NOTE: This material is copyrighted. Do not duplicate in any way, unless you have purchased the book. You may take notes on this material.

Strongly suggest all Mississippians purchase this book for reference.

For Us, the Living, by Mrs. Medgar Evers with William Peters.

University Press of Mississippi, 1996. 378 pages.

Title from Lincoln's Gettysburg address. Page before page 1.

Shows respect for white leaders who fought for black rights.

MEDGAR'S EARLY LIFE.

Medgar grew up in black section of Decatur. His father was a farmer, and blacks needed two jobs to survive so he also worked at a sawmill or railroad. He built two small houses to rent out, and they also rented out a room in their home to teachers. His mother was a homemaker with her large family, and also did housework for a white family and took in ironing. The children worked around the house and farm. As they got older, the girls worked out in white homes while the boys did odd jobs for white families. They were both religious, believed in hard work, and were proud that they didn't need charity or welfare. Pages 14-15.

"It was an unwritten law that Negroes leave the sidewalks of Decatur for approaching whites." His father "was one of the few Negroes that refused to do it... He behaved as though he had never heard of such a custom. He stood up and was a man," said Medgar. Medgar remembers one incident in which his father had a dispute over his account in a store, where his father was called "nigger" by two white men. "When they advanced on him with the obvious intent of beating him, James Evers picked up a bottle, smashed the end of it over the counter, and held it in front of him as a weapon." He ordered his sons to go home, and their last sight of him was of a "calm, grim man retreating slowly toward the door, holding the advancing white men at bay with the jagged glass of the broken bottle." He soon arrived home unhurt, "the bottle still in his hand." Page 16. It hurt Medgar to hear his father called "boy" by white men on various occasions.

Medgar for years played with the white children in a home where his mother worked, as well as on the white fringes of the neighborhood where he lived. "As he grew older, the white boys played less and less with him, and in the end there was a day on racial insults and the rupture of all friendly childhood relationships." Page 16. Medgar and his brother Charles as boys were the only two blacks attending a speech by U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo. In his racist speech upholding segregation and warning of the dangers of educating Negroes, he pointed to the two boys and said, "If we fail to hold high the wall of separation between the races, we will live to see the day when those two nigger boys right there will be asking for everything that is ours by right." Page 17. They stayed for the whole speech. He also saw a lynching when 12 years old. "A Negro man, accused of leering at a white woman, was snatched by a mob and dragged through town and out the road that led past the Evers' house. In a near-by field he was tied to a tree and shot dead." Page 17. Then, "the white mob stripped the Negro and left his bloody clothes at the foot of the tree." When he was old enough for high school, Medgar had to walk twelve miles each way to the Negro high school in Newton; many Decatur blacks never went beyond the towns single-room black grade school. Medgar resented the long walk, since whites had their own high school in town. He worked summers at cutting lawns and painting for white families, and bought a bicycle. There was a small motion-picture house in town with a "balcony known as the 'buzzard's roost' reserved for Negroes." Page 21.

Charles and Medgar Evers both volunteered for the Army after World War 2 broke out. Medgar ended up in a segregated port batallion that saw service in England and after Normandy in France. After hearing Medgar picking up the cursing of the older men, a white lieutenant took him aside one day and said he had a good vocabulary, was intelligent, and urged him to go back to school and make something of himself. Medgar found most white people in France who saw no difference in a man simply because of his skin color, and one family did not flinch when their daughter and Medgar got involved in a romance. The French accepted black and white Americans simply as "American soliders." Page 24. But some white American soliders told the French that blacks were "some kind of monkey whose tails came out at night (page 25). When Medgar got home, his mother pleaded with him to stop corresponding with the French girl "for fear that whites in Decatur would find out and take offense. Negroes have been lynched in Mississippi for less."

In summer 1946 none of the 900 registered voters in Decatur were black. Medgar, Charles, and four friends went to register at county clerks office. A small crowd of whites gathered. People "visited my parents nightly after that. First, it was the whites, and then their Negro message-bearers. And the word was always the same. 'Tell your sons to take their names off the books. Don't show up at the courthouse voting day.' Then the night before the election, Bilbo came to town and harangued the crowd in the square. 'The best way to keep a nigger from the polls on election day,' he told them 'is to visit him the night before.' And they visited us." The six friends walked to the polls the next day. "I'll never forget it. Not a Negro was on the streets, and when we got to the courthouse the clerk said he wanted to talk with us. When we got into his office, some fifteen or twenty armed white men surged in behind us, men I had grown up with, had played with. We split up and went home without voting." Page 27. They weren't beaten up.

Medgar refused to consider a teaching career, as it was the one profession that Negroes were encouraged by whites to aspire to. Medgar and Charles went to Chicago during the summers to make money and save it for college. He liked ability to swim at lakefront beaches, visit museums and libraries, since there was no racial segregation in Chicago's public facilities. Movies, television, advertising show the good life that "awaits the American who is willing to work for it--unless he is a Negro." Page 32. So Medgar wanted to change all this.

