Mississippi Today
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 Mississippians from the ballot box.
On his 21st birthday, he and other Black veterans 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 Law turned Medgar Evers away because of the color of his skin. NAACP officials 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.”

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 “death 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 leaders 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 Jackson 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 support 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 tribute 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 week 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
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.
House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.
Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.
“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”
Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.
“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”
The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.
People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.
The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.
“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”
If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.
Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.
The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.
During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.
As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.
“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget
The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.
Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.
House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.
“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”
But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.
The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.
The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.
Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.
“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.
The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.
But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.
The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.
The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.
But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.
On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.
If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.
“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.
If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Amount of federal cuts to health agencies doubles
Cuts to public health and mental health funding in Mississippi have doubled – reaching approximately $238 million – since initial estimates last week, when cancellations to federal grants allocated for COVID-19 pandemic relief were first announced.
Slashed funding to the state’s health department will impact community health workers, planned improvements to the public health laboratory, the agency’s ability to provide COVID-19 vaccinations and preparedness efforts for emerging pathogens, like H5 bird flu.
The grant cancellations, which total $230 million, will not be catastrophic for the agency, State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney told members of the Mississippi House Democratic Caucus at the Capitol April 1.
But they will set back the agency, which is still working to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic decimated its workforce and exposed “serious deficiencies” in the agency’s data collection and management systems.
The cuts will have a more significant impact on the state’s economy and agency subgrantees, who carry out public health work on the ground with health department grants, he said.
“The agency is okay. But I’m very worried about all of our partners all over the state,” Edney told lawmakers.
The health department was forced to lay off 17 contract workers as a result of the grant cancellations, though Edney said he aims to rehire them under new contracts.
Other positions funded by health department grants are in jeopardy. Two community health workers at Back Bay Mission, a nonprofit that supports people living in poverty in Biloxi, were laid off as a result of the cuts, according to WLOX. It’s unclear how many more community health workers, who educate and help people access health care, have been impacted statewide.
The department was in the process of purchasing a comprehensive data management system before the cuts and has lost the ability to invest in the Mississippi Public Health Laboratory, he said. The laboratory performs environmental and clinical testing services that aid in the prevention and control of disease.
The agency has worked to reduce its dependence on federal funds, Edney said, which will help it weather the storm. Sixty-six percent of the department’s budget is federally funded.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back $11.4 billion in funding to state health departments nationwide last week. The funding was originally allocated by Congress for testing and vaccination against the coronavirus as part of COVID-19 relief legislation, and to address health disparities in high-risk and underserved populations. An additional $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration was also terminated.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the Department of Health and Human Services Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement.
HHS did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today about the cuts in Mississippi.
Democratic attorneys general and governors in 23 states filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tuesday, arguing that the sudden cancellation of the funding was unlawful and seeking injunctive relief to halt the cuts. Mississippi did not join the suit.
Mental health cuts
The Department of Mental Health received about $7.5 million in cuts to federal grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Over half of the cuts were to community mental health centers, and supported alcohol and drug treatment services for people who can not afford treatment, housing services for parenting and pregnant women and their children, and prevention services.
The cuts could result in reduced beds at community mental health centers, Phaedre Cole, the director of Life Help and President of Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, told lawmakers April 1.
Community mental health centers in Mississippi are already struggling to keep their doors open. Four centers in the state have closed since 2012, and a third have an imminent to high risk of closure, Cole told legislators at a hearing last December.
“We are facing a financial crisis that threatens our ability to maintain our mission,” she said Dec. 5.
Cuts to the department will also impact diversion coordinators, who are charged with reducing recidivism of people with serious mental illness to the state’s mental health hospital, a program for first-episode psychosis, youth mental health court funding, school-aged mental health programs and suicide response programs.
The Department of Mental Health hopes to reallocate existing funding from alcohol tax revenue and federal block grant funding to discontinued programs.
The agency posted a list of all the services that have received funding cuts. The State Department of Health plans to post such a list, said spokesperson Greg Flynn.
Health leaders have expressed fear that there could be more funding cuts coming.
“My concern is that this is the beginning and not the end,” said Edney.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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