To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
—ATTRIBUTED TO NOVELIST WILLIAM FAULKNER
When Medgar Evers set foot back on Mississippi soil, it must have been like crashing through the atmosphere and returning to earth after spending time on a distant planet. It was the spring of 1946, and the stocky, handsome World War II veteran, who stood five feet eleven, with deep brown skin, a slight mustache, and a serious, studious demeanor, was twenty years old and brimming with ambition. He was the second of his parents’ children together—the second of his father’s four, including an older brother and two younger girls, and the fifth of his mother’s seven—born into a blended family in the small town of Decatur, Mississippi, on July 2, 1925.
He had been born again in the world beyond Mississippi.
In that wider world—that distant planet called “Europe”—Medgar Evers was a man; a technician fifth grade in the Quartermaster Corps of the U.S. Army, with the rank of sergeant, after serving in England, at Liege and Antwerp in Belgium, and in France in La Havre, Cherbourg, and Omaha Beach. He was an American, who had seen more of the world than the vast majority of white Americans. He was a World War II veteran and a human being. Yet the moment he returned to Mississippi he was nothing but a nigger.
Having received an honorable discharge on April 16, he was flown back to Camp Shelby, near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with the other returning servicemen. From there, the bus ride is more than six hours to Decatur. Still wearing his uniform, Medgar climbed aboard and took a seat near the front. The trouble started as soon as they got close to his hometown.
“When we were almost there, the driver asked me to move . . . to the back. Well, I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “Hell, I’d just been on a battlefield for my country. When we reached my hometown, the driver signaled to some men in town. They came on the bus and beat me within an inch of my life.” Medgar actually told the story laughing. “It was the worst beating I ever had,” he said. “But after that, I was a different man.” 1
Though he was young, Medgar was plagued by the questions raised by what he’d experienced in the war. “Why should I put my life on the line for my country, the place where I was born and reared . . . and even while I am here in Europe, I’m still treated [by the U.S. Army] as a second-class citizen,” he told family members and friends. “And then when I return to the country of my birth, I’m treated not only as a second-class citizen, but a human being that they despise and want to see put down and kept on a lower tier than everybody else.”2 He told the story again and again.
He just couldn’t let it go.
FROM THE TIME OF HIS INDUCTION ON OCTOBER 7, 1943, UNTIL HIS discharge in 1946, Medgar used his time in the military both to serve and, whenever he could find the time, to study. He developed a fascination with the African liberation movement in Kenya and its leader, Jomo Kenyatta, who had been engaged for more than a decade in the struggle to rid the country of British colonial rule. He had a deep respect for Kenyatta, who in 1945 attended the fifth Pan African Congress in Manchester, England—a meeting that brought together African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Black American intellectual leader W. E. B. Du Bois. Kenyatta later led the bloody Mau Mau rebellion against white colonial settlers (and eventually emerged as the independent nation’s president).
“I admired the man,” Medgar said. “He was intelligent, and he didn’t believe in compromise. And while I never cared for brutality, I realized that just as the Africans followed Kenyatta, Negroes might have successfully followed someone like him.”3 He even dreamed at one stage of arming his own “black shirt Army” and mounting an uprising against the racist white system in Mississippi. His flirtation with ideas of armed revolution didn’t last. “It didn’t take much reading of the Bible,” he said, “to convince me that two wrongs would not make the situation any different, and that I couldn’t hate the white man and at the same time hope to convert him.” 4
Medgar also idolized his brother, James Charles Evers, whom everyone just called “Charles,” and who was three years older and their father’s firstborn. From childhood on, the brothers were close, with Charles acting as Medgar’s protector. Charles warmed the bed they shared as children, before Medgar, who hated the cold, climbed under the sheets. A Mississippi civil rights attorney named Jack Young described the brothers by saying, “Charles was a rough and tumble guy, Medgar was a gentleman.”5 Mainly, though, they were inseparable. In high school, Medgar stood out for his athleticism on the football field and for his “zoot suit” fashion style (not unlike a contemporary, Malcolm Little—later Malcolm X—who was two months older), complete with baggy slacks and a brimmed hat tipped to the side, and for the large vocabulary that was a testament to his bookishness.
After America’s entrance into World War II, Medgar followed Charles by dropping out of high school to enlist in the Army. He filled out his registration a month before his eighteenth birthday on June 3, 1943. In doing so he defied his mother’s admonishment to her children that they beat the odds for Blacks in Mississippi and get their education, though he had every intention of finishing school after his service. He dreamed of becoming a lawyer and combatting the discrimination against Black Mississippians in the courts.
Medgar entered basic training at the strictly segregated Camp Shelby and was soon deployed to England and then to France, where he experienced the mass death and horror of the U.S. military assault at Omaha Beach in June 1944. U.S. troops from the First and Twenty-Ninth Infantry Divisions began landing across the six-mile stretch of the Normandy coast at 6:30 in the morning. From the start it was pure chaos. The assault on the Normandy coast was the largest amphibious invasion ever attempted in military history. Divisions of troops were mixing haphazardly as men raced to climb out of the ships and escape the “kill zone” along the beach, where German forces were raining fire at the assault, and get to a safe spot, on higher ground.6 Medgar was assigned to the all-Black 325th Port Company as a designated “supply clerk.” As part of the famed, and largely African American “red ball express,” he loaded and unloaded weapons and supplies, and offloaded vehicles from transport ships onto trucks to keep the front lines supplied. The still-segregated Army allowed few Black men to participate in combat. But there was no escaping the gore of the 10,300 D-Day casualties among the 133,000 U.S. and Allied troops who crammed into 7,000 ships and landing craft or who strafed the beach from the air. Remaining in France after D-Day, Medgar joined the all-Black 3677th Quartermaster Company and the 958th Quartermaster Service Company.7
Like his elder brother, Medgar relished his experience in Europe despite the segregated service. The horror was real; seeing the bodies of dead soldiers littering Omaha Beach changed something in him, he later told Charles. It hardened him. He was moody and started doing uncharacteristic things, like swearing. Some of the white officers were deliberately cruel, bringing a touch of Mississippi overseas.8 But Europe was not Mississippi. There was no Jim Crow system of formal racial segregation and no Ku Klux Klan. People in England, and especially France, often treated Black Americans with a normalcy that elided race. Medgar’s military service gave him confidence and perspective, and it heightened the contradictions between the mission of fighting for liberty and freedom abroad, while at home as a Negro man he had none.