Mrs. Evers knew only two white people growing up--the family that her grandmother worked for, and the insurance man who collected money each week. The racial differences in Vicksburg where she grew up related to privileges. "The whites had parks, a library, a swimming pool, a YMCA, and the choice seats at the movies and on the buses. On the buses the seating was most annoying, for each bus had only four short seats and one long one behind the sign that read 'Colored'. All of the seats ahead of the sign were reserved for whites, whether there were any whites on the bus or not. Often the seats in the Negro section would be filled and we would be jammed together standing in the aisle behind the sign, while the front of the bus would be all but deserted. Later, when I was in high school and rode the bus to school on rainy days, the driver would pack us in and shout at us to move back, though the front of the bus was empty. One driver in particular seem to take delight in jamming us all toward the rear of the bus and then slamming on the brakes at each stop to make us fall forward." Pages 41-42.

COLLEGE YEARS.

Medgar and his wife to be both attended Alcorn A&M College in Lorman. Both her aunt and grandmother were teachers and believed in education. She was from Vicksburg. The chapel was built entirely without nails by slaves more than a hundred years earlier, since Alcorn "like virtually everything else in Mississippi that had been set aside for Negroes, was a hand-me-down. It had been built originally as a white military school." Page 9.

Mrs. Evers was encouraged by four piano teachers to major in music because of her talent. The state enforced separate-but-equal by paying for black students to attend out-of-state universities, if the black Mississippi universities didn't offer the courses they wanted, and if they were willing to return to work in Mississippi and pay back part of the money. None of the black state universities offered a major in music. Alcorn offered a minor, but her request was denied after the black President of Jackson State wrote that he felt his college "offered enough music for what I would want and need." Page 48-49. "The ultimate cause of my problem was the complete segregation of Mississippi's schools." She went to Alcorn, majored in educated with a minor in music.

When traveling to Chicago in the summer to earn extra money: "Friends drove the two of us to Jackson and dropped us at Union Station, where in a dirty segregated waiting room we waited several hours for the Illinois Central train to Chicago. The room was crowded with Negroes headed North, their belongings carried in battered suitcases tied with rope and pasteboard boxes held together with twine. They looked like refugees, most of them, carrying their lunches in greasy brown paper bags and shoe boxes. When the train finally came, we all crowded to the platform where conductors and porters hustled us to the Jim Crow cars in the rear of the train with shouts of 'Colored folks to the rear.' We rode the crowded, stuffy coach all the way to Chicago, eating the food we had brought along with us." Page 51-52.

Medgar loved Mississippi. "He loved to hunt and fish, to roam the fields and woods... Space for him and his family to grow and breathe." Chicago was a rat race, where blacks lived in the same ghettoes. Mrs. Evers' Chicago experience was being frightened by its huge size, being surrounded by strangers and were indifferent, because nobody belonged; there were "drunks to be stepped over every morning, and in the evening on the way home there were men who leered and muttered obscene remarks." But she still preferred moving there permanently instead of remaining in Mississippi.

After getting married while at Alcorn, they spent their honeymoon visiting relatives in Mississippi. After learning about "several decent places for Negroes on the Gulf Coast, places where we could stay for a week," they decided not to spend their "tiny bit of money" on "anything so frivolous." Page 64.

HIS JOB.

Medgar accepted a job upon graduation in 1952 as an insurance salesman (hospitalization and life insurance) with Magnolia Mutual Insurance Company, a firm founded by Dr. TRM Howard and other black business and professional men from the Delta. Dr. Howard had founded a medical clinic in the all-black community of Mound Bayou, and was the wealthiest Negro and one of the most respect in Mississippi. The "new company was almost the only place for a Mississippi Negro to begin a business career in Mississippi. There were few other Negro-owned companies with many employees in the state. White-owned companies did not employ Negroes in white collar jobs." Page 72.

The Evers' living in Mound Bayou, and Medgar's sales territory was Clarksdale. His work day was from 6 AM to 7 PM, and was soon promoted to district supervisor of Clarksdale district and his territory expanded to include the large rural areas surrounding the town. Page 78.

Medgar became most interested in the life of his customers--the poor Negroes of the Delta. Their condition of life "dropped from mere poverty as you left the small frame houses of the Negro section of Clarksdale to absolute squalor as you visited the sharecroppers' shacks on the near-by cotton plantations." Medgar returned home with stories of: "children without shoes, without proper clothing; of adults with nothing to eat; of sanitary conditions no self-respecting farmer would permit in his pigpen...

shacks without windows or doors, with roofs that leaked and floors rotting underfoot." Medgar resented their unwillingness to help themselves, but came to understand the "hopelessness" that led to such "neglect." Page 78-79.

Delta sharecropping system bound blacks to the land through 50% crop payment for rent on land, and credit extended by company store owned by plantation owner or his friend whom he conspired with. Worse than slavery since the sharecropper could be easily replaced and wasn't owned by plantation owner. He couldn't even leave since he was nearly always in debt. "The vicious and oppressive system of sharecropping, of daily hired hands, of working small children in the cotton fields that produced such beaten and subservient Negroes also produced a small group of fantastically wealthy whites." Page 82-84.

EARLY ACTIVIST WORK.

