again and that he would keep fighting by joining others dedicated to the cause of the civil rights movement.

“The movement for equality was always on his mind, and whites’ denial of his right to vote in his hometown served as one cog of many in the overall wheel of injustice, a wheel of which he was bound and determined to break,” said Michael Vinson Williams, author of “Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr.”

Myrlie Beasley met Medgar Evers on the first day of her freshman year at Alcorn A&M College in fall 1950. As she leaned against a light pole, she said he told her to be careful, “you might get shocked.”

And shocked she was when she fell in love and married him a year later. He was one of those military veterans that her family had warned her about. And he was involved in the movement that her family had avoided.

She joined him in the fight, and they moved to Mississippi’s only all-Black town, Mound Bayou, where he helped Dr. T.R.M. Howard lead a boycott. They distributed thousands of fluorescent bumper stickers that read, “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom.”

In January 1954, the University of Mississippi School of turned Medgar Evers away because of the color of his skin. NAACP considered taking his case to court, but they were so impressed with him they hired him instead as the first field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP.

Myrlie Evers worked as his secretary. She said he insisted they call each other “Mr. Evers” and “Mrs. Evers” in the office.

He spent much of his time on the road, putting 40,000 miles a year on his car, recruiting new members, reviving branches and inspiring young people to participate in the movement, including Joyce Ladner, who invited him to speak to the NAACP Youth Council in Hattiesburg.

“He had a quiet courage,” she recalled. “I was always amazed that he drove up and down Mississippi’s two-lane highways alone at night. He was a marked man, but he kept on going.”

Joan Mulholland is seen holding a photo of her booking shot taken when sge and othger Freedom Riders were arrested in Mississippi un 1961. Credit: Courtesy of the Mulholland family

In 1961, Joan Trumpaeur Mulholland was one of more than 400 Freedom Riders, half of them white, who challenged segregation laws in the South. She and other Riders were arrested and sent to serve their time at the State Penitentiary at Parchman.

When she and other Riders needed a lawyer, Medgar Evers “was the one who took care of it,” she said.

He became a model for her and others in character and courage, talking often to Tougaloo College students, she recalled. “He wasn’t intimidated.”

In 1962, Evers installed Leslie McLemore as president of the Rust College chapter of the Mississippi NAACP. “Medgar Evers was really a brilliant man,” he said. “He had an incisive mind and personality that drew people to him. In another era, he could have been a U.S. senator from Mississippi or maybe even President.”

Evers investigated countless cases of intimidation and violence against Black Americans, including the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. Evers often dressed as a sharecropper in those investigations.

No matter where he went, threats of violence followed. He bought an Oldsmobile 88 with a V-8 engine so powerful it would leave most cars behind. On some dark nights across the Mississippi Delta, he floored it to escape those hell-bent on harming him.

His name appeared on Ku Klux Klan “ lists,” and his home telephone rang at all hours with threats to him and his family.

When his daughter, Reena, answered the phone one time, she heard a man saying he planned to torture and kill her father.

In spite of these threats, he stayed. He told Ebony magazine, “The state is beautiful, it is home, I love it here. A man’s state is like his house. If it has defects, he tries to remedy them. That’s what my job is here.”

On May 20, 1963, Evers talked on television about the mistreatment of Black Mississippians. “If I die, it will be a good cause,” he told The New York Times. “I’m fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.”

Weeks later, President Kennedy delivered his first and only civil rights speech, telling the millions watching on television, “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

Evers smiled. He and other Black had urged Kennedy to push Congress for a civil rights bill, and now that seemed certain to happen.

Hours later, returning home from a late civil rights meeting, Evers was shot in the back in the driveway of his home.

Myrlie Evers and their three children dashed outside, saw the blood and screamed. “Daddy!” Reena yelled. “Please get up, Daddy.”

He never did.

“He had the courage to hold an impossible job at a crucial turning point in American history,” said Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a trilogy on the civil rights movement.

For the first time, members of the mainstream press didn’t call such a killing “a lynching,” he said. “They called it an assassination.”

In his book, “Parting the Waters,” he wrote, “White people who had never heard of Medgar Evers spoke his name over and over, as though the words themselves had the ring of legend. It seemed fitting that the casket was placed on a slow train through the South, bound for Washington so that the body could lie in state.”