And there were the women. French women seemed particularly intrigued by Black American men; or at least, they were free to show it openly. Unlike in the American South, going around with them was neither illegal nor particularly frowned upon; as long as no white American soldiers were around. This allowed Medgar to experience something that would have been incredibly dangerous, even life-threatening in Decatur: a romance with a white woman. It happened in Cherbourg. The woman was the daughter of a French couple he’d befriended. Unbelievably to him, he could hold her hand and even kiss her in public without fear of reprisal. Her parents even approved of the union.9 It was a mesmerizing change of status. Back home, he would likely have been lynched for such a romance.
In France, white U.S. servicemen frequently tried to prevent Black troops from interacting with white women. They spread rumors among French locals that Black men were rapists, or even that they had tails. The racist propagandizing didn’t work. More than 350,000 Black men had served in France during World War I, nearly 100,000 of them seeing combat under French commanders, so Blacks were not viewed as alien in the country, which continued to operate a colonial empire that included countries like Guadeloupe, Niger, and the Ivory Coast. France was not free of racism, but it did not have institutionalized discrimination and terror based on color alone. Outside of American barracks, Black soldiers could move around freely.
And there was Paris.
Since the 1920s, the city had been a magnet for Black artists, such as Josephine Baker, and a hub for the popular spread of jazz, though many of these Americans left the country as the Nazis invaded and began to outlaw the “corrupt influence” of jazz. After World War II ended, Paris was still reeling from the physical and emotional ravages of war and Nazi occupation, and food rationing was still underway. Despite this, the city became an even greater magnet for African American artists, writers like Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, as well as musical performers who wished to escape the limitations of segregated venues in the United States.
Part of Medgar wanted to stay in France after the war, the way Baldwin and Richard Wright had done. Wright, like Medgar, was a Mississippi native and the grandson of slaves—born in 1908 on Rucker Plantation near Natchez, where his father was a sharecropper and his mother a schoolteacher. He called Paris “a place where one could claim one’s soul.”10 Medgar shared Wright’s impatience with the limits America placed on Blackness. He was proud of being Black and chaffed at the pressure on Black Americans to feel or act ashamed. He was in Cherbourg, less than two hours away from Paris, so it could be done. He could simply refuse to go home. He had a girl, whose family accepted him. He could have a life outside Decatur and racist Mississippi.
It was a temporary dream. He wrote to Charles that he saw no reason they should have to leave Mississippi in order to succeed. He wanted to put his foot down in his home state and raise Black children in freedom there.11 “This is home,” he later said. “Mississippi is a part of the United States. And whether the Whites like it or not, I don’t plan to live here as a parasite. The things that I don’t like I will try to change. And in the long run, I hope to make a positive contribution to the overall productivity of the South.” 12
Although Medgar shared some of the rage that drove Charles to declare his utter hatred and contempt for white people, his relationship with his Paris sweetheart convinced him it was possible for Blacks and whites to live together harmoniously. He told Charles that when they got home from Europe, they were going to fix things. Still, neither he nor Charles could bring their white girlfriends home as their wives. They knew better than that because they were returning to Mississippi. So they both came back alone. Still, Medgar saved his Paris girl’s letters until he married.13 Their mother begged them to stop writing to these women (Charles’s girl was Filipino) for fear that local whites would accuse the Evers boys of “messing with white women.”
MEDGAR, CHARLES, AND THEIR SIBLINGS HAD RECEIVED THE standard education of every Black Southern child—the realization that there were three kinds of white people: the ones who hated you but were too cowardly to do anything about it, the dangerous ones who would kill you just as soon as look at you, and the nice-acting ones who despite their kindness wouldn’t do a damned thing about it.
This lesson started young. “My parents were poor, but not destitute,” Medgar later told Ebony about growing up in Decatur, where Black and white families lived in close proximity, as in much of the South. He spoke of a white kid who lived next door, who “practically lived” at the Evers house. Seemingly oblivious to their divergent status in Mississippi, the boys would spend the long, sweltering summers playing hide-and-seek, bickering over favorite toys, sharing personal treasures, or telling each other what they wanted to be when they grew up. Neither could imagine in those moments that either of them couldn’t be a fireman or ship’s captain; a banker, boxer, or business tycoon; or that they wouldn’t always be friends. They were just boys, dreaming. It was a blissful boyhood in what felt to a child like a close-knit community. Until it wasn’t. Medgar told of the day, he didn’t even recall at what age, that his friend stopped coming over. Then one day, Medgar saw his friend standing with a group of white friends. “He called me ‘nigger,’” Medgar said. “The split had come. The lines were drawn, Blacks on one side, white on the other. I guess at that moment, I realized my status in Mississippi.”14
The same split came between Medgar and the sons and daughter of the white woman their mother worked for. Their perfectly normal childhood friendship ended abruptly when they all reached school age—and especially puberty. It was then that the lines were most sharply drawn in the South, and the white children seemed to instinctively learn to fix their mouths into a sneer, to replace their Black friends’ names with “nigger” and “boy,” and to demand that these “friends” call them “sir” and “miss,” especially in front of white adults. Suddenly, they were no longer allowed to run to the creek together or even to talk to each other—especially the white girls, who became instantly dangerous to even look at square in the eye.