In the summer of 1952 Megar began organizing chapters of the NAACP. An organization called the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, formed by Dr. Howard and other black Delta leaders, promoted the bumper sticker slogan "Don't buy gas where you can't use the restroom." The national NAACP attorney, Thurgood Marshall, spoke at one of the Council's meetings. Many Delta blacks refused to come out of fear of the white plantation owners, and some who came devised alibis of where they had been. In the Delta there was "widespread brutality and beatings as the ultimate means of white control over the Negroes... Reports were forever circulating about this or that plantation owner or manager having beaten one or more of his Negro sharecroppers or hired hands.. Most often it was the younger Negroes...as a means of preparing them for a life of subservience and near-slavery... A report to the police would often bring a second beating, this time administered by experts who routinely beat up Negroes who drank too much on Saturday nights and found themselves in the hands of the police or sheriff's deputies." Page 88-89.

At a time of Medgar's "angry young man," he came to admire Jomo Kenyatta and the Mau Mau, who were fighting for independence in Kenya (at that time, 70 whites were killed and 8,000 Mau Mau). He dreamed of a "Mississippi Mau Mau, striking under cover of darkness, punishing the crimes of whites against Negroes, setting itself up as a sort of black vigilante army, writing a new law of an eye for an eye over the brooding flat land of the Delta... It was the Ku Klux Klan, the lynch mob, the terrorist police turned black." Medgar abandoned the idea after studying the Bible.

Pages 92-93.

THE BROWN DECISION.

In January 1953 Medgar Evers became the first black to attempt to enter Ole Miss, seeking entry into their Law School. The Executive Secretary of the State College Board was quoted in the newspaper as saying that the Board would take no action on his application until they receiving a ruling from the state's Attorney General, and he already referred to the situation as a legal "case." After much stalling, in August Medgar was summoned to meet with the state attorney general and IHL Board Secretary, and they questioned his late age of 29, why he didn't want to pursue business administration, and asked whether he would accept an out-of-state scholarship, but Medgar wanted to study law where he would practice it. In disbelief they asked whether he would want housing accommodations and meals on campus. In September the Board rejected Medgar's application, allegedly because his two letters of reference (by whites) were from the county where he had grown up (Newton) instead of the county where he currently worked (Bolivar). He could reapply, but the Board announced that henceforth all Ole Miss applicants must receive character recommendations from five alumni of the school, all of whom had known the applicant for two years. The National NAACP didn't pursue the case, since they wanted Medgar Evers to take on a new responsibility--state field secretary. Page 119.

Meanwhile, Medgar's father lay dying in a hospital basement, which is where the Negro patients were segregated. He was called away from his dying father's side as a nurse asked for his possible assistance, as a black man who had had an argument with a policeman and been shot in the leg had just arrived and an angry white mob grew outside. Every few minutes a voice called out "Nigger." Medgar couldn't do anything, and when he returned to his father's room "resolved at the very least to defend him, if necessary, with his own life, he found the older man dying. When the end finally came, the mutterings of the mob were at their height, and Medgar's father, that quiet and dignified man whose courage and manliness had provided the model for much of Medgar's own character, died to the accompaniment of angry white voices and the threat of violence. Medgar never forgot that, and in his sorrow and bitterness afterward, he cited it often as proof that a Negro could neither live nor die in peace in Mississippi as long as things remained the way they were." Page 105-106. So he continued his work with the NAACP.

Mississippi white officials and the Clarion-Ledger strongly opposed the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Education decision, calling it "Black Monday" and a "black day of tragedy for the South." Pages 108-110. A Mississippi circuit judge gave speeches that became a book entitled, "Black Monday." In it, he referred to the slave ships as positive, forcing blacks "in spite of his basic inferiority.. to lay aside cannibalism, his barbaric savage customs." He wrote: "You can dress a chimpanzee, housebreak him and teach him to use a knife and fork, but it will take countless generations of evolutionary development, if ever, before you can convince him that a caterpillar or a cockroach is not a delicacy." He expressed concern that young blacks might make an obscene remark or assault upon some white girl. "The loveliest and purest of God's creatures, the nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this terrestrial ball is a well-bred cultured Southern white woman or her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl." The response was the forming of the White Citizens Councils with an orientation towards economic intimidation of blacks. Page 111.

The Governor and Speaker of the State House of Mississippi called a meeting with 100 black leaders in the state, and proposed continuing segregation voluntarily. The black delegates took the floor "with an outright demand for an end to segregation." Speaker Walter Sillers called on a conservative black preacher known as a friend of the white man, who came out meekly for segregation. The next woman delegate "denounced him roundly and held him up to ridicule as a classic example of the results of segregation." The Speaker called on a black minister expected to be a trusted ally, but he responded: "Gentlemen, you all should not be mad at us. Those were white men that rendered that decision. Not one colored man had anything to do with it. The real trouble is that you have given us schools too long in which we could study the earth through the floor and the stars through the roof." Many black participants "felt for the first time a surging pride in being a Negro in Mississippi." Page 113-114. All but one black delegate signed a statement declaring strong support for the Brown decision.

MATRIARCHAL SOCIETY AND RAPE.

Use of the term "boy," and denial of the term "mister," being forced to get off of the sidewalk: "If there is one thing above all else that has been degraded by Southern discrimination against the Negro, it is the concept of manhood in the Negro man." Page 122.

