Freedom is never granted; it is won.
—A. PHILIP RANDOLPH
The first victory for James Meredith in his fight for admission to the University of Mississippi came on June 25, 1962, when his New York NAACP attorneys, Constance Baker Motley and Jack Greenberg, along with his local attorney, R. Jess Brown of Vicksburg, won a two-to-one Fifth Circuit Court decision ordering the university to admit him. The Mississippi Free Press splashed the euphoric headline across its front page: “Ole Miss Will Integrate in July,” announcing that Meredith would become the first Negro admitted to a white university in the state’s history.
The judges had broken out laughing during the trial when the state’s attorney declared that there is no segregation statute in Mississippi. In response, they said if that were so, “they would have to take judicial notice that segregation was nevertheless strictly practiced” in the state. The decision came down on Meredith’s twenty-ninth birthday, but he said that day: “Now comes the real test.” 1
The state’s appeals went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and dragged through September, ending any chance of Meredith enrolling that summer. Meredith saw the case as a mission from God, who often worked, when it came to Black Americans, in mysterious ways.
Medgar spent time with the Meredith’s family, including his parents; his wife, Mary June; his young son; and his sister Hazel throughout the trials and appeals. He attended court hearings, and he and James traded news and advice as the case dragged on for more than a year. He became a frequent presence at the Meredith parents’ house, said James’s sister Hazel Meredith Hall, who at the time had just graduated from Mississippi Valley State College.
Medgar was concerned about Meredith’s security and wanted an armed guard posted round-the-clock at Meredith’s parents’ home where he and his wife were staying. But Meredith wouldn’t agree to it. He had a penchant for self-help that Medgar could certainly relate to. “During the worst of the Meredith mess, Medgar and Myrlie were barricaded in at home, couches piled up in front of their windows,” Charles said, adding: “Medgar was nonviolent, but he had six guns in the kitchen and living room. He needed them.” 2
John Salter recalled going to the Evers home with his wife to check on Myrlie while Medgar was supposed to be in New Orleans, where the Fifth Circuit was deliberating Meredith’s admissions case. They pulled into the driveway and knocked on the side door under the carpark. Medgar’s dog was barking in the backyard and there was no answer. When Salter knocked again, the door swung open just a crack. “I could see a gun,” he said. “I called my name and Medgar opened the door, instantly apologetic. He had come home to Jackson for the weekend. Inside the home, furniture was piled in front of all the windows. At least a half-dozen firearms were in the living room and kitchen.”3
The couples sat around the dining table next to the kitchen visiting while the Evers children slept. Salter was struck by how calm Medgar and Myrlie were. He thought this was unusual, since other than Meredith, no one was a bigger target on the Mississippi Klan’s hit list than Medgar Evers.4
Not long afterward, Charles came from Chicago to visit and to encourage his brother to take a break. But Medgar barely paused his work schedule to spend time with his brother. Myrlie admonished him that Charles didn’t come around often enough to be ignored. Medgar reluctantly took the following day off.5 As they spent time together, fishing at Medgar’s favorite spot, Charles told his brother he was being foolish by working himself to death. Medgar shrugged it off. “It’s what I want to do,” he said. “I never thought I’d make a fortune at it.” 6
Before Charles headed back to Chicago, he handed Myrlie $50 as a gift and told the couple to use it to have some fun. “I want you to go someplace for a weekend and enjoy yourselves. Don’t spend it on groceries or to pay bills.”7
The next weekend Medgar and Myrlie drove to New Orleans with another couple, the Tates. “The first thing Medgar did when we walked into the motel room was pick up the telephone and call the local NAACP office,” Myrlie said. “Fortunately, no one answered.”8 The moment they got home from their brief vacation, Medgar dove back into work.
On September 10, 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Meredith’s favor, ordering his admission to Ole Miss, yet Governor Barnett still refused to stand down. He named himself as the university registrar and twice physically blocked Meredith from entering the registration center, prompting fresh circuit court cases and federal fines that cost thousands of dollars per day. By September 28 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had found Governor Barnett and his lieutenant governor, Paul Johnson, in contempt and ordered them to pay $10,000 and $5,000 per day until they complied with the court’s orders to admit Meredith.