Death arrived quickly for Black boys in Mississippi. Its specter began to hover the moment you were old enough to possibly catch the attention of the wrong white man’s daughter, or if she flirted with you. One thing you could count on was that no white woman would ever admit to flirting with a Negro. She would let you hang instead. More than a few white men bragged about their “nigger women” on the colored side of town. Sometimes the ones who talked the loudest and the meanest quietly left land to those same children in their wills, producing a society of constant socioeconomic contradictions and inexplicably complicated social rules. It was a bitter irony. Slaveholders had raped enslaved Black women so routinely that they invented new racial categories to characterize the resulting offspring: mulatto, quadroon, and octaroon—based on the percentage of “white” the person was. Many of these children were put up for sale regardless of being their “owner’s” child and were often the subject of confusion and wonder at how a “Negro” could look so white.
Slavery in Mississippi and throughout the South had been characterized by forced breeding and relentless sexual violence. Yet the sons and grandsons of the men who built that system, and who fought to defend it during the Civil War, built their postbellum Southern culture around the constant fear that Black men were fixated on raping white women. And even though the South’s defeat at the war’s end failed to stop the raping of Black women, these sons and grandsons of enslavers invented a palliative for their fears: lynching.
In Mississippi, and across the American South, Black life was cheap. A Black man, woman, or child could be killed for anything or for nothing: for looking at a white man wrong or testifying against him in court (Mississippi juries were of course, all white, and until 1968 all male); for brushing against a white woman on the sidewalk because you didn’t jump into the gutter fast enough; for talking rudely to a white man or woman or even to a white child; or answering “yes” without the “sir” or “ma’am.” Your life was in danger every minute of every day. You lived at the whim of any white person’s momentary moods. And they knew the law, which was deeply enmeshed in white supremacy, wouldn’t touch them. For the first hundred years after slavery officially ended, whites in the South got in bigger trouble for killing a pig or a dog than for killing a Black person. Slavery hadn’t really ended for the sharecroppers still tied to white planters’ land and for those trapped in the pernicious system of convict leasing that thrived in the loophole of the Thirteenth Amendment. Police existed solely to serve white people, to excuse their crimes, and to bully, bludgeon, and control Black bodies. The “peckerwoods,” as the rich whites called poor whites, were the most dangerous whites. Their shops and feed stores served primarily Black customers, and the planter class and the sell-to-whites shopkeeper classes unleashed them to exorcise their frustrations on Black bodies.
“Slavery was seventy years gone,” Charles Evers later wrote. “But the system I was raised in might as well have been slavery. White folk segregated ‘the niggers’ to hold us in line. They forced us to sharecrop, worked us like mules, walked on us like dirt. We lived in shacks and shanties, went down cheap, and grew old with nothing. Half of us died as children, and the other half were always in danger. You drank that in with mama’s milk. You knew you were a nigger the very first time you rode in a car and couldn’t use the bathroom at the service station and had to relieve yourself in the woods just off the road, hiding from passing cars.” 15
The white plantation owners who ran every rural Southern town closed the Negro schools during planting season so Black children could pick cotton in their fields. There was always work to be done: Mississippi cotton didn’t stop being the finest-grade cotton in the world just because formal slavery ended. When Medgar and Charles made the miles-long trek to the ramshackle, one-room, all-Black school during the nonplanting season on foot, “white kids in their school buses would throw things at us and yell filthy things.” Medgar called this the “elementary course” in white supremacy.16
For Blacks in Mississippi, as in every Southern state, everything in your life was separate. If you wanted to watch Hedy Lamarr and Tom Mix movies and work out the psychology of whether you should root for the cowboys or the Indians, you did so from a dusty balcony, while the white patrons watched from comfortable seats below. Every beautiful woman in the movies and advertisements was white. Black people were portrayed mainly as moronic, simple, and docile; Black men as dangerous to white women if let loose, as shown in 1915’s Birth of a Nation, the wildly racist film that popularized and galvanized the Ku Klux Klan throughout the South—and was screened by President Woodrow Wilson in the White House.
If you wanted to eat outside your home, you had to wait for a plate to be shoved roughly into your hands from the back window of a local mom-and-pop restaurant, provided they would serve you at all. If you strayed downtown, you weren’t welcome at the Woolworth’s lunch counter at all, and to buy a pair of shoes or a dress you had to take it home without trying it on. When your mom dropped off the white people’s washing, she entered the white family’s house only through the back door and didn’t go far into the house, even if the white family were nice. That was just the way it was. Once you learned to drive, you quickly learned never to let a car full of white men pass you, lest they run you off the road or shoot at you from the passenger or rear windows. Life was humiliation and threat, every day, all day. Slavery was technically gone, but the plantation class was determined to cling to as many of its social and economic features as possible, using every cruel means they could find.