"A man, it is generally accepted in our society, supports his family. The Southern Negro has always been denied this right. Under slavery, of course, he worked solely for his master, contributing nothing to the support of his wife and children. They, too, worked for the same master, deriving their right to life and sustenance solely from him... Marriage in any formal sense was forbidden. The real meaning of family disappeared." Page 122.

With low income jobs, "he has only rarely had a chance to support his family decently. Not only did his wife usually work, she often had the better, the steadier job... Almost always, the children worked, too, thereby undercutting the importance of their father still further." Page 123. "The hopelessness of maintaining his status as head of the family in such a situation has caused more than one Negro husband and father to abandon his family for good. But a man in our society also protects his family, stands up for its members, defends them from attack... Under slavery, his wife and children were as much the possessions of the white master as was he himself. They could be worked, beaten, sold, or raped at the master's discretion. And they were." Page 123.

"A casual glance at the skin colors of American Negroes today gives some idea of the frequency with which the masters, his sons, or his white overseer made sexual use of Negro slave women... The rapes took place under the very eyes of slave fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. For to life a hand in protest meant death. My own great-great-grandfather, the white overseer McCain, is a good example of the white rapists most Negroes can count among their ancestors. How can I be sure it was rape? Can sex between a master and a slave be anything else? Is a slave ever in a position to refuse?" Page 123.

"Under segregation, it has been different only in degree... where the only alternatives open to a Negro woman sought sexually by a white man are submission or flight. She dare not tell her menfolk... for if they reacted as men to defend her, the result, as under slavery, could well be death. And if they withdrew in fear and impotence, the Negro woman's worst fears about the mean in her family would be realized." Page 124. They might be seeming consent, but "who can say that she would have given her consent under conditions of genuine freedom." "The man who will not risk injury and even death to protect his wife or daughter from a rapist is no man at all. And it was here, at precisely this point, that the Southern Negro man lost not only his manhood rights but much of his masculinity as well... Death has been the universal sentence. And knowing that, the Southern Negro woman has often protected him by silent acquiscence to the white man's sexual demands." "It is the white man throughout Southern history who has played the role of rapist. Yet it is the white man who, at the same time, has obsessively feared the Negro man as a potential rapist of white women. It was, at base, a guilty fear of retaliation."

Page 125-126.

"I have seen Medgar in an almost uncontrollable rage only twice. Both times the incident that provoked it involved a white man, a Negro woman, and sex." One time involved a recently separated black woman and a white man whom Medgar saw embracing each other in a parked car; he came home, referred to her as a "slut" and a "traitor to her race" for "lowering herself to make love with a white man." The other incident involved a married black woman who worked in a white home, and while the woman of the house was away, her husband allegedly raped her. "The young woman told her story in such detail it was impossible not to believe her. Her husband sat, head lowered, hearing it now for the second time." Page 127. The husband refered to go to the police station to press charges: "It's no use going to the police. You know they won't do anything. They never do. All that'll happen is that Ruthie and I will both lose our jobs. We'll be threatened and maybe beaten up. We might even be killed." Medgar replied that he's "fight back or die in the attempt," and that "You're less than a man" for doing so. A third incident involved Mrs. Evers mother and a black male friend who were walking down the street and two white men in a car propositioned them obscenely, and finally stopped and opened the car door. Her mother ran to a nearby white home, pounded on the door, and the car drove off. After they reported the incident to the police, the two white policemen who came were "clearly annoyed to find the complainants Negroes." They asked whether it was possible that "Mother might be having an affair with one of the white men and that he had been angered at seeing her with a Negro." Watching Medgar's controlled anger, "I felt myself the awful frustration, the terrible impotence of the Negro man in the South, the impossibility of his properly defending his women without immediately risking his life." Page 129-130. Mrs. Evers' also recalled an incident when she was fourteen and a white man had offered her a ride, but her Aunt had protected her.

EARLY NAACP FIELD SECRETARY WORK.

Medgar was hired as NAACP field secretary in December 1954, and he hired his wife as a secretary in his Jackson office. It was difficult to increase membership in the organization since membership had "proven more than ample cause for dismissal from a job, loss of a mortgage or farm loan, or even threats of violence." One state legislator indicated that the white Citizens Councils were "organized for the sole purpose of maintaining segregation of the races... through the application of economic pressure to troublemakers." A written plea by the national chair of the NAACP to President Eisenhower resulted in no action, so the NAACP deposited some funds in a bank "solely for loans to Negro victims of economic reprisal in Mississippi." Page 141-142.

White retailiation against activist blacks were directed against: 1) A dentist, Dr. Stringer, president of the state NAACP conference of local branches, who had lost the use of his car when his liability insurance was cancelled, whose creditors began to require immediate payment on his dental supplies, whose wife lost her job as a schoolteacher in a black public school in Columbus, who faced "anonymous telephone calls, obscene threats, murder warnings... At night, cars would drive slowly past the Stringer house, and the knowledge that one of them might contain a man carrying a home-made bomb forced the Stringers to sleep in their middle bedroom," and who was audited by the federal IRS. A group of white and black desegregationists were audited at four-and-a-half times the normal rate during this period. Page 152-153.