After the casket arrived, Medgar Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

“The tragedy of his martyrdom is eloquent testimony to the courage and dedication of a leader who — in his lifetime — deserved the respect and of the powerful people who later publicly identified with this man and his cause,” said John Dittmer, author of “Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.” “Though long overdue, this award is a fitting to Medgar Evers and his family.”

A year after Evers’ assassination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act on his birthday, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill into law hours later.

“Medgar Wiley Evers boldly stood against injustice, against oppression, against this country’s determination to keep Black people as second-class citizens,” Williams said, “and he was murdered because of his commitment to truth, justice and the struggle for civil and human rights.”

Before leaving office as governor in 1984, William Winter hosted Myrlie Evers and her family at the mansion, where he remarked that Medgar Evers did more than just free Black Mississippians, he freed white Mississippians as well from the bonds of racial segregation, oppression and hate, he said. “We were all prisoners of that system.”

It took three decades before Evers’ killer was finally brought to justice in 1994, and that verdict helped to inspire the reopenings of other cases. There have been 24 convictions in civil rights cold cases.

Myrlie Evers’ courage to press for justice in her husband’s case started all of this, said Leslie McLemore, who helped found the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. “It would not have happened without her persistence.”

When she learned last about the Presidential Medal of Freedom honoring her late husband, she exclaimed to her daughter, Reena Evers-Everette, “Oh, my God!”

Then Myrlie Evers grew silent.

“I’m just utterly speechless,” she said, “and frozen with gratitude.”

Evers-Everette still misses the man she knows as “Daddy,” but she perseveres as the executive director for the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, because his spirit inspires her.

“I feel him around me all the time,” she said. “I marvel at his courage, stamina, vision, and commitment for equality and justice for his people and all of humanity. I pray for his love and wisdom as I pursue this work, because I don’t want him to have died in vain.”

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 1875

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mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2024-11-02 07:00:00

Nov. 2, 1875

Pictured here are U.S. Sen. Hiram Revels of Mississippi, left, with six Black members of the U.S. House, Ben J.S. Turner of Alabama, Josiah T. Walls of Florida, Jefferson H. Long of Georgia, and Robert C. De Large, Joseph H. Rainy and R. Brown Elliot, all of South Carolina. Credit: Library of

The first Mississippi Plan, which included violence against Black Americans to keep them from , resulted in huge victories for white Democrats across the

A year earlier, the Republican Party had carried a majority of the votes, and many Black had been elected to office. In the wake of those victories, white leagues arose to Republican rule and began to use widespread violence and fraud to recapture control of the state. 

Over several days in September 1875, about 50 Black Mississippians were killed along with white supporters, a school teacher who worked with the Black community in Clinton. 

The governor asked President Ulysses Grant to intervene, but he decided against intervening, and the violence and fraud continued. Other Southern states soon copied the Mississippi plan. 

John R. Lynch, the last Black congressman for Mississippi until the 1986 election of Mike Espy, wrote: “It was a well-known fact that in 1875 nearly every Democratic club in the State was converted into an armed military company.” 

A federal grand jury concluded: “Fraud, intimidation, and violence perpetrated at the last election is without a parallel in the annals of history.”

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

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Mississippi Today’s NewsMatch Campaign is Here: Support Journalism that Strengthens Mississippi

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mississippitoday.org – Mary Margaret White – 2024-11-01 12:34:00

High-quality journalism like ours depends on reader support; without it, we simply couldn’t exist. That’s why we’re proud to join the NewsMatch movement, a national initiative aimed at raising $50 million for nonprofit newsrooms that serve communities like ours here in Mississippi, where access to reliable information has often been limited.

In a time when trusted journalists and media sources are disappearing, we believe the stakes couldn’t be higher. Without on-the-ground, trustworthy , civic engagement suffers, accountability falters and corruption often goes unaddressed. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Here at Mississippi we act as watchdogs, holding those in power accountable, and as storytellers, giving a platform to voices that have been ignored for too long. And we’re committed to keeping our stories free for everyone because information should be accessible when it’s needed most.

Why NewsMatch and Why Now?

This year’s NewsMatch campaign runs from November 1 through December 31, giving us a special to make each dollar you give go even further. Through matching funds provided by local foundations like the Maddox Foundation, and national funders like the MacArthur Foundation, the Rural Partner Fund and the Hewlett Foundation, your gift will be matched dollar for dollar up to $1,000. Plus, if 100 new donors join us, we’ll unlock an additional $2,000 in , bringing us even closer to our goal. Boiled down: your donation goes four times as far.