Instead, a defiant Barnett attended a Sunday afternoon Ole Miss football game on September 29 at Veterans Memorial Stadium and used the occasion to whip up a frenzy among the forty thousand white attendees, many waving Confederate flags and chanting “Never, Never!” as the governor declared: “I love Mississippi. . . . I love her people . . . her customs. . . . Never shall our emblem go from Colonel ‘Reb’ to ‘Old Black Joe’!” 9
In a tense phone call afterward with President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, as hundreds of armed men converged on the Oxford campus, Barnett pleaded “Southern culture”—an indication that his segregationist bravado was largely a show to appease white Mississippi voters.
“I’ve taken an oath to abide by the laws of this state and our state constitution and the Constitution of the United States,” Barnett said. “How can I violate my oath of office? How can I do that and live with the people of Mississippi? You know, they expecting [sic] me to keep my word. That’s what I’m up against.”10 President Kennedy made it clear that federal troops were being deployed to see the rulings of the courts accomplished and urged Barnett to find a way to comply. Barnett then cut a secret deal. He would make a public pretense of standing firm while being “overwhelmed” by federal marshals.11 Meredith was allowed entry that evening, to be in a dormitory overnight before a final attempt to register on Monday, October 1. The governor’s concession failed to prevent two thousand or more enraged segregationists from swarming the campus. For more than eight hours, they amassed to block Meredith from entering, not realizing that he’d already been taken inside by U.S. Marshals.12 The ruse didn’t prevent a riot.
U.S. Army troops were pelted with bricks and rocks, which were also hurled at passing vehicles, while other cars were set on fire. The old Greek Revival Lyceum, with its red brick façade and towering columns, was bathed in tear gas smoke. White infantrymen faced cries of “Yankee go home!” while Black infantryman “stood gritting their teeth while the hecklers taunted them with shouts of ‘Nigger, why don’t you go back to New Jersey!”13 Shots were fired from the frenzied crowd, killing Paul Guihard, a photographer for Agence France-Presse, and a local jukebox repairman who was part of the insurrection, while more than two hundred marshals and National Guard troops were injured. Police arrested another two hundred. In the end, President Kennedy ordered the Army to deploy twenty thousand National Guard troops from Tennessee, and hundreds more from Memphis.
After spending the night in a lonely dorm, James Meredith walked into the admissions office on October 1, flanked by his U.S. Marshal escorts and Assistant Attorney General John Doar, and registered for classes. What struck him, even after the violence of the previous night, was that the Army units protecting him had been segregated, just as they had been overseas. According to Meredith, the Kennedy Justice Department begged him not to release a statement about that at the time, because, according to journalist Tom Dent, “they felt that once he was in safely, he should be happy and keep his mouth shut.” 14
Meredith suddenly became a Black cultural hero. Letters and telegrams poured in, from Rosa Parks, Langston Hughes, and Josephine Baker.15 But for the two years he attended Ole Miss, he never had an easy day. He needed armed federal guards protecting him daily, and he was shunned by most of his fellow students, making him, as he called it, “the most segregated Negro in America.”16 He was nearly run off Highway 93 in his hometown of Kosciusko once, only to be saved by an elderly Black man who sped to the other side of the attacking vehicle, and aimed a rifle out of his window.17 In December, he was arrested in Kosciusko, and told reporters he was called a “nigger” and “ordered to remove his hat, shoved and jostled and mishandled,” which the local cops, who claimed they didn’t realize who he was, denied. The arrest, for an alleged traffic violation, made national news.18
Meredith’s family felt the fallout, as well. “I could not get a job, I could not keep a job,” James’s sister Hazel said. “I was pulled over by the police. They pulled a gun on me. They shot in our house. They called and said, ‘We’re going to come down and shoot in your house.’ They did all kinds of things to us. But you expected those things to happen.” James’s father and mother saw some of their neighbors keep their distance, fearful of the Klan backlash for associating with them.19 But as they tended to do, the Merediths made do.
Medgar was affected, too. “When Meredith reached Ole Miss,” Charles Evers said, “whites asked, ‘Who cooked up this stunt: Medgar Evers, the Communists, John Kennedy?’”20
Dorothy Gilliam, the first Black female writer for the Washington Post,21 captured the mood among other Black Mississippians after the Meredith triumph, reporting on October 14, 1962, that “the hope is that Meredith signals the coming of the light for all of them. The fear is that the inevitable changes will bring further death, destruction, and repercussion.” Gilliam quoted Medgar as saying Ole Miss was just the beginning. “Petitions are pending to desegregate local schools in Jackson and Leake County. And we’re going to make it known to high school and college students that Meredith’s suit was designed to break down barriers in all institutions of higher learning.” But, he added, “we don’t expect to win without a fight.”
