I may be going to heaven or hell . . . but I’ll be going from Jackson.
—MEDGAR EVERS
The house at 2332 Guynes Street had pale yellow-green vertical clapboard on one end and pale brick on the other. The small, ranch-style house was built to Medgar’s specifications—and with his family’s security in mind. Its flat top was covered in gravel; the better to hear any intruder who might alight on the roof. Unlike the other homes on the block—which had otherwise identical layouts, with a combined living and dining room, a cozy kitchen, three bedrooms, and a narrow bathroom—this house had no front door. Instead, you entered through a side door at the top of the long, concrete carpark. The idea of the side entrance was to prevent anyone from being seen going in or coming out, while letting those inside the house see who was coming by peeking through the blinds of the living room window.
The carpark was wide enough for two cars, including Medgar’s Oldsmobile and the black station wagon he later bought for Myrlie. The house welcomed civil rights leaders, celebrities, and spillover attendees of the NAACP mass meetings at the Masonic Temple, who became frequent fixtures at the home. An overhang roof stretching across the carpark connected the home to a narrow storage shed that looked like a skinny little house of its own. Medgar installed a freezer in the shed that he filled with the proceeds of the hunting and fishing trips that were his treasured weekend relaxation. For Medgar, who was a country boy at heart, hunting and fishing were more than just diversions. He’d made a vow to Mama Beasley and Aunt Myrlie that he would always provide for Myrlie. That included making sure that she and their children would never go hungry.
The backyard fence posts were festooned with small, gray stone Native American heads, standing soberly in profile with their headdresses pointing straight back; the yard was filled with trees, which Myrlie loved, because they reminded her of Mama’s house in Vicksburg. There were plum and oak trees, and the couple planted a hackberry tree that dropped sweet, pulpy berries and sometimes, annoyingly, its tangly limbs, too. There was plenty of room in the yard for their cocker spaniel named Blackie, who had been Medgar’s surprise gift to Myrlie, and later, a fiercely protective German shepherd named Heidi.
Guynes Street, a single block in northwest Jackson that comprised the Elraine Subdivision three miles from downtown, was an oasis of hope and possibility. Elraine was the first subdivision of modern homes built for the Black middle class in Mississippi after World War II. Its thirty-six homes were erected starting in 1955 by two Black developers, Winston J. Thompson and Leroy Burnett. It quickly attracted Black professionals, mostly teachers and a handful of business owners. Margaret Walker Alexander, the esteemed Black poet and novelist, was the first to move onto Guynes Street, and she owned the lone two-story home at the top of the block. She formed a kind of one-woman welcoming and veto committee, tacitly approving new arrivals to Elraine. The children on the block knew not to stray from the safety of their Negro enclave and into the all-white streets and neighborhoods adjoining their quiet block. As long as they stayed on Guynes Street, they lived as close to a normal, carefree life as a Black child could in that era.
For Medgar and Myrlie, the house was a step up to the Black middle class. The small amount they had saved from Medgar’s time with Magnolia Insurance in Mound Bayou was devoured by the medical bills from Myrlie’s miscarriage, so they borrowed the down payment1 for the $10,500 home and took advantage of VA loans, though they would sometimes struggle to meet the $56 monthly payment.2 Still, for Myrlie, it was worth it.
The move—after first living in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Jackson—meant the end of twenty-one-year-old Myrlie’s misery in Mound Bayou. Myrlie’s maternal grandmother, Big Mama, even came along initially, to help care for the children.3 When the house on Guynes Street was ready in 1956, it also meant friends, and a social life for this young mother of a two- and a three-year-old, and moments of respite from the constant din of activity, threats, and loneliness that went along with being the wife of a civil rights leader. Myrlie even joined Ms. Walker Alexander’s gardening group.
Medgar’s $4,500-a-year salary4 plus the $2,000 a year the NAACP paid Myrlie as Medgar’s secretary5 stretched only so far, so the couple furnished the house modestly. They placed a sofa and a small upright piano in the living room, where Myrlie could keep up her practicing. They had a record player, and they often slow-danced to “their song”—Erroll Garner’s “Misty”—or bopped and swung to up-tempo R & B tunes. As the kids grew older, they stood in the hallway, which a pocket door separated from the living room, to sneak a peek.
A telephone was just outside the kitchen, and it seemed to ring day and night with calls from the NAACP, from those needing Medgar’s help, or from others with menace in mind. They had a television in the living room, where Medgar exercised every morning to The Jack LaLanne Show, often balancing little Reena, whom he nicknamed “Punkin” and “Sunshine,” on his knees while he did leg lifts. On Saturdays, that was where Medgar, Punkin, and little Darrell, “his big boy,” 6 watched cartoons. And like a growing number of Americans in the mid-1950s, they had a second television in their bedroom, where Myrlie would sometimes cuddle up with the children for a snuggly nap while Daddy was away.
The living room TV was tuned to the news every evening. As the kids grew, Medgar watched with them and explained what they were seeing. Sometimes on Sundays after church, the family would take long drives and Medgar would point out to the children the parks and swimming pools, restaurants, and libraries where they were not allowed to go, simply due to the color of their skin. He promised them that he was changing that.
It was a wonderful, terrible time. Medgar spent long hours away from home, driving back into the Delta to conduct his investigations, with the interior or even the trunk of his car sometimes doubling as the hiding place for Blacks who had to get out of town quickly after offending a local white person.7 Myrlie was regularly faced with reminders around her home of her husband’s dangerous activities. Medgar had guns stashed in nearly every corner of their modest bedroom.