“Just before I went into the Army,” Medgar later said, “I began wondering how long I could stand it. I used to watch the Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down a Negro with their car, or white gangs coming through town to beat up a Negro.” 17
In 1932 or 1936, depending on which brother was telling the story, Medgar and Charles witnessed their first lynching. The murdered man was a friend of their father’s named Willie Tingle. “I guess he was about forty years old, married, and we used to play with his kids,” Medgar said. “I remember the Saturday night a bunch of white men beat him to death at the Decatur fairgrounds because he sassed a white woman. They just left him dead on the ground.”18
That was all it took back then: an accusation by any white person could sentence any Black man, woman, or child to the rope, the pistol, or worse. As Charles Evers put it, in the Mississippi they grew up in, “killing Negroes was a white man’s prerogative. They’d kill Negroes just like stepping on a bug.” 19 And brag about it. “Negro bodies were found in rivers and creeks all over the South,” Charles wrote. “For every Negro we knew was murdered, there were two others buried deep in the forest or fed to the gators.” 20 In Willie Tingle’s case, Charles wrote that before they beat him, they tied him to a wagon and dragged him alive through the streets of Decatur, as Black people watched helplessly and rushed their children off the street. After that torture, they hanged Mr. Tingle’s body from an old tree in the fairgrounds and shot him full of holes, cut him down, and left the body lying there. It was Medgar and Charles’s father, James, who collected Mr. Tingle’s body and carried it to his uncle Mark Thomas’s funeral home in the company hearse.21
Charles wrote that Medgar asked their father afterward why those men killed Mr. Tingle. The answer had to be as devastating to a young Black psyche as the murder itself: “just because he was a colored man.” When Medgar asked his dad if white men could kill him, too, Mr. Evers told them the truth: “If I was doing anything they didn’t like, they sure could kill me.” 22
James Evers, who drove the family hearse as a side vocation, worked mainly as a lumber stacker at the local sawmills and for the railroad. He also owned land in Decatur and ran a small cow, chicken, and pig farm, and he rented two small houses on it. He was a tough man, never one to bow and scrape before white people. He was known to buck white folks in Decatur so often, they labeled him “Crazy Jim.”
Not much shook Mr. Evers the way Tingle’s lynching and Medgar’s question had. In answering his son, he had laid bare a Black child’s ultimate vulnerability: that in the white South, in America, you had no protector, no matter how much your parents loved you and how tough they were. Medgar’s mother echoed her husband’s warning to her boys to always be careful around white folks. She chastised the feistier Charles, who complained loudly that the lynching was unfair, urging him to pray on it. Someday things would get better, she said. It was the kind of thing Black church ladies would say, but Charles didn’t want to hear it. “Mama, we pray all the time,” he told her. “What do it get us?”23 The children had learned young that white folks hated nothing like they hated Negroes. “White hatred dogged your heels like a shadow,” Charles would later write.24
For months, Charles and Medgar passed Tingle’s bloody clothes as they passed the fairgrounds on the three-mile trek to their segregated school in the Decatur Consolidated School District. (The bright yellow-and-black school buses that carried white children to their modern, well-equipped schools were denied to Negro children.) The clothes had been deliberately left on display by the lynchers, to rot and stink of clotted blood and gore, so that every other “nigger” would remember their place. Worse, most everyone in town knew who the killers were; yet they had just gone on about their business.
For Medgar, the worst part was the silence from a Black community that had been terrorized into submission. “Everyone in town knew” what happened, Medgar said, but there was “never a word in public. . . . They left those clothes on a fence for about a year. Every Negro in town was supposed to get the message from those clothes and I can see those clothes now in my mind’s eye. I saw them every time we ran rabbits near the fairground. Nothing was said in public. No sermons in church. No news, no protest. It was as though this man just dissolved, except for the bloody clothes.”25
The lynching produced a desire for revenge among the Evers boys. When the school bus drivers tried to push them off the road into the muddy gutters by driving so close to them that they stumbled and dirtied the clothes their mother had carefully hand-washed for them, they retaliated by throwing rocks. A year later, they decided to start selling the Black newspaper the Chicago Defender. The paper offered positive stories about Black people and about Africa, a palliative to the ugly and dismissive coverage by papers like the Clarion-Ledger. When local white leaders shut down their trade, decreeing that only whites could be paperboys, Charles and Medgar secretly ambushed a couple of white paperboys with a hail of rocks, then destroyed their bundle of newspapers as they fled.
Despite their mother’s deep disapproval and fear for her youngest boys, James Evers seemed to quietly approve of their bravado. He had long taught his sons that most racist whites were bullies but also cowards, only capable of harming you when they greatly outnumbered you or caught you out alone. A smaller number were truly dangerous, mostly because they had authority or associated with those who did. Every colored man or boy needed to know the difference. Charles was particularly eager to test that theory often. He was angry and rambunctious, and he and Medgar were constantly engaged at hijinks, often to make a buck. They swiped pecans or other small items from a local shopkeeper and sold them; always looking for little businesses to get into. Years after the Defender play fell apart, they started bootlegging, which was strictly illegal in “dry” Mississippi. Sometimes they drove the liquor to “wet” Tennessee in their great-uncle’s hearse.26
Charles called Medgar the saint of the Evers family. He was as studious and serious as Charles was balled-up rage. Charles gave him the nickname “Lope”—a play on the name of an old Black preacher who used to come to the Evers house during revivals and eat up all the pies and treats Mrs. Evers whipped up for the pastors but couldn’t afford to fix for her kids during an average week. The two brothers shared a deep resentment over the treatment of Blacks in Mississippi and were determined to make something of themselves. Even as children, Charles and Medgar moved with resoluteness. For Medgar, that included a drive to stay in his home state, come what may. It came from his natural stubbornness and from knowing that his family’s blood ran deep into the Mississippi soil.