IN AUGUST, MEDGAR TOLD MYRLIE HE WISHED TO ADD DARRELL’S and Reena’s names to a petition headed to the Jackson School Board of Trustees and the school superintendent demanding the integration of Jackson public schools.
“I looked at him and said, ‘Not my children,’” Myrlie said. The tension was thick between them. Darrell was preparing to enter fourth grade, and Reena was going into third. “Medgar was determined to go ahead,” she recalled. “And I was determined to protect my children.” 22
Medgar dug in his heels. He couldn’t ask other parents to take risks he wasn’t willing to take himself, with his own children. Myrlie saw little choice but to concede. As Medgar’s wife, and thus a core part of the movement, she knew that she had little choice but to sign on to the petition, though she did so reluctantly.
Medgar gently explained to Darrell and Reena why they needed to integrate the schools; why it was so important. It was the same way he would explain why they couldn’t go to the local swimming pool or enter a movie theater or a restaurant through the front door, or walk freely into the zoo like any child would, or use whichever water fountain they wanted to. Medgar fought for the space for his kids to be kids, but he didn’t shield them from the truth of what it meant to be Black in Mississippi. He would explain to them how Africans were brought to America as slaves and that some died on the way. He would explain the horrors of slavery: the families who were separated and the horrors of the slave markets. And he would explain lies white men told themselves about Black inferiority and their own superiority. And he emphasized that these were lies. He wanted his children to fully understand that racism and discrimination were wrong and that they had as much right to grow up to achieve their dreams, to vote, and to live and be what they wanted to as any white child in Mississippi. But they needed to know that evil existed, and he told them it did.23
Medgar always made it clear to his children that they were inherently equal—and that he was working hard to make sure they were treated that way. Myrlie maintained her fears and occasional doubts about the path Medgar had them on, but she adored her husband and still believed he was brilliant and fascinating as much as she had when she was a seventeen-year-old college girl. He was a gentle and patient father. And his children so admired him.
Darrell later recalled the times he spent with his father as full of “quality time and quality love.” Medgar taught his eldest son how to protect himself, how to fight if he had to, and how to protect his younger siblings. He imparted to Darrell the same lessons “Crazy Jim” had taught him: be strong, don’t let anyone put you down, and don’t let anyone take away your rights.24
Putting their children’s names on that petition shook the delicate balance the Everses had achieved on Guynes Street and raised the wariness of even their activist neighbors. Still, Medgar remained adamant. “He had a heart of steel, I’ll put it like that,” Myrlie said. “He tried to be persuasive. . . . We held meetings at our home until people were afraid to visit.”
Myrlie understood her neighbors’ fears. The people who had moved to Guynes Street didn’t do so as activists. They didn’t sign up to have their homes firebombed or shot into. They didn’t want to lose their jobs or their mortgages to Citizens’ Council retribution on behalf of Medgar’s cause. Some of them began to keep their distance from Medgar and even from Myrlie. The Everses lost some friends, though her closest friends on the block hung in, and she continued to play at normalcy at the block’s garden club. Some neighbors, she said, began to speak to them only “in the dark of night, and by phone,” while others “waved behind curtains as we walked or drove by.”
Medgar was undeterred and relentless, pressing their Guynes Street neighbors to support the Jackson schools desegregation efforts as important for all of their children. This was a version of the gentle but firm persuasion he employed in the Delta, where the punishment for registering to vote or taking an NAACP membership could easily be lynching. Medgar sometimes expressed an emotion that ran somewhere between frustration and disgust that so many Jackson teachers, who enjoyed a more comfortable life than that of the terrified sharecroppers in rural Mississippi, seemed to show less courage in many cases than their own collegiate or high school children. Those frustrations occasionally spilled into his monthly reports, but even more often in his conversations with Myrlie. It was why he placed so much emphasis and hope in direct youth action. That was where the courage was.