“We had a relationship of fun, of depth, of challenge, of love that I have never known,” Myrlie said. “I can’t explain it other than to say it was a blessed relationship. Did we have problems? You bet we did. And those problems arose around his work in the civil rights movement. It was not that I did not support him, but I was fearful all the time for his life. Medgar was the love of my life, and the father of my children. And I knew that if he continued to pursue civil rights justice and equality, and certainly at that time, that his life would be taken from him. And I could not imagine life without Medgar.”8
In those moments, when his young wife raised her doubts and fears, Medgar was encouraging but clear about his commitment to the movement. “You’re stronger than you think you are,” he told Myrlie. “You know what I’m in. I’m not going to leave it.”
“And I said to him, ‘Well, why not? I’m your wife. These are your children.’ And he said to me, ‘That’s exactly why I’m not going to do it. Because I’m fighting for you and my children, and other parents and their children.’ I really had no answer for that because I knew how sincere he was.”9
Myrlie prayed, day and night: “‘God, please take care of my husband.’ And I always added to that: ‘Because I cannot live without him.’ And something always said [back]: ‘You will.’ I lived with that every day, every day, every day . . .”10
Black families in Jackson during this time were largely denied the benefits of the city’s postwar economic boom. They were banned from the sprawling developments springing up all over the city and its surrounding suburbs and relegated to undesirable corners of the capital. Downtown shops barred Black women from trying on clothes or donning the white gloves to work at the cash register. Everything from cafes to movie theaters was strictly segregated. And the nearly seventy chapters of the Association of Citizens’ Councils of Mississippi, whose Jackson headquarters was down the street from City Hall, were determined to keep it that way, especially in the schools.
Some already living on Guynes Street were less than thrilled about sharing their quiet, peaceful block with the most prominent and active civil rights activist in the state. Teachers in Mississippi were especially vulnerable to the Citizens’ Councils, who made it clear that joining the NAACP was a firing offense. Before Medgar and Myrlie moved in, they learned that some on the block had signed a petition to keep them from living there. This anxiety by their new neighbors was painful for Medgar and Myrlie, but also well-earned.
A few months after the Everses moved into their house, Grace Britton Sweet and her husband, Dennis, moved in three doors down. Medgar and Myrlie soon made an impression.
“One afternoon, the doorbell rang, and it was Medgar at my door,” Mrs. Britton Sweet said.
“I’m your neighbor,” said Medgar. “All of us need to meet each other and get together and support [each other].”
The Sweets agreed, but Medgar wasn’t done. “He wanted to know did we vote? And of course, the answer was yes,” Ms. Britton Sweet recalled. A Tougaloo College graduate, she was one of the few Black Mississippians to get past the literacy tests and registered to vote in 1953.
Medgar also asked if they belonged to the NAACP. “And, well, our answers were no,” she said. “Well, why?” he asked. Britton Sweet explained something Medgar already knew: they were teachers, like many others on the block, and if they joined the NAACP, they would be fired. The Citizens’ Councils had worked out a way to easily discover anyone’s NAACP membership.
“You had to sign things” declaring whether you were a member of the civil rights organization, Ms. Britton Sweet said. “If you did . . . you did not belong in the Jackson public school system,” as far as white authorities were concerned. “Of course, it was a tactic to keep Black Mississippians from voting.” 11
“Well, I can join because that issue hasn’t come up where I am,” Dennis chimed in.
When Mrs. Britton Sweet said she’d join, too, Medgar changed his tune. “No, no, no,” he said. “What I need you to do is to pay your dues” without going onto the organization’s membership rolls. “We need your money. And what I want you to do is to vote, which you say you already do.” He asked them to encourage their students at the local high school to vote and to get their parents to do so. “There’s no need of you joining and getting fired. If you don’t have a job, that’s not going to help you, and it’s not going to help us,” he said.
Britton-Sweet was impressed. And the couple chipped in their dues.
The Everses were finding their niche in the community, and Myrlie was gaining in confidence. Dennis Sweet and Medgar often went fishing on Saturdays. The three Sweet kids and the Evers children attended one another’s birthday parties and were part of the “Guynes Street gang” of kids who spanned every age from toddler to high school senior. They played together and stayed out of trouble, and they formed a bond that would last for decades, since few families on the block ever moved away. Ms. Britton Sweet’s brother, Dr. Albert Bazaar Britton Jr., the first African American physician admitted to the staff of Baptist Hospital in Jackson, became the Everses’ family doctor, giving them a replacement for Dr. Howard, and Myrlie some needed peace of mind.
“We got to know them [both] quite well,” Mrs. Britton Sweet said. “They were very nice, very accommodating. . . . Boy, you just couldn’t ask for better people.” And once they settled in, the block was like one big family; the kind where you’d ask a neighbor: “Do you have a cup of sugar? I need some sugar and I’ll pay you back.”
“My husband was working on his master’s degree and . . . he had to do a whole year in Atlanta, Georgia,” Britton Sweet said. “And Medgar told him, ‘Hey, I’ll look after Grace and the kids, while you go, I’ll look in on them. You don’t have to worry, you go do that.’ And that’s what he did. We had floor furnaces, and [mine] went out and it was cold. It was really bad. I called Medgar’s house, twelve o’clock midnight or one o’clock in the morning and said, ‘Hey, I have no heat up here. Can you help me?’ And he said, ‘I certainly can.’ He got out of bed, came past two houses, to my house, and the pilot [light] was under the house. So, he crawled under the house with a flashlight and lit the pilot and got my heater going.”
Johnnie Pearl Young, who lived directly across the street, met Medgar before the Everses’ house was finished. He’d come by to check on things, knocked on her door and asked: “Neighbor, do you think I might have a glass of water, since ours is not connected yet?” When Myrlie arrived a few weeks later with little Darrell and Reena, the two women bonded over having daughters around the same age. Medgar became fast friends with Young’s husband, Thomas, too.
Nearly every weekday Ms. Young, who Myrlie called “Bo,” dropped by after a long day teaching at a local Negro public school, to relax a bit in Myrlie’s living room and chat about their days. Ms. Young was always stylishly dressed in clothes she made from fashionable patterns from companies like McCall’s. Myrlie would fix her a cool drink and pop a record on the player. “Let me play some music for you, maybe that will relax you,” Myrlie would say.
