Medgar Evers

Medgar Evers was the NAACP's first field secretary for Mississippi — the man who investigated the state's lynchings, organized its boycotts, and registered its voters through nine years in the most dangerous posting the civil rights movement had. He was shot in the back in his own driveway in Jackson on 12 June 1963, at thirty-seven. James Baldwin had traveled with him in Mississippi, dedicated Blues for Mister Charlie to his memory, and counted his murder among the three that shape No Name in the Street.

Mississippi

Evers was born on 2 July 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi, the third of five children of James and Jessie Evers, and grew up walking twelve miles a day to a segregated school. At seventeen he enlisted in the Army, served in a segregated transportation unit that landed in Normandy in June 1944 and supplied the front lines, and was honorably discharged in 1946. When he and his brother Charles tried to register to vote in Decatur that year, an armed white crowd turned them away from the courthouse.

He took a business degree at Alcorn A&M, where he met Myrlie Beasley; they married on Christmas Eve 1951 and had three children. In 1954 he applied to the University of Mississippi's law school and was rejected — the NAACP took up his case as a test, and instead of a law student it got an organizer. On 24 November 1954 the association named him its first field secretary for Mississippi, based in Jackson.

The field secretary

The job was investigation as much as organization, and it made him the state's most visible Black man. Evers drove Mississippi's back roads interviewing witnesses to racial killings — including the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, whose murder Baldwin would later fictionalize in Blues for Mister Charlie — and published what he found when juries would not act. He built NAACP chapters across the state, led voter registration drives, defended Clyde Kennard, supported the Biloxi wade-ins against segregated beaches, ran the boycott of Jackson's downtown merchants, and worked on James Meredith's 1962 admission to the University of Mississippi.

The threats kept pace with the work. His name circulated on segregationist death lists, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into his carport on 28 May 1963, and a car tried to run him down outside the NAACP office days later. He kept a rifle in the car and taught his children to fall to the floor at the sound of gunfire.

The assassination

Shortly after midnight on 12 June 1963 — hours after President Kennedy's televised address on civil rights — Evers pulled into his driveway on Guynes Street in Jackson carrying NAACP T-shirts reading "Jim Crow Must Go." Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and White Citizens' Council member firing an Enfield rifle from a honeysuckle thicket across the street, shot him in the back. The bullet passed through his chest; he staggered thirty feet before collapsing at his door, in front of his wife and children, and died within the hour at a Jackson hospital.

Justice took thirty-one years. All-white juries deadlocked twice in 1964, and Beckwith went free until Mississippi reopened the case; on 5 February 1994 a Jackson jury convicted him of the murder, and he died in prison in 2001. Evers was buried on 19 June 1963 at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Myrlie Evers-Williams went on to chair the NAACP itself.

What the name marks now

The NAACP awarded Evers its Spingarn Medal in 1963, posthumously. His widow told the story first — For Us, the Living, written with William Peters, appeared in 1967 — and the 1994 trial became the film Ghosts of Mississippi two years later. Brooklyn's Medgar Evers College took his name in 1969, Jackson's airport in 2004, and a Navy cargo ship in 2011, christened by Myrlie Evers-Williams herself.

The house on Guynes Street still stands. The street was renamed for the writer Margaret Walker, the house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2017 and a National Monument in 2019, and in 2024 Evers was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He had been dead sixty-one years.

Evers and James Baldwin

Baldwin met Evers in Jackson in the early 1960s, and Evers took him along on the field secretary's actual work: night visits behind locked doors and lowered lights, gathering testimony on the murder of a Black man in the Mississippi back country. Baldwin never forgot it. In a 1984 Paris Review interview he called Evers "a great man."

Baldwin was writing Blues for Mister Charlie — his play drawn from the Till case — when Evers was killed, and finished it in his memory; the published dedication names Evers, his widow, and his children. The murder became one of the three around which No Name in the Street is built, alongside those of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and Evers is one of the three men of Remember This House, the unfinished manuscript that became the documentary I Am Not Your Negro.