JAMES EVERS AND HIS WIFE, JESSIE WRIGHT EVERS, CAME FROM mixed-heritage families. Jessie’s great grandfather was Medgar Wright, the namesake of Jessie’s future son. The elder Medgar was a half-Black, half-indigenous slave whose reputation was one of incorrigibility. Jessie’s father, Essiens Wright, was half white and born in Georgia in 1874. In 1893, at twenty years old, he married a Black woman one year his junior and they had a son; less than a year later, they moved to Washington, Mississippi, where their two daughters, Lessie and Jessie, were born in 1894 and 1897. According to family lore, what prompted the change of scenery was an incident in which Essiens Wright shot two white men after one of them called him a “half-assed mulatto.” 27
Jessie was no rabble-rouser. Instead, she was a holy roller who skillfully sewed her children’s clothes and required them to be in church three times a week for Bible study and Sunday services. She encouraged them to be patient with white folks, pray for those who trespassed against them, and put their trust in the Lord. Like most Black women in the South, she worked for white families, taking in laundry and returning it through the back door, cleaning their homes, and minding their children. One of her older children, Eddie, became a hobo, hopping trains and living free. Charles admired his uncle and strived to one day achieve that kind of freedom.
James Evers was born in Lena, Mississippi, on September 6, 1882, according to his World War I draft card. He was one of four children of Mike Evers, a farmer who owned land near Decatur and who was born in 1845 in Georgia, and Mary Lizzie Horn, a Black and Creole Indian woman born in 1850 in North Carolina; both were likely formerly enslaved. Charles remembered his grandmother for her high cheekbones and long hair. As in most Black families at the time, there were no family photographs or portraits. Just memories and old folks’ stories.
James and Jessie, who called each other “Jim” and “Grimm,” married sometime around 1920. Jessie had been married before and brought three children into the marriage. They then had four more: Charles, Medgar, and two girls, Mary Ruth and Liz. Jessie Wright Evers ensured her children went to school every day, all four months of the Negro school year. The schools barely passed for educational institutions. Decatur Negro schools were one- or two-room shacks that were freezing cold during the late winter months that comprised the school year for Negro children. The segregated schools were typically stuffed with one hundred or more students, presided over by just two or so teachers struggling to educate kids of all ages at once. There were few books and few resources. What passed for truth in the history books was little more than propaganda: denouncing Reconstruction as a shameful period and omitting the contributions of Black people to U.S. history. This was what white Southerners called “separate but equal,” as their children attended school in modern, clean buildings with plenty of books, pencils, and globes, where they, too, were taught that Negroes had contributed nothing to the United States or to the world, other than what they could contribute with their backs or on them.
Despite the determination of whites to keep Southern Blacks dumb and docile, one Evers daughter finished high school, and both Medgar and Charles finished college, which was unusual for Blacks in that era, and both boys were determined to go to law school, determined to learn how to fight segregation and Negro subjugation via the law. The Evers kids had books at home, and Medgar in particular kept his nose in them.
Medgar and Charles idolized their father, whom they referred to as “Daddy” even as adults. They revered him for the same reason local whites respected him: because James Evers refused to bow and taught his sons not to, either. He was the rare Black man who refused to move off the sidewalk to let white folks pass, or to skin and grin and “yassa boss” to those who viewed themselves as his betters. The assumption by whites in Decatur that he had to be crazy to act the way he did afforded him and his family a measure of safety.
Charles loved to retell the story of the day their father was overcharged five dollars at the local sawmill commissary. James Evers couldn’t read, but he could add in his head better than most. When the commissary manager, a white man named Jimmy Boware, sneered at him, “Are you calling me a liar, nigger?” James stood his ground and politely but firmly reiterated that Boware had got the math wrong. When Boware went for his pistol behind the counter, Evers, who stood over six feet and was broad and physically imposing, broke a Coca-Cola bottle and held out the sharp end, quietly explaining to the man that if he came around that counter, he was gonna get his brains bashed in. The Evers boys stood behind their father and refused to leave him, even grabbing Coke bottles of their own. As they walked home along the railroad tracks, Evers admonished his boys, who feared reprisal from the white men in the store, telling them, “Don’t run, don’t run. They’re nothin’ but a bunch of cowards.”28 Indeed, no one followed them. Evers told Charles and Medgar that night, “Don’t never let anybody beat you. . . . If anyone ever kicks you, you kick the hell out of him.”29 White men in Decatur knew that if they were ever going to kill this “crazy nigger,” he would take a couple of them with him. They left him alone. But that night, James Evers sat up with his .22 rifle, just in case.
BLACKS IN THE SOUTH WERE KEPT FROM THE BALLOT THROUGH A mix of trickery and terrorism—a crucial means of maintaining the status quo. Lynchings often targeted those who expressed a desire to vote. White newspapers published lists of Blacks who appeared before a voter registrar or who became members of the NAACP. Being on those lists could mean getting fired by your white employer, being evicted from your tenant farm, or even having the bank foreclose on your home. And because you had to be a registered voter to serve on a jury, the practice of keeping Blacks from voting served a double purpose.
Mississippi was in many ways the birthplace of the American creed that neither a Black citizen nor a Black voter should ever exist. The notion of limiting the franchise to “free white males” dates to the Tenth Congress, which in 1808 amended the Organic Act that controlled the Mississippi territory, nine years before it became a state.30 The number of free Blacks in Mississippi in 1808 was just 181, versus 14,523 enslaved Africans and 16,602 Whites.31 The rich alluvial soil in Mississippi’s Delta region made its planters exceptionally wealthy. “The Delta has probably the richest soil outside of Africa and therefore very conducive to the planting and the harvesting of cotton,” Jackson State professor Cassie Sade Turnipseed said. The mass of Black labor required to run the wildly prosperous plantations of the American South resulted in several Southern states having populations that were almost equally Black and white or, in South Carolina and Mississippi, majority Black. Indeed, Mississippi emerged from the Civil War with a 55.3 percent Black majority that peaked at 58.5 percent in 1900.32
The planter class was determined to secure white minority rule through an aggressive system of American apartheid. After witnessing the election of Black statewide officials—including two United States senators: Hiram Rhodes Revels (1871) and Blanch Kelso Bruce (elected in 1874 and serving from 1875 to 1881), plus a Black lieutenant governor, Alexander K. Davis (1873–187633), which made Mississippi, ironically, a model of Reconstruction—Mississippi’s white Democrats vowed to beat back racial progress by any means necessary. When Reconstruction collapsed in the 1877 compromise made on the backs of the formerly enslaved, Mississippi was the most ferocious Southern state in forcing a total reversal. It was the first state to erect barriers like poll taxes and literacy tests to keep its Black majority from ever exercising the vote again.