“A few close friends said, ‘Please stop. Don’t pursue this anymore,’” Myrlie said. “Medgar’s answer was, ‘I’m in this until they—meaning white authorities—stop me.’ That broke my heart, because I knew that he meant every word he was saying, and he intended to put the children that I had given birth to . . . in danger. I learned that Medgar Evers would do as his heart, his soul, his mind persuaded him to do.” And come what may, “our children, Darrell and Reena, were going to be [among] those first students integrating those schools.”
It was yet another difficult stretch for the Everses’ marriage. Myrlie was at loggerheads with herself. She couldn’t bear to leave the man she loved and didn’t have the heart to take his children from him. But staying meant accepting that the danger she and he lived with every day would now be shared by a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old. Still, Myrlie could do little but give way. “Needless to say, love won,” she said. “I loved my husband. I respected him terribly.”
The petition, which cited the Brown decision, was submitted on August 17, 1962, and it contained the names of nine parents and fifteen children, demanding that they “and other similarly situated Negro children, be admitted to the so-called ‘white school’ nearest their residence or within their proper district.”25 Medgar told the Mississippi Free Press, “This is not just a demonstration. We are deeply concerned about having our children receive a good education. We will stay with this until they do.”26 The signers’ names would be in the local newspapers, meaning they could be fired from their jobs in the white community.
The risks, though, brought the signers together. There was a strength and community that grew out of the shared plunge into the deep water of challenging “the Mississippi way.” The families would gather at one of their homes, quite often Medgar and Myrlie’s, to fuss or to laugh, to listen to music together and share a meal, and just to convene as fellow travelers heading into what they hoped would be a new era in Mississippi and America.
THE MEREDITHS ALSO CONTINUED TO LIVE UNDER CONSTANT threat. Medgar and Aaron Henry were among the few Black men who regularly dared to drive to Oxford to look in on Meredith, who eventually moved out of the dorms where he faced constant harassment, to an apartment with his wife and son. One time after visiting Meredith, Medgar’s Oldsmobile broke down outside Ruleville, and he and Henry were forced to leave the vehicle overnight with a white mechanic who refused all of Medgar’s attempts at friendly charm. When they picked up the car the next morning, after staying overnight with some NAACP members, they were certain the mechanic had rigged the car to explode. Myrlie marveled at her husband’s fearlessness. He laughed when he told her, but she failed to see the humor in it.27
Myrlie also began to doubt how concerned the national office was about Medgar’s safety. “The only times the national office wanted Medgar to be careful,” she wrote, “were times when a member of the New York staff was with him. They came in, did their work, and got out, sometimes within a few hours. I wondered, resentfully, if they really cared about Medgar’s life as much as they obviously cared about his work.”28
Medgar, Salter, and Tougaloo student activists wanted to build on the momentum from the Meredith victory and opted to repeat their 1961 boycott29 of the State Fair for Colored People, which took place each October for two days following the official Mississippi State Fair. As Ed King described it: for the first five days of the fair, white farmers advertised and showed off their “white chickens,” while their children enjoyed the rides, food, and amenities at the segregated Jackson fairgrounds. Then for the final two days, Black patrons were admitted, and Black farmers were allowed to show off their “Black chickens”; the amenities were sparse, having been largely dismantled. Medgar saw an opportunity. Unlike filing a desegregation petition, marching in a protest, or even signing up for an NAACP membership, boycotting was something anyone could do, risk free. Not every Black Mississippian was willing to risk their lives or economic well-being by walking into a courthouse to try to register to vote, but if they simply refused to buy a new dress or a new pair of shoes from the segregated shops in downtown Jackson, they would be taking a small but meaningful “psychological step towards becoming freedom fighters.”
The fair boycott was a success. Just 3 percent of Black Jacksonians attended the fair,30 matching the participation rates of the prior year’s action. A fresh boycott of downtown Jackson businesses followed, with Tougaloo College NAACP and North Jackson Youth Council members, alongside SNCC and CORE activists, leafletting Black neighborhoods and calling on Black citizens not to do their Christmas shopping in downtown stores. This time, more Black Jacksonians got on board. The flyers carried the Jackson Movement label and proved that COFO could bring together the various civil rights organizations. The activists who picketed outside of Jackson businesses, including John Salter, his wife, Eldri Johanson, and other Tougaloo faculty members and students, were arrested for “obstructing the sidewalks” and released from the Jackson jail on $500 bond, setting off the now-familiar dance between city authorities and the NAACP attorneys.