Medgar and Myrlie also befriended Houston and Jean Wells, who moved next door to the Everses with their children and were among the last to join the block. Houston Wells owned a furniture store in Jackson, and he and his wife, who worked at the store with him, were quiet but active financial supporters of the NAACP. When Medgar and Myrlie knocked on the door to welcome them to the neighborhood, Medgar made his customary pitch for them to join, only to find they were already members.
THE MISSISSIPPI STATE NAACP OFFICE WAS LOCATED AT 507 Farish Street, and Medgar also kept an office at the Masonic Temple at 1072 Lynch Street, where regular mass meetings were held to grow and nourish the Black resistance in the state. Officially, Medgar’s job was to increase NAACP memberships and add to Mississippi’s Black voter registration rolls. Both tasks would prove to be extremely challenging, given the fears among Black professionals, particularly the teachers who formed the backbone of Mississippi’s small Black middle class, that joining the NAACP would cost them their jobs or bring about financial retribution from the Citizens’ Councils. Impoverished Black sharecroppers feared the Klan violence that could result from registering to vote. Meanwhile, Black collegians and high schoolers in Jackson and around the state were watching a nascent civil rights movement bubble up in other parts of the South, and they were increasingly eager to join it in the wake of the Till lynching. This growing movement was built on the direct action that belied the staid legal tactics of the NAACP. Increasingly, Medgar, just thirty-one years old, was siding with the impatient youth.
Medgar wrote to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in July 1956, nearly a year after the Montgomery Bus boycotts, inviting King to speak in Jackson. “We, the NAACP here,” Medgar wrote, “feel that your presence would do more to bring together our ministers and the people of Jackson than any other person or incident conceivable.”12 The two had met briefly that month at the NAACP national convention in San Francisco.
King had to decline Medgar’s invitation this time as he was set to travel abroad, but he telegrammed his reply: “It was a real pleasure having you in Montgomery. . . . Your presence added much to the success of our meeting. You have my prayers and best wishes as you continue your struggle against the forces of evil and injustice in the State of Mississippi.”13 It would not be Medgar’s last attempt at courting an alliance with Dr. King, and his determination to do so would make him no friends at New York headquarters.
That October, Medgar sent a telegram to President Dwight Eisenhower on behalf of the State Conference, after the president invited Russian observers to come to the United States and “observe our system of free and fair elections.” He called on Eisenhower to send the Russian observers to Humphrey County, Mississippi, where Reverend Lee had been killed and Gus Courts was shot “because they tried to vote as Americans. Send them to Jefferson-Davis County, where more than one thousand who have been qualified voters from three to ten years, were disenfranchised because they were Negroes. Send them to Hattiesburg, in Forrest County, where there are less than twenty-five Negroes registered to vote when there are twelve thousand Negroes in the Country. Mr. President,” he concluded, “we feel that a more accurate and objective view will be derived from a visit in these counties, and the majority of Mississippi counties where no Negroes are permitted to register and vote in our great democracy.” 14
Excerpts from the telegram were published by the Associated Press, and Jefferson Davis County clerk James W. Daniels responded that “no one here has been refused the right to vote because of race or color. They have been refused because they have failed to qualify under the laws of Mississippi.” The Associated Press pointed to the 1956 constitutional amendment requiring would-be registrants to interpret a passage from the state constitution to the registrar’s satisfaction, pointing out, “There are no Negro circuit clerks in Mississippi” and that when the bill was argued on the House floor in 1955 and 1956, “backers said the tighter regulations would help curb the Negro vote.”15
Yet even with Medgar’s frenetic pace and six-day workweek, Mississippi’s NAACP memberships were collapsing, dropping in Jackson from 4,639 in 1955 to 1,436 in 1956. “It is not the lack of interest,” Evers wrote to the national office, “but fear.”16 The terrorism and economic reprisal sometimes seemed too brutal to overcome. Medgar was under tremendous pressure from the national office to refocus on his prime directives: voter registration and NAACP memberships. And he faced near-constant attacks from local critics. He was frequently targeted by the racist editors of the Clarion-Ledger and even in editorials in the Jackson Advocate, the biggest Black newspaper in the city, whose editor, Percy Greene, was an agent of the status quo and uncomfortable with the “radical” young leaders of the NAACP.
Medgar’s 1957 annual report described his travels to speak at a protest rally in Detroit that September, and subsequent speeches in St. Louis, Tampa, and Nashville. He participated in a conference with Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, and Ruby Hurley, the director of the organization’s Washington bureau, in which he pleaded with Assistant U.S. Attorney General Warren Olney for federal intervention in Mississippi “for the assurance that the Civil Rights of Negroes of that state would not be abridged.”
The report also said he had put 13,372 miles on his car, “visiting branches, keeping speaking engagements, making various kinds of investigations, organizing branches, etc.”17 The wear and tear on his Oldsmobile prompted him to disclose in a separate letter to Wilkins that he had spent $382.70 of the organization’s “special fund . . . to replace a set of worn out automobile tires and to have worn mechanical parts replaced on my car.” He stated that “it was my means of being able to keep going over the state without being caught out on some of these country roads with a flat tire or a ‘conked out’ engine”—something that, for a man of his growing profile, could very well mean winding up dead.
Despite New York’s frequent displeasure with his emphasis on King-style activism, and their perception of his lack of focus on memberships and voter registration, Medgar’s relentless travel around the state was having an impact. He was setting up or reviving defunct field offices and aiding Black Mississippians in crisis. And the various offices around the state, and particularly in the Delta, as well as the many Youth Councils Medgar established at Mississippi’s Black colleges and even among high school students were communicating, and coordinating—creating what amounted to a civil rights underground network. Fellow activists like Amzie Moore recognized that this was more valuable and more audacious than Medgar meeting his national NAACP membership quota. But Wilkins and the national NAACP often seemed impatient with Medgar’s aggressiveness, believing that civil rights battles would mainly be won in the courts, not in the streets. Charles never trusted Wilkins and viewed him as jealous of Medgar and contemptuous of Dr. King.