Like most Southern states, Mississippi moved in 1902 to switch from a caucus system to a primary system to elect its candidates, which all but guaranteed white control. After the Civil War, the vast majority of Black Americans were Lincoln Republicans—members of the Southern “Black and Tan” party—so there was no need to block them from Democratic primaries, since no Republican could get elected dog catcher in any Southern state. That meant the Democratic primary effectively was the whole election. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, despite the many ways it limited or even excluded Black participation, had drawn Black voters to the Democratic Party during the 1930s and ’40s. Mississippi Democrats, along with those in other Southern states, came up with a new scheme to get around the Fifteenth Amendment. The “white primary” was predicated on the idea that a private political party had the right to make its own rules and choose its own candidates—in this case, white men.
For more than twenty years, the U.S. Supreme Court had begged to differ. In 1927 the nation’s highest court struck down Texas’s all-white primary in the landmark Nixon v. Herndon ruling, and it ruled that Congress had the authority to protect the right of all citizens to vote in primary elections in the U.S. v. Classic (1941) and Smith v. Allwright (1944) cases, ruling that a political party using the apparatuses of state government to run its elections was tantamount to state discrimination against Black voters.34 The 1944 case, argued by NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, revolved around a Black dentist from Houston, Texas, Dr. Lonnie E. Smith, who tried to register to vote in that state’s Democratic primary but was denied because of his race. The Texas Democratic Party, like the one in Mississippi, argued that it was a “voluntary association” and therefore not subject to Fifteenth Amendment rules. His successful lawsuit marked the end of the “white primary” in every Southern state, including in Mississippi.
Two years later, Mississippi’s Democratic-controlled legislature made a careless error; passing a law exempting soldiers returning from the war from paying the poll tax, perhaps forgetting about the tens of thousands of Black men from the state who had enlisted. That meant some eighty thousand Black veterans had, in theory, become eligible to register and vote. And Medgar and Charles were two of them. The brothers, who both revered Thurgood Marshall, were determined to test the rules. They gathered a group of fellow Black veterans and decided to become the first Blacks from Decatur to register and vote in the July 1946 Democratic primary, in which the flamboyantly racist demagogue Theodore G. Bilbo was seeking a third term in the U.S. Senate.
Bilbo was in many ways the ultimate Mississippi caricature. He was a career politician, standing no more than five feet two but with the persona of a plantation boss. And he dressed the part: “business suit, metal-rim eyeglasses, big white hat, [and a] diamond stickpin in his necktie,” 35 as Charles described him. Bilbo was elected to the Senate in 1934 following a stint in the Mississippi legislature and two terms as governor. He made a name for himself with his raucous, triumphantly racist stump speeches.
“He called his opponents ‘liars,’ ‘hypocrites,’ and ‘buzzards on a fence, waiting for the good white folk of Mississippi to let down their guard,’” 36 Charles wrote. “Then Bilbo would warm to his favorite subject: The Nigger. He’d start shouting about how he was going to preserve racial purity by ‘sending the niggers back to Africa” and claim “Negroes meant to mongrelize the white race.” 37 It was the straightest ticket to victory in Southern politics. Never mind that Bilbo also boasted about the “Negro woman down in Poplarville who bore him Negro kids,” 38 or that he quietly donated to Alcorn A&M college and to funds for “Negro schools.”39 Politics in the South, and especially in Mississippi, hinged on white Democrats’ proficiency at publicly and elaborately demonizing Blacks, vowing with all the earnestness they could display that they would save the good white Christian men, women, and children of the South from their sullying, dusky influence.
As teenagers, Medgar and Charles sometimes went to Bilbo’s speeches when he came to town, just for the sheer entertainment value. They were often the only Black faces there. Charles wrote that during the 1934 race, as they sat on the front steps of the Newton County courthouse, Bilbo even pointed them out, telling the hooting audience of white “peckerwood” farmers, “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. You see those two little niggers sitting down here? If you don’t keep them in their place, then someday they’ll be in Washington trying to represent you.” 40
Charles wrote that Medgar nudged him and whispered, “Ain’t a bad idea.” 41
At a rally on May 9, 1946, in Pontotoc, Mississippi, Bilbo raged that one of his opponents, a ten-term congressman named Ross Collins, “is expecting a lot of niggers to vote in this election, and they’re registering all over the state or in the city.” Winding himself up on the stump, Bilbo railed that “the niggers are having meetings all over the state and they’ve got delegates in every congressional district ready to vote. . . . And then, the other day, the Negro Council in Chicago sent a telegram to Harry Truman, the President, saying to send the Army down to Mississippi and to see to it that these 100,000 niggers are gonna vote. You see, the GI boys don’t have to pay any taxes, that’s their basic right you know and there’s 100,000 white people and about 70 or 60,000 Negroes in Mississippi. Mighty sure that Ross is figuring on getting that nigger vote.”