2) In one city, the white school board chairman met with NAACP branch leaders, and read their petition calling for an end to school segregation, and singled out a young Negro in the back of the room, "There is a nigger back there who is a sharecropper... Nigger, don't you want to take your name off this petition that says you want to send your children to school with white children?" The badly frightened young man "shook all over until the shaking got to his head, and then he shook that 'no'".

3) In Belzoni, a banker called in the new local NAACP President, Gus Courts (who owned a grocery store and operated a bus), and demanded to see the books of the NAACP branch. When he refused, the banker threatened "to tie up your bus and tie up your store. We will run you out of town." He quietly paid off his loan to the bank before it was due. However, Courts lost the income he had made hauling field hands to and from the cotton fields in his bus, and the wholesalers from whom he bought supplies for his grocery store refused him credit, demanding cash payments. Both Courts and the reverend George Lee (another small grocery store owner and fellow NAACP member) had registered to vote, and Lee had received a death threat unless he removed his name from the rolls. That night Lee's car suffered two gun blasts, and he died. The local police concluded that he had died as a result of losing control of his car, and that the lead pellets in his jaw were dental fillings. Witnesses in the black neighborhood and two black doctors testified that three men in a car had shot him. The county sheriff charged that Lee had probably been killed by "some jealous nigger," and "rumors were started that the minister had been having affairs with other women." The FBI conducted a cursory investigation, but Mississippi blacks came to view the FBI as "irrelevant at best and as an ally of white supremacy at worst." Page 154-157.

"After George Lee's death we all began to take more seriously something that had come to be called the 'death list'. It had begun with a full-page newspaper advertisement in a Delta newspaper, an ad that attacked by name nine Negro leaders. Shortly after the ad appeared, the White Citizens Councils began passing out at their meetings a list of these same names. The Reverend George Lee's name had been one of the nine, and now there were eight. One of the eight was Medgar's." Page 160.

Despite such intimidation, blacks pushed for an end to segregation. Parents signed petitions calling for an end to segregated schools in Vicksburg, Natchez, Jackson, Clarksdale, and Yazoo City. In both Natchez and Yazoo City, the local newspapers published the names of the petition signers, with one paper urging readers to "check" them. A black carpenter and a plumber in Yazoo City both lost jobs provided by whites, and they removed their names from the petition; three black merchants were refused supplies by their white wholesalers, and they removed their names; two blacks lost jobs with a junk company and a lumber company; eventually, 51 of the 53 signatures in Yazoo City were removed. "And that generally was the story in all of the cities where petitions were filed," despite Evers' driving from city to city; Evers also had to coordinate relief efforts from the national office. In Vicksburg a funeral home owner who was planning to build a suburb saw his loans evaporate overnight, and he lost everything except the family funeral home; he died a broken man in his thirties. Page 166.

Medgar in his Jackson office received all of these telephone calls of intimidation against his NAACP activists. "He was driving hundreds of miles a week to help start new NAACP branches, shore up faltering ones, investigate new incidents of threats, harassment, and arrests." He had to investigate allegations of a black accused of rape, one beaten by police, and a thirteen-year old black girl raped by two white men who were immediately released on bond.

Meanwhile, Lamar Smith, how had registered to vote, actually voted by absentee ballot, and was distributing circulars to other blacks explaining how to do so, was "shot dead in broad daylight on the Lincoln County Court House lawn in Brookhaven"; Brookhaven was the home of the judge who had authored the racist book Black Monday. "A white farmer was charged with the murder in a warrant filed by a courageous district attorney. Eventually two more white men were arrested, but when the grand jury met in September, it failed to return an indictment." Page 170.

Meanwhile, a 14 year old Negro boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, visiting his uncle in the Delta was killed with newspaper reporting that he had asked for a date with a married white woman seven years his senior. "Kidnaped forcibly in the middle of the night, pistol-whipped, stipped naked, shot through the head with a .45 caliber Colt automatic, barb-wired to a seventy-four pound cotton gin fan, and dumped into twenty feet of water in the Tallahatchie River," Till became a national rallying cry because of his youth and NAACP publicizing the event. Two white men admitted taking him only for the purpose of frightening him, but an all-white jury acquitted them of murder; they publicly then described the details of the murder, but could not be retried. Page 171. As Medgar investigated the case in the Delta, he and an NAACP leader from Cleveland, Amzie Moore, actually had to wear disguises and drive a borrowed car with local license plates, since his car had begun to be followed. Mrs. Evers: "from that time on I never lost the fear that Medgar himself would be killed."

Meanwhile, Gus Courts was shot. He had gotten registered to vote, but a white Citizens' Council member had brought the voting list to him, threatened him with loss of his grocery building rent, and he did lose it. He then lost his wholesaler, as Council members had threatened to withdrew business from the wholesaler. He was shot in his store by men from a car. Friends drove him to a black hospital in Mound Bayou. Noone was ever arrested. In an incident of a dispute over gasoline between a black attendant and a white car owner, the white shot and killed the black man, Clinton Melton; the white claimed someone had shot at him first, and he had shot back in self-defense; despite white town respect and support for Melton, and the white gas-station owner's defense of Melton, the white jury found him not guilty. Page 183.

INTERMEDIATE NAACP FIELD WORK.