Charles recognized that Wilkins was smart, a strong speaker, and an excellent diplomat, but he wasn’t a Southerner, so he didn’t grasp what the growing Southern movement was up against—or how relentless Medgar could be.
In February 1957, Medgar drove to New Orleans for King’s inaugural Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which sought to coordinate the various Southern protest movements and draw on the reach and influence of Black clergy to form a broad movement around the principles of nonviolence, to “redeem the soul of America.” Medgar was excited to finally meet with King, as well as other ministers like Fred Shuttlesworth and C. K. Steele plus strategists like Bayard Rustin, who were moving toward a strategy of direct action in the mode of the Montgomery bus boycott. At the conference, Medgar was elected assistant secretary, with the responsibility of assisting the Baton Rouge SCLC secretary, Rev. T. J. Jemison. That drew a rebuke from Wilkins, prompting Medgar to write an apologetic letter to Wilkins the following month, saying he was unaware that joining the SCLC was against the “policy of the NAACP” and insisting he was solely “trying to do what I possibly could to bring first-class citizenship to our section of the country as hurriedly as possible.”18 Medgar’s tenure in the SCLC ended quickly.
That August, Medgar spoke at Mount Heron Baptist Church in Vicksburg, where Myrlie grew up and where they were married. His theme: “man’s obligation to God and to man.” 19 He spoke of the “righteous struggle” he had committed his life to, saying, “let it not be said in the final analysis when history will only record these glorious moments and when your grandchildren will invariably ask: granddaddy what role did you play in helping to make us free men and free women? Did you actively participate in the struggle or was your support only a moral one?” Medgar praised the Montgomery bus boycotts and King as examples of men putting their preaching into practice. Montgomery had sparked similar boycott movements in Florida and other states. He desperately wanted to bring that energy to Mississippi.
IN NOVEMBER 1958, EBONY MAGAZINE RAN A SPLASHY, SIX-PAGE profile of Medgar titled “Why I Live in Mississippi” by Francis H. Mitchell. Beside a full-page photograph of Medgar, wearing a casual striped shirt and leaning, half smiling, against a wall, Mitchell wrote that “Evers had not always planned to be a productive member of Mississippi society. In fact, during his Army days, he read extensively of Jomo Kenyatta’s Mau Mau reign of terror in Africa and dreamed of arming his own band of blackshirts and extracting ‘an eye for an eye’ from whites who mistreated their black brothers.” Mitchell quoted Medgar’s change of heart. “It didn’t take much reading of the Bible though, 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.”
More photos showed the Evers family in silhouette, standing at the site of the Civil War battle of Vicksburg, Medgar in a cap, beside a man in rural Mississippi, Medgar fishing in a boat on a lake, and Medgar and a beautiful, smiling Myrlie, cuddling four-year-old Reena. The caption quoted Medgar: “Why do I live in Mississippi? I live here to better it for my wife and kids, and for all the wives and all the kids who expect and deserve something better than what they are getting from life.” 20
The article described a March protest when Medgar boarded a Trailways bus in Meridian and refused the driver’s request that he move from the front section. “He was removed and taken to the police station for questioning,” Mitchell wrote. When he was returned to the bus, he sat in the front, and as they neared the station, the bus was stopped and a cabbie boarded and hit Evers in the face. “Says Evers of his refusal to fight back: ‘You can’t let your emotions get away with you. If I had retaliated, I would have helped defeat the cause for which I was struggling.’”21
“You know, it may sound funny,” Medgar told Mitchell, “but I love the South. I don’t choose to live anywhere else. There’s land here, where a man can raise cattle, and I’m going to do that some day [sic]. There are lakes where a man can sink a hook and fight the bass. . . . There’s room here for my children to play, and grow, and become good citizens—if the white man will let them.”22
The article ended with Medgar, whom Mitchell had photographed fishing, speaking with a Black farmer deep in the Delta, cuddling four-year-old Reena and standing in silhouette with Myrlie, Reena, and Darrell at Vicksburg, declaring: “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the white man lick me. There’s something that I’ve got to do for my kids, and I’m not going to stop until I’ve done it.”23
Myrlie had learned to smile for the photos and cook the meals for the NAACP leaders who frequented their home. She did her best not to argue or explode, but the strain was growing. A year after the Ebony article, which helped turn the spotlight on Medgar into a klieg light, Myrlie was pregnant again.
On January 10, 1960, Myrlie gave birth to a boy they named James Van Evers, in a tribute to both of their fathers—Medgar’s late father, dear old “Crazy Jim,” and Myrlie’s too-often-absent but beloved father James Van Dyke Beasley. With the birth of their third child, whom the family called “Van,” Myrlie quit her part-time job as Medgar’s secretary and devoted herself full-time to being a mother and supportive, if apprehensive, wife of Mississippi’s most prominent civil rights leader.
Mrs. Young, whom Myrlie chose as baby Van’s godmother, often heard Myrlie playing the piano from across the street. “It just sounded beautiful,” she said. Sometimes Myrlie taught music lessons to kids on the block, just as her aunt Myrlie had done for her, earning a bit of money to supplement her allowance. Even with her new domestic role, Myrlie’s car gave her the freedom she craved and helped to solidify her relationships with some of her still-reticent neighbors. She would help to shuttle the neighborhood kids back and forth to all-Black Christ the King, the Catholic elementary school most of the school-age children on Guynes Street attended. And because she was the only housewife on the block, Myrlie soon became a kind of block mom. And when he could grab some rare time off, Medgar provided the fun.