Medgar embarked on a speaking and media tour, and he was interviewed about the Meredith case and the ongoing push for desegregation in Mississippi. On November 10, just as the Kennedy administration was putting a quarantine on Cuba, Medgar told the Los Angeles Times, “It is just as important to put a quarantine on Alabama and Mississippi and make it possible for Negroes to be able to register and vote.”31
During the tour, he wrote letters to Myrlie and the children on hotel stationary. On November 27, 1962, he began:
My darling wife and children, I love you dearly and miss you terribly! I am now aboard TWA’S #54 For Idlewild Airport N.Y. City and the time is 12:50 PM Eastern Standard time or 11:50 your time. It is a beautiful day with a slight overcast and bright sun coming through my cabin window. Honey, tell the children daddy will be returning soon and that when Xmas comes, if it is in the Lord’s will, we are all going to enjoy Santa Claus and a good Xmas. You be sweet and take care of yourself. Be assured this trip can’t end too soon. Love, Medgar.32
New Year’s Day 1963 was the start of James Baldwin’s Southern lecture tour for CORE. His novels Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and Another Country had made him a star to rival Richard Wright. Like most prominent Blacks who set foot in Jackson, Baldwin, who first met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957, stopped by Guynes Street, where he visited the Evers house and that of fellow writer Margaret Walker Alexander.
Baldwin didn’t just chat with Medgar and Myrlie at home. He tagged along in the Oldsmobile and headed into the Delta with Medgar, accompanying him as he investigated the murder of a Black man, allegedly at the hands of a shopkeeper. He learned firsthand what it was like to speed down back roads at one hundred miles per hour to avoid the Klan, and to look into the eyes of terrified sharecroppers who had faced disrespect and threats, or who had lost a loved one to the common racial violence of white Mississippians’ cherished “way of life.”
“Many people talked to Medgar that night, in dark cabins, with their lights out, in whispers,” Baldwin wrote in the foreword to his 1964 play Blues for Mister Charlie. “And we had been followed for many miles out of Jackson, Mississippi, not by a lunatic with a gun, but by state troopers. I will never forget that night.”33 Medgar drove Baldwin to the airport the following day, and they promised to see one another again.
Those who rode with Medgar consistently noted how disciplined and unflappable he was even while being followed by one or more patrol cars that waited for him to exceed the speed limit or some other infraction so they could pull him over. He got so used to the tap on his phone he sometimes ended calls by announcing into the receiver: “And I hope the white folks are listening!”34 That January, Medgar also investigated the case of Sylvester Maxwell, a Black man whose mutilated body was found by his brother-in-law less than five hundred yards from the home of a white family in Madison County. “While the body bore markings of that of a person having been lynched (including castration),” Medgar wrote in his report, “a Negro is being held in connection with the killing. We are in serious doubt that this act was committed by the Negro in question.”35
MEDGAR WAS PARTICULARLY HAUNTED BY THE CASE OF CLYDE Kennard, who remained imprisoned on trumped-up charges of theft to punish him for attempting to register at all-white Mississippi Southern College. At Parchman, Kennard was forced to do daily hard labor on the prison planation even while he was dying from colon cancer. The Mississippi Free Press reported on January 26, 1963, that he was made to work “although he is so weak that he has collapsed several times during the 2 or 3 mile walk to work.”36 Kennard’s plight stung Medgar even more after Meredith successfully enrolled at Ole Miss. Myrlie later recalled an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet a year after Kennard’s conviction.
After Medgar and Aaron Henry gave out awards, Medgar spoke about a recent conversation with Kennard’s mother. He began his speech but soon had to stop, as he was overcome by emotion. Myrlie recalled praying quietly herself because she knew Medgar didn’t approve of public displays of emotion, let alone tears. “Men don’t cry,” he often told Darrell. He expected public strength in others, but even more so of himself.