In 1955 the work of the NAACP was "almost completely defensive. Under the pressure of economic intimidation and reprisal, membership and financial contributions fell. A special cash relief fund of more than $5000 set up by the national office was distributed to those hardest hit. Branches in Natchez, Greenville, Indianola, and Yazoo City all but ceased to exist, and it became impossible to find sufficient applicants to institute a school desegregation suit." The NAACP focused on voter registration drives with mixed success. Page 188.

Medgar began to encourage blacks to patronize black owned businesses. Part of the reason was continued discrimination in white stores, which would often wait on blacks only when there were no white customers present, or who would call blacks by their first name in a condescending manner. One hat store required that blacks try on hats only with kleenex inside of them, because "you people always have such greasy hair you ruin the hats." Page 195. White doctors had separate waiting rooms for blacks and whites; blacks got the smaller, more crowded, less well lighted, dingy and dirty room with older magazines; doctors would see all of the white patients before admitting any of the black ones, so a black could wait hours. Page 196. Such segregation actually helped to build a small black business and professional community in Jackson. The names of murdered black activists grew: two in 1956; one in 1957; two in 1958; four in 1959. That year, Mack Charles Parker was "lynched in the old-fashioned way, dragged by his heels down concrete stairs from an unguarded cell in Poplarville where he had been charged with the rape of a white woman; then shot to death by a lynch mob, his body dumped into the Pearl River. Everyone in town knew who did it... There were no arrests." Years later, a Mississippi judge was asked whether he thought the lynchers of Parker would ever be caught said he didn't think so and "Besides, three of them are already dead." Page 204.

Beatings by white civilians and police detailed on pages 205-210. A police murder on p. 211-13.

Clyde Kennard, born in Hattiesburg, moved to Chicago, taught Army denazification courses to the Germans while a paratropper in the Army, and then moved back to Hattiesburg to run his disabled stepfather's chicken farm. He sought entrance into USM in 1959 thinking that "These people at MSC are more liberal." President William McCain of USM staved off formal replies to three applications from Clyde, and finally went by his farm and said Governor James P. Coleman wanted to talk with him. Coleman promised to pay his expenses if he wanted to attend any other university in the country that would accept him, but he declined because of the farm. Colemen then asked him to wait until after the primary elections (where he had a handpicked successor), or he'd have to close the school. Clyde was moderate, didn't use the NAACP, and agreed. After the election, Clyde met with McCain and the chief investigator for the State Sovereignty Commission. The President rejected him for alleged forgery regarding using old letters of recommendations from previous applications. When Clyde got back to his car, he was arrested and accused of reckless driving and liquor possession, using planted liquor as he was a non-drinker. He was convicted of a misdemeanor and fined $600. According to state law, university entrance was forbidden to convicted felons, so an illiterate Negro stole five bags of chicken feed worth twenty-five dollars, stashed it in Clyde's egghouse, and then accused him of being an accessory to the crime. Clyde was convicted of accessory to burglary, a felony, and was sentenced to seven years in Parchman; hence, he could not apply again to USM, even though the President admitted he was qualified. The actual thief received five years probation, and was hired back by the white employer whom he had stole from. When Medgar condemned the outcome as a mockery of justice, he was fined $100 and 30 days in jail for contempt of court, but the state Supreme Court through out the contempt ruling. Clyde got cancer in prison, after a national campaign was granted clemency by the Governor, and soon died in Chicago. Pages 214-223.

Black children debate their skin color, and decided the next time a white called them black they would call him a "poor white peckerwood" or a "poor white cracker." Page 230.

Story of Aaron Henry, NAACP President of State Conference of Branches in 1960, who had been smeared by whites as an alleged homosexual. He had grown up in Clarksdale, and had had a white childhood friend who had grown up to author the racist book Black Monday. Aaron wrote to this white judge as an adult, and enclosed money to receive a copy of the book; he wrote back twice more. Finally, the white drove by and hand-delivered the book saying, "Hi, Aaron... Sorry it took so long... I thought I'd better give it to you in person. I didn't want to get you in any trouble with your people. You know what the book is." Aaron replied, "We read everything you people put out, just to keep informed." The white supremacist smiled and said, "We keep pretty busy reading your stuff, too." This shows Mississippi's split personality. Page 233.

LATE NAACP FIELD WORK DAYS.

Black Mississippians took the offensive in 1961, as nine Tougaloo students sat down and read in Jackson's white public library, and police told them to go to the "colored library" on Mill Street. When they refused, they were jailed overnight and charged with breach of peace. The next day, Jackson State students meet and marched toward the city jail in protest, but were halted by tear gas. At an outdoor gathering at the court when the students were fined $100 and given 30-day suspended sentences, Jackson police moved in with police dogs, and one picture showed one dog with a grip on a black's arm.