On Sundays, when Medgar wasn’t resting his weary mind fishing, he’d toss a football with seven-year-old Darrell and the other neighborhood boys, watching as they peeled up the street jostling to catch it and throw it back. Johnnie Pearl Young said theirs was a mostly “boy block,” and the kids just “fell in love with Mr. Evers.”
Dennis Sweet III, the second of the three Sweet kids, remembered, “Me, Chipper, Zach, Ted, Billy Henry. . . . There was a bunch of boys,” he said. “It was a blast. We weren’t really feeling the weight of who [Medgar Evers] was. He was a dad on the block [among] a lot of dads. We’d get in the street . . . throw a football, a baseball. It was a good neighborhood.”
“It was fun,” Dennis’s sister, Denise Sweet Owens, agreed. “I was seven, eight years old. We didn’t have air-conditioning. When the sun came up . . . we went outside. We’d meet up—all the kids—kind of halfway—and we’d just start playing. We’d start climbing trees. We’d create ‘gangs.’ Reena Evers, Darryl Evers, Paula Pitman, Reggie Pitman, Dennis, and I, we just ran the streets, having a lot of fun.”
Sometimes Medgar piled the kids into his Oldsmobile and took them out to eat. Ms. Young said, “He’d play with them a while, and then he’d say, ‘Let’s go!’ And you talking about running, wanting to get into his [car]? Oh, they were so happy.”
The kids from Guynes Street interacted only occasionally with the white kids who lived in the adjoining community—just one street away. Invariably, it didn’t end well.
Sweet Owens recalled a “nice white lady” who lived on that nearby block. She and her husband had a son and a daughter, and she was Sweet Owens’s frequent playmate. “We had a lot of fun,” she said, until the day the girl remarked on a passing car with a Black driver and spat out “That nigger.” An astonished Sweet Owens asked, “What did you say?” to which the girl repeated, “‘That’s a nigger,’ and I realized something was strange here.” Before long, Sweet Owens’s mother informed her and her brother that the “nice white lady” and her family were moving away. The woman had told Mrs. Sweet, “We have to move because of integration. It’s coming.”
Medgar was determined to make it come, but the effort was hard on his family.
Darrell and Reena waited up eagerly every night for their father to come home. When he arrived—so long as it wasn’t too late, Darrell and Reena ran to the door. He remembered his dad saying, “Well, I have some gifts for you.” He always brought them something, “usually it was Cracker Jacks or something like that. We jumped all over him.” 24
Sometimes Myrlie’s patience faltered: when she cooked too many dinners for one too many impromptu meetings in their living and dining room, or when funds ran low. She reacted with long silences, and Medgar implored her not to hold things in. He knew the pressure his life’s mission was putting on both of them. “Medgar used to tell me, ‘Myrlie, you shortchange yourself. You have so much more to offer than that,’” she said. “I was proud of what he was doing, and I can’t even explain to you how much I loved that man. But the thought of losing him, and my children’s father, was almost more than I could take.”
By then, Medgar’s every move was being watched. White men no one recognized would stand silently inside the Masonic Temple during NAACP mass meetings, watching, or hang around outside, writing down license plate numbers. That information was turned over to the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News, both owned by the staunchly racist Hederman brothers and which openly supported the Citizens’ Councils and served as a de facto partner of the Sovereignty Commission—Mississippi’s state-operated spy agency and propaganda arm, created by the state legislature in 1956 to protect segregation against federal interference and controlled by the governor. It had been enacted by the Mississippi state legislature after the Brown decision, and its reach included everything from a national speakers bureau, which sent white and even Black speakers around the country to tout the benefits of segregation, to surveillance of NAACP meetings and organizers. At the commission’s behest, white newspapers published the names of anyone who attended a civil rights meeting, making them vulnerable to retribution from their employer or mortgage holder, likely Citizens’ Council members or, worse, from the Klan. The teachers and professionals on Guynes Street were especially vulnerable.
While the existence of the commission was not widely known at the time, Medgar and Myrlie soon suspected that not only were their phones tapped, but their neighbors’ phones were, too. “You’d pick up the phone to use it, and then you could hear the neighbors on the side of you,” Ms. Young said. Sovereignty Commission spies and paid informants were always around, including FBI-trained or retired agents. The commission would compile extensive records for decades on civil rights “agitators” and integrationists, Black and white.
“We would always have a saying in the meetings, we don’t ever have to worry about planning and people knowing, because by the time we leave here, and in the morning, they’re going to know anyway,” said Bennie Thompson, then a young activist and currently the only Black congressman from exquisitely gerrymandered Mississippi.25
The Sovereignty Commission didn’t recruit just white spies. A July 1957 Associated Press investigation exposed Greenwood pastor H. H. Humes, head of the General Baptist State Convention—the state’s largest Black Baptist group—and Jackson Advocate editor Percy Greene, for accepting Sovereignty Commission payments in exchange for supporting the segregated status quo and informing on NAACP members.26 Greene’s paper would run articles attacking the NAACP that were later discovered to have been written by the Commission and reprinted in the Advocate verbatim.
Myrlie recalled discussions at the house about whether Greene was “getting paid.”27 He was a conservative in the Booker T. Washington tradition of some in Mississippi’s small Black middle class who saw the benefits for Black businesses of maintaining segregation and, with it, a captive customer base. He and Humes were frequent and enthusiastic critics of the NAACP.28
Medgar understood that the fight for Black Mississippians was a messaging war that couldn’t be waged by Blacks alone. On December 16, 1961, he and an interracial group of civil rights activists and editors, including John Salter Jr., a half-Indigenous, white-presenting Army veteran and former labor organizer who was a social science professor at all-Black Tougaloo College, launched the Mississippi Free Press, a four-page weekly with the defiant subhead: “The Truth Shall Make You Free.” The inaugural issue’s opening editorial stated: “We believe that all men should be free—no man a slave. We believe in freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of movement, and freedom from intimidation. These, among others, are the rights of all Mississippians, regardless of creed, color or religion.” 29
The paper covered news and politics from Black communities that were about things other than crime, plus coverage of the freedom struggle, “voting and political tips” on how to make sure poll taxes and other requirements were completed on time, and articles denouncing the poor treatment of Black shoppers in downtown Jackson.30 It ran advertisements by Black-owned business like Houston Wells’s furniture store and Smiths Supermarket, owned by Black entrepreneur R. L. T. Smith Jr., who was running to become the state’s first Black congressman.