Myrlie said Medgar regained control, only to stop again. “It happened three more times. Finally, tears streamed down his face as he spoke, and he just gave way. He stood there in front of hundreds of people and cried as though his heart would break. Hundreds of us cried with him.”37
For Medgar, James Meredith was the dream and Clyde Kennard was the nightmare. Meredith faced constant harassment, but he was a free man and defiantly so. Kennard had been no less brave at war or valorous in fighting for his civil rights at home—yet he was barely living, and on borrowed time. Medgar had kept Kennard’s name alive, in interviews and lectures, hoping to shame the State of Mississippi into ending his unjust incarceration. The headline of a November 1962 essay in The New Republic paired the two men: “James Meredith Goes to College—Another Negro Went to Prison.”38
When Kennard’s mother told Medgar and Attorney Brown that the thirty-six-year-old former Army paratrooper needed help from fellow inmates to dress himself, they saw an opening. Brown filed an emergency petition for Kennard to be transferred for treatment at the University Medical Center in Jackson, pointing to the medical neglect during his two-plus years of confinement—with some five years remaining in his sentence.39 Medgar and Brown went to see Kennard on January 23 and vowed to do everything they could to get him released.
That decision lay with Governor Barnett, who believed that Black life was valuable only as menial labor. Medgar and Brown pressed their case with the governor, but also with local Black newspapers and national media, such as Ebony and Jet, which lamented on its pages that Kennard had become a forgotten man, even as Meredith had emerged as a hero. This caught the attention of Dick Gregory, a St. Louis–born Army draftee who honed his skills doing stand-up comedy during the war, winning awards at Army talent shows and working in Black nightclubs when he came home. By the 1960s he was a crossover star even while he laid bare the mistreatment of African Americans, selling out concert halls of white audiences and performing at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club.
Gregory had emerged as a civil rights activist, and he was periodically a dinner guest at the Evers home. And Medgar, who treasured the small kitchen blender in which he whipped up homemade fruit shakes and talked constantly about healthy eating and fresh food, had an influence on Gregory, down to his diet. Reena recalled being six, seven, and eight years old and not knowing who these famous adults were, as her parents closed the pocket door between the living room and kitchen while they had their meetings. Even without knowing who was being entertained on the other side of that door, she and Darrell and Van got to eat shrimp creole, scalloped potatoes, and other treats they didn’t normally have for dinner, and if they stuck to Mama’s side in the kitchen, they could be her tasters as the delectable smells filled the house.
When Gregory heard the news of Kennard’s condition, he contacted Medgar about new treatments available in Chicago. Under public pressure, Barnett finally relented, and Kennard was transferred to the colored wing of Jackson’s University Medical Center, and then granted executive clemency on January 28.40 By then, Kennard had been given just a one-in-five chance of surviving for another five years.41
News reports of the governor’s order illustrated the difference between the white and Black press in America. The Mississippi Free Press reported that Kennard planned to return to his chicken farm to care for the land and his mother, and that he still hoped “to earn a degree in constitutional law and work for the rights of Negroes in Mississippi.” 42 White newspapers referred to Kennard as the “Negro convict . . . apparently dying of cancer” and praised Barnett, about whom Kennard supposedly said: “Whatever happens in the future I will always regard it as a tremendous favor.” 43 The white Southern press typically presented Black life as a constant exercise in gratitude at the undeserved blessings of white beneficence.
Even though Kennard was now a free man and soon being flown at Gregory’s expense to Chicago for treatment, he was deeply in debt. His sentence included a $10,000 fine, and he still owed more than $4,800 on the FHA mortgage on his farm. Medgar set up a Clyde Kennard Fund to assist Kennard’s sixty-nine-year-old mother and his sister.44
Medgar went to the hospital on the morning of Kennard’s release with Thomas Covington “Tom” Dent, a New Orleans–born Morehouse graduate, writer, and poet who at the time was working as a press assistant for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York. Dent later wrote, “The segregatory devices had apparently been designed by a psychotic with a fascination for labyrinthine geometries.” As Medgar stood inside the medical center in the endlessly long “colored” line to fill a prescription for Kennard, Dent and Kennard sat in Medgar’s Oldsmobile, waiting and talking about the newly freed man’s experience. Kennard, who by then weighed little more than ninety pounds, described Parchman as a “modernized slave-labor camp”—where white prisoners got the better accommodations and the easier work details, while Black prisoners were fed the leftovers from the white prisoners’ meals and worked sunup to sundown on the penitentiary’s multiple farms. Kennard also didn’t praise Barnett for any “favor,” as the white papers claimed. Instead, he told Dent, “The way Mississippi is going now, it’s going to fall very hard.” Kennard had been stripped of his freedom, his health, and his right to an education, but not of his militancy. He told Dent: “Let’s sue the prisons, too.” 45
Two days after the Kennard clemency announcement, Medgar and Meredith held a press conference at the Masonic Temple. The expectation was that Meredith would concede his place at Ole Miss due to the endless taunts, threats, and misery. The Temple was jammed with thousands of Black supporters, including James Baldwin, and the scene that played out was purely cinematic.