National NAACP officials indicated a full attack on segregation, as Meredith sought to desegregate Ole Miss, three Jackson black businessmen filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state's segregated transportation facilities, and the federal Justice Department filed suit against Clarke and Forrest voting registrars. Four Jackson State students were arrested for taking seats in the front of a Jackson city bus. Four hundred Jackson State students boycotted classes after the JSU President dissolved student government and fired the student president for participating in protests against segregation. In December 1961, Reverend and black grocer Robert Smith qualified to run for Congress in the Democratic primary against segregationist John Bell Williams. In January 1962, a national NAACP official filed a federal lawsuit to desegregate all of Jackson's public recreational facilities. Page 237. William Simmons of the White Citizens Councils expressed alarm at these developments. Leake County parents filed a petition calling for school desegregation. Meanwhile, a federal circuit court declared that James Meredith had been turned down for Ole Miss admission "solely because he was a Negro."

In Jackson, nine black parents including Evers signed a petition with the school board called for desegregated schools. The Jackson Daily News promptly identified them "right down to the jobs of husbands and wives." Mrs. Evers received such harassing phone calls as: "That nigger husband of yours is going to get himself killed if he doesn't watch his step." Page 246. Federal lawsuits were filed regarding Leake and Jackson schools. By 1962 civil rights organizations besides NAACP were active in Mississippi, such as SNCC under Bob Moses, CORE under Dave Dennis, and SCLC under Martin Luther King. Page 255. They eventually combined in 1964 into COFO, Council of Federated Organizations, for the Mississippi Summer Project.

After a national NAACP visit in 1963, Evers announced a black boycott of three white businesses, who had made large contributions to the White Citizens Councils. The boycott widened to include all of the shops on Capitol Street, the main downtown shopping area. Page 257. College students started sit-ins at the lunch counters

of Woolworths and Walgreens, and whites had poured catsup, relish, and sugar over their heads. Black high school principals issued instructions for students not to participate in mass demonstrations, so students at Lanier and Brinkley HS walked; police surrounded the schools, and a battle between students and police ensued. Students then marched, and were arrested. After a particularly large student demonstration and march, students were arrested and taken to the fair grounds, which served as an emergency jail. They were released after a week. These young people set the tone for the demonstrations that followed, as reluctant adults admired them and began to join in. The police patrolled black areas of Jackons, which "took on the look of an occupied city." Page 262.

THE FINAL DAYS

The state NAACP demanded that Mayor Thompson of Jackson end all segregation and discrimination in the city, and formation of a biracial committee. The major backed by 75 local white businessmen rejected it, and charged outside agitators with causing problems. After Thompson successfully got a black attorney to publicly back his position, a committee of prominent black citizens rejected the mayor's position.

As Medgar got equal time on television to reply to Mayor Thompson's speech, his wife feared for his safety because, "thousands of Mississippi whites who had never seen a picture of him would now be seeing Medgar on television." Medgar rejected claims that NAACP was an outside group, urged a biracial committee as other southern cities had, discussed black deprivations, and said "religion tells them there is something wrong with the old system." Page 268. Whites telephoned praising the speech.

Major Thompson announced a committee of 14 blacks, but 10 were collaborators of the white leaders, so the 4 nominated by blacks resigned. Thompson announced an end of some segregation, but then reversed himself. Four blacks and a white professor at Tougaloo took seats at a Woolworth's lunch counter and were beated by a mob of 200 whites. Only the victims were arrested and one was hospitalized. Page 271.

At midnight, the Evers' carport was firebombed with a burning rag in the broken neck of a brown half-gallon bottle; Mrs. Evers put the fire out. Police said it was "just some kind of prank... It was just some people having some fun probably." Page 276. Then, Medgar taught the children how to protect themselves. "Most of their playmates played on the street on in the vacant lots. We couldn't let our children do that. There were even places in the house where they couldn't sit; the furniture had to be arranged away from the windows; and where the television set was placed, we couldn't use the chairs to watch at night. We had to sit on the floor or present inviting targets through the front windows. Now Medgar taught them (kids Van, Darrell, and Rena) to fall to the floor at the sound of a strange noise, to train their ears to the sound of Heidi's bark, of passing cars, of anything at all unusual. He taught them how to fall without hurting themselves, how to wait until they were sure it was nothing before they got up... And the enemy here was not a foreign power but white American citizens." Page 280.

As public demonstrations against Jackson segregation continued, 664 blacks were arrested. At a June speech at Masonic Temple, Medgar talked about jailed students, and urged bail money be raised if some wanted to do nothing else. "Freedom has never been free... I love my children, and I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die, and die gladly, if that would make a better life for them." Page 284. President Kennedy came on television to denounce segregation and announce what was eventually going to be the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

ASSASSINATION AND TRIAL.

"Darrell heard the car first. "Here comes Daddy." "A shot rang out, loud and menacing. The children, true to their training, sprawled on the floor. I knew in my heart what it must mean. I flew to the door, praying to be wrong. I switched on the light. Medgar lay face down at the doorway drenched with blood. I screamed, went to him, calling his name. There was another shot, much closer, and I dropped to my knees. Medgar didn't move. The children were around me now, pleading with him. "Please Daddy, please get up."" Page 302. Leading whites condemned the assassination. On the day of the funeral, there was a massive funeral procession by those honoring Medgar Evers. About one thousand crowd members, led by young people, showed their frustration by running to Capitol Street. Police moved in to cordon off the street, and used force against blacks who did not obey their orders. A riot was prevented by a white Justice Department official, John Doar. Medgar's body was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in D.C. The next day Mrs. Evers met President Kennedy in the White House. Page 327.