The Free Press had to be printed far outside of Jackson each week in Holmes County, by Hazel Brannon Smith—a white, Baptist woman, born in Alabama in 1914, who was the owner, publisher, and editor of the Lexington Advertiser and three other small weeklies that served majority Black towns in the Mississippi Delta. She had initially supported segregation and criticized the New Deal as an abandonment of Southern Democrats, but she reversed her position after the Brown decision and published sharp editorials opposing segregation and denouncing White Citizens’ Councils’ intimidation of Black Mississippians. Unsurprisingly, the local council initiated an advertiser boycott of her newspapers. They had her husband fired from his job at Holmes County Hospital, and when a prestigious journalism award brought her national attention, the Klan burned an eight-foot-tall cross on her lawn and her office was firebombed.31
This partnership was not Medgar’s only foray into interracial cooperation. In addition to writers and editors at the Mississippi Free Press, Salter became one of Medgar’s fiercest allies. Another ally Rev. Ed King, who was white, also became a trusted member of Medgar’s inner circle. The two had met when Medgar attended an interracial forum at Millsaps College, where King was an undergraduate student. King would in later years become (at Medgar’s urging) Tougaloo’s chaplain.
Like Myrlie, Ed King hailed from Vicksburg—though white Vicksburg might as well have been on the moon, it was so different. But perhaps because of his religious convictions, he deplored the treatment of Black people in Mississippi. Medgar’s visit to Millsaps came after the Emmett Till case as he worked to open college NAACP chapters, and the encounter changed the trajectory of Ed King’s life.
Medgar “was a good organizer and a quiet agitator and a good teacher,” King said. “And he invited some of us who were sociology or history students to come to his NAACP office, [so] he would give us more information about poverty and race and topics like that.” Medgar preferred to show rather than tell, King said, in demonstrating to this group of young white Mississippians what it meant to be Black in the state.
“Medgar talked about people not having electricity, water, and things like that. And he said, ‘get the census data . . . and you will find that there are people without indoor plumbing within a block of the State Capital Building.’ He made us find it out for ourselves, but it also meant we could trust the other things he was saying. . . . He was wonderful as a teacher.”
King’s friendship with Medgar evolved quickly. “I think he considered me a student. But it was more like I was a little brother that could be guided. And I vaguely understood [that] for him to trust a white man was not something to be taken for granted.” 32
King was in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1958, working with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy to coordinate white support for the movement. When word got back to the white Citizens’ Councils in Mississippi, pressure was put on King’s parents in Vicksburg, who were forced to leave the state amid accusations that their son was a communist.33
BACK IN 1955, A FRIEND OF MEDGAR’S, A BLACK VETERAN NAMED Clyde Kennard of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had filed repeated applications for admission to all-white Mississippi Southern College. When he attempted to enroll again in 1958 and was again rejected, Medgar wrote in an NAACP report, “Legal action is now pending.” 34
Kennard was also an NAACP member, which, as far as the Sovereignty Commission was concerned, made him a threat. But the “legal action” that he would soon face would raise the level of peril for every Black Mississippian who desired to see change. “Kennard’s application to attend Mississippi Southern was seen as an attack on segregation and set into motion a swift response from the state,” said Rick Bowers, author of the book Spies of Mississippi. The Sovereignty Commission conducted a thorough investigation of Kennard’s background and were unable to produce anything it could use to reject his application. They needed a new tactic.
Kennard was arrested by state police and charged with stealing $25 worth of chicken feed from the county co-op that police had planted on his farm. He was charged with grand larceny and for “conspiring to burglarize the Forrest County Cooperative.”35 Mississippi’s notorious “pig law,” passed in 1876, made such a theft punishable as an act of grand larceny with sentences of up to five years.36 The law led to the imprisonment of thousands of impoverished, formerly enslaved men and quadrupled Mississippi’s prison population. Not uncoincidentally, the profits from working convicts at plantation prisons like Parchman State Penitentiary, and the leasing of convicts as free labor to local planters, effectively returned slavery to the state, bringing Reconstruction in Mississippi to an abrupt and hideous end.
Now, the Citizens’ Councils and Sovereignty Commission were weaponizing those laws against integration. Kennard’s trial began on November 21, 1960, and lasted one day. He was sentenced to seven years at Parchman, a place that was considered horrific, even for the South. Medgar attended Kennard’s trial and reported to the national office about the charade he observed.
Evers also released a statement to the United Press International and the Associated Press, calling what happened to the thirty-three-year-old veteran—just two years younger than Medgar—“the greatest mockery to Judicial Justice.” He railed, “In a courtroom of segregationists apparently resolved to put Kennard ‘legally away,’ the all-white jury found Kennard guilty as charged, in only ten minutes.”
After his statement was published, Medgar was served with a subpoena by the Forrest County Circuit Court, demanding to know why he should not be cited for contempt of court for criticizing a proceeding for which he had been present. A hearing was scheduled for December 2. Medgar was found guilty of contempt and sentenced to thirty days in jail plus a $100 fine—twice his monthly mortgage.37
The attacks would not end with Kennard.
Tougaloo College, where Medgar had opened a strong NAACP Youth Committee, was the activist center of Jackson. Medgar had also opened Youth and Collegiate NAACP chapters at Jackson State, along with active organizations at Black high schools in the state capital. “His focus was to get in and encourage the NAACP chapters across the state of Mississippi to groom the next generation of leaders,” Daphne Chamberlain, historian and Tougaloo professor, said.