The two men sat at a table facing the claque of about fifty mainly white reporters and around one hundred and fifty Black spectators. The hall fell silent as Meredith began reading his statement slowly and deliberately. “After listening to all arguments, evaluations and positions, and weighing all this against my personal possibilities and circumstances,” he read, pausing for dramatic effect, “I have concluded that ‘the ‘Negro’ will not return . . .” 46
At that moment, according to Dent, a handful of white newsmen rushed out of the room to phone in the good news to their newsrooms: Ole Miss would be rid of its bombastic Black interloper. But Meredith had only begun what would be his greatest performance. He drew an extended pause, waiting for the white reporters to disappear through the doors. Only then did he deliver his dramatic crescendo: “but I, J. H. Meredith, will register for the second semester at the University of Mississippi.” 47 The room, now almost exclusively Black, exploded in cheers and adulation. Baldwin and Dent exchanged a glance filled with the innate, mutual knowing that characterizes Black existence in America. Meredith had exposed the lie of the “contented Negro” with a dramatic flourish and made fools of the racist Mississippi press. Meredith and Medgar continued the press conference, but for all intents and purposes it was over. “That was it,” Dent wrote. “We were all limp.” 48
The Mississippi Free Press blared two big headlines: “Meredith Will Return to Ole Miss” and “Kennard is Free.”49 These triumphs led Black Mississippians to push hard against the boundaries of segregation. A second Black man, Dewey Greene, went to court seeking to follow Meredith in integrating Ole Miss. Parents in Clarksdale filed a petition seeking to integrate the schools there, and a boycott was launched against segregated businesses downtown, and Black would-be voter registrants in Rankin County were beaten, prompting a federal investigation. And that was just in February.50
ON MARCH 4, 1963, MEDGAR AND MYRLIE EVERS, AND FIVE OTHER families officially filed suit in federal court demanding the desegregation of Jackson schools. “We don’t care for all the flamboyancy,” Medgar said in a press statement, days before the filing. “But we want equal school opportunities for our children.”51 To avoid and prevent desegregation, Mississippi officials had built new Negro schools they claimed were equal, in the hope that Black leaders would voluntarily agree to maintain the status quo. But the facilities were still inadequate. Science classrooms had Bunsen burners not even connected to gas pipes, and no beakers or microscopes. The textbooks were out-of-date, often used, and without a word about Black contributions to the country. Black parents often had to buy playground equipment. Mississippi was clear it had no intention of educating Black children, who were still seen as worthy of nothing more than being farmhands a few months a year or household domestics for white families.
The fight for her children’s education brought out a fire in Myrlie she scarcely knew was there. She had told a friend her name had to be on the Jackson desegregation petition because she was Medgar’s wife. (He replied, so they both could hear, that his name was on the petition because he wanted it to be.)52 Now she was to be a full partner in seeing the petition succeed. “I’m most thankful for the love that Medgar and I had and being able to finally reconcile,” she said. “And I would stand by his side all the way. All the way to the end, I was not afraid [anymore], beyond the fear that I already had: that my husband . . . who was leading the cause, who was doing all of the organizing . . . that his outcome would not be a good one.”
Myrlie recalled the continuing harassment of the phone calls and said that “threatening” cars and trucks “drove around in our neighborhoods.” White Mississippians were sending a clear message: “No desegregation, segregation stands.” The intimidation “went on and on and on and on,” she said. “People in my community were . . . hesitant to be upfront to speak out, and wanted to see the process go on without any conflict. That was not to be, and it took a few strong people, particularly in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, to say, ‘No. We pay taxes. Our children will go to those schools too, whatever it takes.’”