The FBI soon arrested Byron de la Beckwith. A fertilizer salesman who lived in Greenwood and worked in Greenville, both in the Delta, Beckwith was a member of the White Citizens Council; the gun and sight had been traced to him. Some people recognized him as one of the three white men in the audience at a mass meeting the Friday night before the murder, as well as the one who was looking around the NAACP offices afterwards. Beckwith was indicted by a grand jury and held without bail.

A white segregationist district attorney instructed Mrs. Evers how to behave in court. She asked to be called by her last name as white people were, since she was called "Myrlie" only by her friends. The DA felt that her demand would be a hindrance to the case when dealing with a white jury and trying to "persuade some of the people on the jury to have some sympathy for you." She said, "This is one of the things my husband lived and fought for. If it is a question of winning the case or my being called Mrs. Evers, well I have lost a husband for these principles, and I refuse to lose my dignity and pride as well." Jury selection took four days, and none of the six blacks on the panel of 106 jurors were selected. Beckwith was defended by three lawyers (including a partner in Governor Ross Barnett's law firm), and his expenses were paid for by newly formed White Citizens Legal Fund. Page 355.

Before testifying, the Assistant DA cautioned Mrs. Evers not to take offense if she was called by her first name, but she said she would protest. When she testified, no one used her name at all. The DA in his opening statement to the jury allegedly used the word "nigger." Page 357. A pathologist testified that the bullet found in the Evers' kitchen had killed him. A 30.06 Enfield rifle equipped with a telescopic sight was found in a clump of bushes between the vacant lot and the parking lot. The rifle was proven to be Beckwith's. A fingerprint on the sight, estimated as less than twelve hours old, was verified as being Beckwith's. Two Jackson taxicab drivers testified that Beckwith the Saturday before the murder had asked them directions to Medgar Evers' home. Witnesses placed Beckwith's car in a nearby drive-in parking lot the night of the crime. Three police officers testified that Beckwith had been in Greenwood at the time of the shooting (though they had not come forward until the trial), and other witnesses disputed the drive-in car's identity and the age of the fingerprint.

Beckwith testified that his rifle had been stolen the Monday before the murder. He admitted writing letters to newspaper editors uphold segregation: "I believe in segregation just like I believe in God. I shall oppose any person, place, or thing that opposed segregation... I shall combat the evils of integration and shall bend every effort to rid the USA of the integrationists... And further, when I die I will be buried in a segregated cemetery. When you get to heaven you will find me in the part that has a sign saying 'For Whites Only,' and if I go to Hades I am going to raise hell all over Hades until I get to the white section." Page 362. A letter six months before the shooting to the NRA said: "For the next fifteen years we here in Mississippi are going to have to do a lot of shooting to protect our wives, children, and ourselves from bad negroes." One letter written to a magazine two days before the trial said: "I have just finished an article on garfish hunting at night which is sure to be of interest to the reader along with several ideas I have on shooting at night in the summertime for varmints."

After the judge gave the jury their charge and they left, Governor Ross Barnett entered the courtroom, "strode straight to Beckwith, greating him warmly and shaking his hand. If there had ever been a question of where the governor of Mississippi stood, it did not survive that scene. A mistrial was declared after the jury voted 7 to 5 for acquittal. A second trial was held in April; the jury was different, in that seven were college graduates and two were originally from the North; still a hung jury. As Beckwith returned to Greenwood, white crowds greeted him like a hero. Since then, "with like-minded whites, he has harassed white patrons of a desegregated movie theater in Greenwood, among other activities." Page 369.

Finally, Mississippi began to change, as schools were desegregated and black police were hired. "Mississippi has changed--a little. But it was the rest of the country that forced that change. It was not done willingly. And it was the Negroes of Mississippi, a few at first, then more and more, that forced the rest of the country to care. Many have died in that effort. I am not the only woman who lost her husband... It took me years to learn what Medgar felt instinctively: that freedom has to be won, that it is worth fighting for. It was the lesson of his life. It was the lesson, if there was one, in his death." Page 373.

In 1964 Mrs. Evers moved to California. "In Mississippi, we were all victims. The disease was hate, fed by fear, nurtured by ignorance, fostered by guilt. We were all, black and white, its victims." Page 374. There is racism in the North as well as South. "We used to speak of the Negro problem. Not long ago, someone said, 'The Negro is no longer a problem; he is part of the solution.' That is the way I think of Medgar. That is the way I hope he will be remembered." Page 376.

Regarding Evers' assassin: "He and Evers lived in different worlds. "When they collided, my husband lay dying outside the door of our home, his key clutched tightly in his hand, a trail of his blood bearing witness to his struggle to reach safety inside. And as his life's blood poured out of him, his assassin dropped his weapon and slunk away through the underbrush of a vacant lot, hidden by the darkness of night." Page 2.

"The man who killed Medgar loved Mississippi too in his twisted, tortured way. He must have loved the Mississippi that divides whites from Negroes, that by definition made him better than any Negro simply because he was white." Page 3.

"Medgar was killed specifically because of what he represented, of what he had become, of the hope that his presence gave to Mississippi Negroes and the fear it aroused in Mississippi whites."