Medgar admired the young activists, particularly those raised in the segregated South, who were willing to keep pushing even though they knew the risks of defying the calcified norms that kept white supremacy in place. He shared their belief that white supremacy could ultimately be defeated only through direct action. This surprised some of the young activists. “The students thought that he thought they were crazy,” Reverend King said. “They thought he would echo the opinion of Roy Wilkins and people who for fifty years had said the last thing you should do is stir up the white police.”
Far from it. Medgar used his Oldsmobile to ferry Tougaloo students to and from the mass meetings at the Masonic Temple, so they didn’t have to ride in the back of Jackson’s segregated buses.
Fred Douglas Moore Clark Sr. was a teenaged activist at the time, and president of a jazz club at all-Black Lanier High School. “I was always glad to be in [Medgar’s] presence because he was the biggest name out there during those times,” said Clark. “Every chance that I got, I would come to the meetings at Tougaloo’s campus. The word would get around to me, where these meetings were and what time. Usually, James Meredith and Medgar Evers would be there, and I often got a ride [home] with him from Tougaloo campus.”
Sometimes when Medgar gave a talk on the campus, Clark went there but didn’t go inside. “I’d wait around his car,” he said. “I always kept an eye on his car. So when he came out, I’d get a ride [home] with him.” Clark admitted that Medgar’s notoriety, particularly among the police, made him fearful at times, riding with Medgar. “Of course, I was always scared when I was around him. At the time they told us that we had white spies with us, and we had ‘real niggers.’ We had black people that would go back and tell the white man everything we had done.” The Sovereignty Commission, he said, “had people at all these meetings.”
Medgar, he said, had an “iron will. He had no fear. He was too bold. So right away, I saw that I got to be careful around this guy, in order to survive as a young man who was, in his words, ‘skinny and black.’
“The last time I rode with [Medgar], I asked him, was he scared—cause I was: no street lights, pitch-black, and we were traveling from a hot campus meeting. He started talking to me about his spirituality, about God and his faith. Of course, I was halfway listening—looking at the window for the attacks.”
Over time, Clark stopped taking those rides. “Every time I saw him, I wanted to be with him, but I was trying to survive, and I wanted to take forward what I was learning and be an activist. I didn’t have to be with him all the time to pick up on what he’s doing, or what he has done from other people.”
The risks of “riding with Medgar,” literally and figuratively ranged from the threat of violence to threats of losing what little normal high school life was available to young Black Mississippians.
For Amos Brown, now a senior at Jim Hill High School in Jackson, being the president of the NAACP’s West Jackson Youth Council meant being stripped of his chance to be valedictorian, barred from senior prom, and threatened with expulsion, all because he used his NAACP platform to expose the truth about Mississippi’s separate and deeply unequal schools. Chamberlain said, “He voiced concerns about the lack of resources, the dilapidated buildings, the secondhand textbooks they were receiving, [and] even the school food.” When he traveled to the 1958 national NAACP conference in Cleveland, he told the Plain Dealer “exactly what was going on here in the state of Mississippi,” she said.
That made Brown a target of the Sovereignty Commission as well, which labeled him a “full-fledged agitator. . . . I was just a kid,” Brown said. “But this kid tagged along with Medgar Evers.” According to Chamberlain, when the school threatened Brown with expulsion, “Medgar Evers stepped in and said that . . . if you do not allow this young man to be vocal about some of the issues that are impacting African American students in the city of Jackson, we will attempt to integrate the all-white high school”38 in Jackson.
The Woolworth’s sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 increased the desire of college and high school students across the South to go beyond court cases and petitions and take direct action against the recalcitrant segregation. With members of the Mississippi collegiate and youth NAACP chapters, Medgar crisscrossed the state tirelessly to set up similar protests. The desire for freedom spanned age. Eight months before the first lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, Dr. Gilbert Mason Sr., a founding member of the NAACP chapter in Biloxi, Mississippi, had begun leading wade-ins to desegregate Gulf Port beaches. He later led the lawsuit against the Biloxi Municipal School district to desegregate its public schools.
Medgar’s December 1960 field report highlighted the Montgomery-style consumer boycott he’d launched of Jackson’s white merchants during the Easter season, when Black women flocked to downtown shops for new dresses and hats. The campaign urged Black Mississippians to wear what they already had instead of buying from segregated stores that failed to treat them with respect. He wrote, “More than 700 students combined and participated in a door-to-door canvas urging Negro citizens to cooperate in this ‘Sacrifice for Human Dignity.’ . . . Stores that do not recognize Negroes as Miss, Mrs. or Mr. do not deserve to have Negroes trade with them. Stores that do not employ Negroes are likewise not worthy of our patronage. We can, by this method, use the same items and clothes that we already have, as a step toward our contributions to Human Dignity, and create for the Negro a new respect and appreciation.” 39
The boycott was brief and ultimately faltered, in no small part because middle-class Black Jacksonians were wary of provoking white business leaders and the violent white supremacist organizations who backed them. Medgar was adamant that Mississippi needed to adopt the ferocity of what Dr. King was doing across the South, as well as the energy of youth-focused organizations like SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and the impatient young NAACP activists filling the Masonic Temple, his Lynch Street offices, and increasingly his home for training and planning meetings.