Every dollar raised strengthens our ability to serve you with fact-based journalism on issues that impact your everyday —whether it’s covering local election issues or reporting on decisions affecting schools, safety and economic growth in Mississippi. Your support makes it possible for us to stay rooted in the community, offering nuanced perspectives that understand and engage with what’s around them.

Special Event: “Freedom of the Press: Southern Challenges, National Impact”

As part of the campaign, we’re excited to host a special virtual event, “Freedom of the Press: Southern Challenges, National Impact.” Join Deep South Today newsrooms Mississippi Today and Verite News, along with national experts on press freedom, for an in-depth discussion on the unique challenges facing journalists in the Deep South. This one-hour session will explore the critical role local newsrooms play in holding power accountable, highlighting recent restrictions on press freedom such as Louisiana’s “25-foot law,” which affects journalists’ ability to vital news.

We’ll examine what’s at stake if local newsrooms lose press freedoms and will discuss how you, as members of the public, can help protect it. This event is open to Mississippi Today and Verite News members as a special thank-you for supporting local journalism and standing with us in this mission. Donate today to RSVP!

How You Can Help

Make Your Gift Today

Together, let’s ensure Mississippi has the robust, independent journalism it needs to thrive. Your support fuels our ability to expose the truth, elevate marginalized stories and build a more informed Mississippi.

Thank you for believing in the power of journalism to strengthen the communities we love—not only during election season but year-round. With your help, we’ll keep Mississippi informed, engaged and connected for generations to .

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

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Mississippi Today

Hinds County loses fight over control of jail

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mississippitoday.org – Mina Corpuz – 2024-11-01 12:57:00

The sheriff and Board of Supervisors have lost an appeal to prevent control of its jail by a court-appointed receiver and an injunction that orders the county to address unconstitutional conditions in the facility.   

Two members from a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with decisions by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves to appoint a receiver to oversee day-to-day jail operations and keep parts of a previous consent decree in place to fix constitutional violations, a failure to protect detainees from harm. 

However, the appeals court called the new injunction “overly broad” in one area and is asking Reeves to reevaluate the scope of the receivership.

The injunction retained provisions relating to sexual assault, but the appeals court found the provisions were tied to general risk of violence at the jail, rather than specific concerns about the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The court reversed those points of the injunction and remanded them to the district court so the provisions can be

The court also found that the receiver should not have authority over budgeting and staff salaries for the Raymond Detention Center, which could be seen as “federal intrusion into RDC’s budget” – especially if the receivership has no end date. 

Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Robert Graham was not immediately available for comment Friday. Sheriff Tyree Jones declined to comment because he has not yet read the entire court opinion. 

In 2016, the Department of Justice sued Hinds County alleging a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conditions in four of its detention facilities. The county and DOJ entered a consent decree with stipulated changes to make for the jail system, which people facing trial. 

“But the decree did not resolve the dispute; to the contrary, a yearslong battle ensued in the district court as to whether and to what extent the County was complying with the consent decree,” the appeals court wrote.  

This prompted Reeves to hold the county in contempt of court twice in 2022. 

The county argued it was doing its best to comply with the consent decree and spending millions to fix the jail. One of the they offered was building a new jail, which is now under construction in

The county had a to further prove itself during three weeks of hearings held in February 2022. Focuses included the of seven detainees in 2021 from assaults and suicide and issues with staffing, contraband, old and use of force. 

Seeing partial compliance by the county, in April 2022 Reeves dismissed the consent decree and issued a new, shorter injunction focused on the jail and removed some provisions from the decree.

But Reeves didn’t see improvement from there. In July 2022, he ordered receivership and wrote that it was needed because of an ongoing risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff. 

The county pushed back against federal oversight and filed an appeal, arguing that there isn’t sufficient evidence to show that there are current and ongoing constitutional violations at the jail and that the county has acted with deliberate indifference. 

Days before the appointed receiver was set to take control of the jail at the beginning of 2023, the 5th Circuit Court ordered a stay to halt that receiver’s work. The new injunction ordered by Reeves was also stayed, and a three-person jail monitoring team that had been in place for years also was ordered to stop work. 

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

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