Then in June, he delivered a stemwinder in the town of Starkville, in which he declared that white people would be justified in going to any extreme to keep Blacks from voting, even offering free legal counsel to any white citizen who “took the situation into their own hands” by committing murder to keep Blacks from the polls. He also said he was certain no white Mississippi jury would indict, nor would a trial jury convict, a white person who “committed violence on Negroes.” 42 Bilbo ended the speech with a menacing flourish: “The best way to keep a nigger away from a white primary in Mississippi,” he said, “is to see him the night before.”43
On July 2, Primary Day (and Medgar’s twenty-first birthday), the Clarion-Ledger, owned by brothers Thomas and Robert Hederman, both ardent white supremacists, ran a headline forecasting fair weather for the vote and pointing to Bilbo’s warnings of “racial trouble” to come. “A late development, which is seen as a threat to Bilbo’s strength,” the paper wrote, “is the steady stream of World War II veterans to the registration desks all over the state. The veteran vote is expected to be mainly against Bilbo.” 44
Bilbo faced not just Collins, but Tom Q. Ellis, who was vowing to stand for a “white man’s South” and two other candidates, a war veteran named Levings and Frank Harper, who accused Bilbo of financial wrongdoing and claimed to “have the goods on him.” The Clarion-Ledger summarized Bilbo’s platform: “It is true I’m a little colorblind in Washington, but I cuss the nigger vociferously in election years in Mississippi and [popular national syndicated columnist and radio announcer] Walter Winchell [who was Jewish] cusses me all the time. What other qualifications in a senator do the people of this state want?” 45 The paper also reported that U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark said he intended to put the full power of the Justice Department behind the U.S. attorney in Mississippi’s announcement that all qualified Negro voters be allowed to register and vote in the state primary.
With that in mind, Medgar and Charles walked with four other veterans to the Newton County Courthouse, where they asked to be registered. Decatur had some nine hundred registered white voters, but not a single Black voter on the books. Local whites in the small town seemed determined to keep it that way—and to take Bilbo’s advice to heart. When word got out about the Everses’ plans, a man named Alton Graham, a white clerk who knew the brothers’ family, showed up to warn James Evers that his sons had better stand down if they didn’t want any trouble.46
When the six Black veterans arrived at the courthouse, a group of about twenty white men, armed with shotguns and pistols, were waiting for them. They blocked the door; screaming and hissing at the “niggers” to go home. Medgar and Charles recognized faces in that crowd, including some that on any other occasion might even be friendly. They also recognized Alton Graham, but Medgar and Charles were armed, too. The escalating tension frightened the small, elderly registrar, a man named Mr. Brand. He pleaded with the group to leave it alone, and that in time, things would change. Brand knew he couldn’t legally prevent the six men from registering, but he feared bloodshed could occur on the courthouse steps that day. But the men would not be deterred. They declared that having fought for this country, they had a right to register, and they intended to do so. After a tense standoff, Mr. Brand walked the six men into the courthouse and to a private room where he registered them.47 This victorious act of bravery was the beginning of the fight, but not the end.
Between registration day and Election Day, Graham and other Whites, who the Everses derided as “Kluxers”—that is, the Ku Klux Klan—visited the Evers house and warned James that his sons were asking for trouble. “The word was always the same,” Medgar later recalled, “‘Don’t show up at the courthouse [on] voting day.’” 48 Charles said that even some local Negroes begged them to stand down, lest they unleash hell on every Black family in Decatur. “Take your names off the books before some other Negro gets hurt,” they would say.49 But Medgar and Charles had it in their heads that they would not just register, they would vote.
On Election Day, November 3, Medgar, Charles, and four of their old friends from the neighborhood—A. J. and C. B. Needham, Bernon Wesley, and a fourth man Charles recalled only as Hudson—walked back to the courthouse to cast their ballots. This time, the angry crowd that met them numbered more than two hundred, all conspicuously armed. Medgar and Charles, ever their father’s sons, were armed as well, with pistols and Charles’s switchblade; and they moved their jackets aside to make that known.50 The threat of bloodshed was dire, but the county sheriff made it clear that he had no intention of intervening to assist the Black men. The threat of riot and massacre was heavy in the air. At one point, the men split up into three groups to try to outflank the mob and get inside the building. This time, their efforts wouldn’t end in a quiet room with Mr. Brand. Though they managed to get inside, the would-be Black voters quickly realized the ballot box had been placed behind a locked door.51
Charles later recounted their interactions with a white man named Andy May, whose family drugstore the Evers family had frequented. Far from a friendly ally, May patted the pistol in his pocket and blurted, “Listen nigger, ain’t nothing happened to you yet,” to which Charles responded by showing his switchblade and telling May that nothing was going to happen to them, if May knew what was good for him.52
In the end, Medgar convinced his brother and his friends to stand down and fight another day. “We’ll get them next time,” he said. Medgar had likely saved his brother’s life, because Charles had been itching for a fight. As they left, a white man screamed at them: “You damn Evers niggers gonna get all the niggers in Decatur killed.”53 Some of the men threatened to follow the men home or to come for them later. Charles and Medgar threatened right back, channeling their father’s bravado.
“I had been on Omaha Beach,” Medgar told reporters years later. “All we wanted was to be ordinary citizens. We fought during the war for America—and Mississippi was included. Now after the Germans and the Japanese hadn’t killed us, it looked as though the white Mississippians would.” 54 Medgar and Charles sat up all that night with their shotguns ready, but none of the cowards ever came.55 There would be no hanged men named Evers that night.
When his sons came to the house in Decatur to visit days later, James Evers neither praised nor admonished them. But it was clear to Medgar and Charles that they had made him proud.