Medgar continued to catalog the latest outrages against individuals trying to register to vote, including another constitutional amendment approved by white voters, following a recommendation by the ACCM and Democratic governor Ross Barnett, which added the requirement that voters demonstrate “good moral character,” to the registrar’s satisfaction. This was directed squarely at the NAACP because segregationists regarded membership in the organization as a sign of moral decay. Another amendment eliminated the state’s requirement that it provide free public schools, allowing Mississippi the option of having no public schools at all if it had to have even a single integrated one. A third amendment eliminated the requirement that jurors be registered voters, which was a way of getting around a Fifth Circuit Court decision finding that Black Mississippians were still being systematically excluded from juries.40
Medgar was working at a frenetic pace. His December 20, 1960, NAACP branch newsletter documented 2,871 pieces of outgoing mail, 40 branches visited, 2 new branches opened including a college NAACP chapter, and 16,295 fresh miles on his Oldsmobile,41 sometimes speeding through the Delta at 100 miles per hour to elude Klansmen and anyone else who might try to run him off the road. A year later, he and the Jackson NAACP launched a Christmas boycott of Jackson merchants—his second try at peeling Black shoppers away from the retailers who disrespected them.
To keep his NAACP organizations off the radar of Citizens’ Council spies and out of conflict with the direct-action-averse national NAACP, Medgar gave them varying names. In Jackson, he opened a North Jackson Youth Council and an NAACP Youth Council. Frank Figgers, who was born in segregated Jackson in 1950, graduated from Tougaloo and joined the NAACP as a teen, recalled, “Some days it would be the NAACP’s Youth and College Division. Other days, it would be the North Jackson Youth Council or the North Jackson Community Council. That allowed him to do much more than a less creative person could have done.”
Laura Terrell (later Figgers, when the two married) was a member of the North Jackson Youth Council. “She also was in the NAACP Youth Council,” Figgers said. “On picket days when they were going to support the boycotts with pickets and passing out leaflets . . . the North Jackson Youth Council would do that work, because the NAACP may not want to get bogged down in using finances to get people out of jail. Medgar Evers was so creative and so strategic in his leadership . . . he made preparations for that. When people would go to jail or when they would have a picketing incident, he would already have raised money in the local community, among poor, low-wealth people for whatever eventuality would come up to get people out of jail, to help with bonds, to pay lawyers and that sort of thing.” 42
By the end of 1960, Bob Moses, the brainy, bespectacled New York math teacher and SNCC leader, was already in the state, working alongside Amzie Moore in Cleveland, Mississippi. Ella Josephine Baker, the human rights activist and organizer, had chosen Moses to be her man in Mississippi. Baker had left the national NAACP over differences in strategy—differences Medgar was painfully familiar with—and over the chauvinism she faced in the movement. She had returned to her alma mater, Shaw University, and served as counselor to the students who founded SNCC. “As they began to determine where to launch their program in what Bob Moses used to call the theater of the Movement,” said Derrick Johnson, who eventually led the Mississippi and the national NAACP, “they looked at Albany, Georgia . . . they looked at a location in Arkansas, but she realized that Mississippi perhaps was the most fertile opportunity to launch a direct action program.” 43 Baker assigned Moses to launch the SNCC operation in the state.
The Freedom Rides were set to arrive in Jackson the following March. Organized by CORE, they were designed to test a pair of Supreme Court rulings, made in 1946 and 1960, that ruled segregation in interstate transportation and public facilities such as bus terminals and restaurants that supported interstate travel illegal,44 by sending interracial groups of riders from Washington, D.C., south to New Orleans.
By the time SNCC moved into the state in earnest in 1961, four major civil rights groups—SNCC, CORE, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the NAACP—were operating in Mississippi, sometimes with competing priorities. Medgar, despite his frustration with the influx of outside groups, decided to make the best of it. On behalf of the Mississippi NAACP, he signed onto a compact whose mission was to coordinate the work of the various groups and to distribute funds from a national Voter Education Project. The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) focused its activities on the rural Delta towns that had proven to be the hardest to crack when it came to voter registration, due to the ongoing state of Klan-led terror.
The network Medgar, Amzie Moore, and Aaron Henry (who was named COFO’s president) had created provided crucial infrastructure and support to the other COFO leaders—Bob Moses and CORE’s David Dennis—and to the young activists who were pouring into the state, hoping to coax terrified sharecroppers into putting their names on the rolls and force businesses and public facilities to accept integration as legal and constitutional.
Medgar was defying the New York leadership by pushing financial resources toward bail funds for the college students who were mounting protests, sit-ins, and marches in Jackson, Greenwood, and around the state, while trying to keep his voter registration numbers up enough to satisfy Wilkins and the home office. His priority was the Black Mississippi collegians and students from segregated high schools who were taking risks for their own freedom in the state where they would still be when the national activists went home. After all, many of the young activists gravitating to SNCC and the Freedom Rides had been NAACP Youth Council members first. He and they were determined to engage in direct action against segregation whether New York approved or not.
They most certainly did not approve.
Medgar’s defiance was risky because he couldn’t afford to lose his NAACP job—not with Myrlie and three little children to support. Myrlie had given up her job as Medgar’s secretary when Van was born, and in addition to their mortgage, they now had two car notes to pay. The national office was constantly critical of Medgar’s voter registration and membership numbers, and of the frequency and dollar amounts of his reimbursement requests for the mileage he was putting on his car and the expenses for gas as he traversed the state supporting the very militancy the national NAACP wanted shut down. Myrlie’s concerns were more basic: she was concerned about her husband’s safety, and that he didn’t lose his mind.
To assuage New York and to prove that his strategies were working, Medgar needed a significant increase in Black voters on the books in America’s most tenacious apartheid state, something he knew was unlikely, regardless of the determination of activists like Moses, or a major victory in court against the state of Mississippi.
A February 1961 phone call to the Lynch Street office provided the opportunity Medgar needed. James Meredith, a Black Air Force veteran and NAACP man who had seen service overseas, had applied to Ole Miss and been rejected via telegram a month later, after receiving no initial reply. He wanted the NAACP’s help in filing a lawsuit to attempt to gain entry. For Medgar, it was as if the fates had called. Eight years after his own application to the University of Mississippi had been rejected, and with Clyde Kennard still wasting away at Parchman as punishment for seeking admission to a different “white” college, the opportunity to strike a historic blow against segregation in Mississippi was presenting itself again.