Despite the setback for the Evers men, about 1,500 Black Mississippians voted in the 1946 primary; the first time Blacks had ever voted in a Mississippi Democratic primary. Though they represented just 1 percent of the vote and were a fraction of the half million eligible Black voters in the state, it was a historic moment in the state. The Jackson Advocate, a prominent Black newspaper since its founding in 1938, ran an above-the-fold headline on July 6, announcing in all capital letters: “MISSISSIPPIANS VOTE—BILBO THREATS: No Incidences of Violence Reported.”
Bilbo had defeated his primary opponents handily, assuring him a third term. But there would be a cost. He had become a media spectacle even outside his state, and the emblem of what Mississippi stood for, as far as the national press was concerned. His outright calls to racial violence to keep Black votes suppressed were an embarrassment to the national party—which, after all, was the party of FDR and Harry Truman, who was pushing to desegregate the U.S. armed forces (which he would begin in earnest with an executive order in 1948, though it was not fully accomplished until the Korean War two years later). FDR’s New Deal contained concessions to the Dixiecrats that limited the benefits Black Americans could receive and specifically excluded farm workers from protection; even so, it had provided crucial, federally funded employment for millions of Blacks during the Great Depression, which had hit those just a generation out of slavery harder than most white Americans. And with the ongoing advocacy of his first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the relative openness of the succeeding Truman administration, the Democratic Party for the first time in its history was competitive among Black voters outside the South. To that Democratic Party, Senator Bilbo was a liability.
Even before the election, in May 1946, a special campaign expenditures committee, empaneled to investigate election practices in U.S. Senate races, received a petition from a group of Black Mississippians, accusing Bilbo of running “an aggressive and ruthless campaign” to “effectively deprive and deny the duly qualified Negro electors . . . of their constitutional rights . . . to register and vote.” The petitioners accused Bilbo of operating a “reign of terror” against Black would-be voters, and they named him as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The petitioners called on the Senate to void Bilbo’s election by refusing to seat him for a third term.
The committee sent investigators to hold public hearings in Jackson that summer; despite warnings from the National Negro Council president and from Republican senator Robert Taft of Ohio that “Negro witnesses who told the truth in Hattiesburg or Grenada would not live to return home from the courthouse.” 56 A December 16 report in Time described a raucous atmosphere at the federal courthouse in Jackson, in which white spectators laughed and cheered on the senator, who was present despite being ill, with shouts of “Tell ’em, Bilbo!” as ninety-six witnesses recounted stories of “violence, jailing, bribery or ‘friendly advice’ from white folks,” to scare them away from the polls. From the Time report:
An early witness, a Negro veteran, said that white men had whipped him with a piece of cable after he had tried to register for Mississippi’s white primary and had then given him a ride back to town. (This brought guffaws from the spectators.) Then a shoe repairman and a taxi driver admitted that they had each received $25 for warning fellow Negroes away from the polls. A white Catholic priest, who had asked polling officials why his parishioners were not allowed to vote, had received the answer: “No Negroes are going to vote in Pass Christian [Miss.] unless they paint their faces white.”57
The Time report, which went out of its way to dismiss the accusations against Mississippi’s senior senator as “silly,” said that none of the testimony connected Bilbo himself to the violence with one exception: his now-infamous line from his July speech about “visiting niggers” the night before a vote.
Ultimately, the Senate committee dismissed accusations of campaign interference against Bilbo as nothing but over-the-top rhetoric from a politician concerned about the interference of “outside agitators” in his state, including the press. A second committee simultaneously investigating Bilbo was prepared to act on allegations that he had used his office for financial gain, including taking illegal gifts such as “a new Cadillac, a swimming pool, excavation of a lake to create an island for his home, construction of a private roadway, painting of his ‘Dream House No. 1,’ and furnishings for his ‘Dream House No. 2.’” This second committee produced a scathing December report, just in time for the Eightieth Congress, controlled by Republicans for the first time since 1933, to act.
Before they could do so, the boisterous segregationist was silenced by fate. He withdrew from the Senate to be treated for cancer of the mouth, which he succumbed to that August. Bilbo was not the last Southern white supremacist “dead ender” to make a name for himself standing in the way of Black Americans’ right to the franchise. Over time, he would be largely forgotten by history.
Meanwhile, the Evers brothers had officially become what segregationists of the time called “agitators.” More positively, their efforts caught the attention of the national NAACP and of a prominent and ostentatiously wealthy Black Mississippi activist and physician named Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason (or T. R. M.) Howard. Medgar nurtured this connection until the day he died.
With that fight temporarily behind them, Medgar prepared to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and go to college. To complete his high school degree, he enrolled at the Alcorn College Laboratory School.58 With the strictly segregated University of Mississippi (known in the state as “Ole Miss”) off-limits to Black students, Medgar joined his big brother again, enrolling at all-Black Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College. They both played football, but it was Medgar who excelled as a half back, making all-conference (though white schools refused to play against the Alcorn Braves).59 He quickly became a big man on campus—majoring in business administration, running track, joining the debate team, and becoming the editor of the school newspaper. He even sang in the glee club.
Of the two brothers, Charles was the hustler, constantly starting small enterprises, selling everything from peanuts to bootleg whiskey, and hassling Medgar to get in on the action. Medgar’s head stayed in his books. He was constantly reading—everything from philosophy to history—and he cut an impressive figure that got him noticed not just by the NAACP but also by the Alcorn administration. He was committed to sticking to his plan to go to law school, and he had Ole Miss in mind, though he knew it would be a fight.
In 1950, Medgar was twenty-five years old and starting his junior year at Alcorn when his life plan received a significant adjustment. On the first day of classes, a demure, pretty freshman from Vicksburg, Mississippi, named Myrlie Beasley appeared before him.