Meredith said that after he desegregated Ole Miss, the Klan created a list with thirteen names on it. “Number one was James Meredith,” he said. “I don’t know what number Medgar was, but he was on it [too]. Everybody likes to pretend like Clyde Kennard was a fluke. I mean, they eliminated him by putting him in prison. They eliminated the other fellow from Alcorn”—Clennon King, an eccentric man who tried to integrate the graduate school at Ole Miss in 1958 but who also allegedly cooperated with the Sovereignty Commission—“by taking him to the crazy house. Mississippi got rid of potential threats to their way of life, and everybody knows that . . . I’m sure that Medgar knew that. He not only lived in Jackson, he worked in the Mississippi Delta. . . . So, there wasn’t nothing about Mississippi that I think Medgar Evers didn’t know.”
Rev. Ed King said his name was on the Klan’s death list, too, which also included Tougaloo student activists. He said the Klan distributed a “Wanted” poster at one point. Tougaloo student activist “Anne Moody’s name was on that poster,” King said. Moody grew up with her family of sharecroppers on a plantation in Canton, Mississippi. When she was fourteen years old and working as a maid in the home of “the meanest white lady in town,” she overheard this Mrs. Burke and her friends refer to Emmett Till not as a child, but as a Northern Negro who didn’t know his place and got what he deserved. This drew Moody to the movement, and she made the Klan’s list for setting up a “freedom house” in rural Canton and helping her fellow activists in SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP to register Black Mississippians to vote.53
Despite the fear and hardships, Myrlie recalled the sense of togetherness and courage her neighbors got from acting:
For those who gathered, who supported each other, who went to churches, who went to homes and had private prayer meetings to support each other, it was a blessing . . . and a joy, because it meant that in that particular community, whether it was in Jackson, Mississippi or some other place, [Black Mississippians] had finally come together with a strength that said, this is something that must be done, and we will pay the price. . . .
When you have people or an individual who feels that way, and those who are opponents . . . realize how strong that feeling is, [including] the willingness to lose your job, to lose your home, to possibly lose your life, that was one of the strongest statements that could be made. And it helped to bring other people on. And it certainly helped to bring a younger generation into that part of it, even though they could not do everything that they wanted to do. . . .
I was definitely afraid for Medgar, afraid for our children, afraid for my community, but [there] was something about us gathering together in each other’s homes over corn cakes and tea and prayer, that [took us] forward. And I am so thankful that I was a part of that. . . . We had to be able to break down those barriers of segregation and open up the schools for all of our children.
MEDGAR THREW HIMSELF INTO THE ESCALATING FLURRY OF ACTIVITY. On May 12, he and the Jackson NAACP sent letters to Mayor Thompson and local white business organizations, demanding that they end segregation in the city or face demonstrations. The move was designed to trigger federal support for civil rights legislation that could address racial discrimination across the South.
Ed King said the goal was “to get the white [power] structure to set up a biracial committee, to look at changes in Jackson.” But, he added, Thompson “said, ‘there are no changes needed because our Black people . . . our colored,’ in his word . . . are satisfied and want no change.” According to King, “Medgar had suggested . . . 10 or 12 changes, from opening golf courses to Blacks, to public school desegregation. He never said what should be first. And the white powers realized if they said anything should start, Medgar had a long list of what might be next, and that ultimate freedom for Black people was his goal; and ending Jim Crow and desegregation.”
Thompson, backed by the Jackson Chamber of Commerce, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the White Citizens’ Council,54 refused to back down, and Medgar concluded that demonstrations had to start.
Three days later, on the nine-year anniversary of the Brown v. Board decision, Medgar took the stage at the Masonic Temple. After Clarence Mitchell Jr. addressed how little had changed in Mississippi despite the Supreme Court’s ruling and Meredith’s admittance to Ole Miss, Evers announced a boycott of three products popular in Black households made by companies that had contributed financially to the White Citizens’ Councils: Barq’s soft drinks, Hart’s bread, and McRae’s department store. Myrlie later wrote that “it was a success from the beginning,” and it was quickly “widened to include virtually all the white shops on Capitol Street, the main downtown shopping area.55 Student-led sit-ins, and pickets quickly spread across the city and to the parks, train and bus station waiting rooms, downtown Jackson department stores, and restaurants.56
This was the Montgomery-style mass boycott campaign that Medgar had long dreamed of.
High school students were surging into the movement. The mass meetings at the Masonic Temple and nearby churches were filling to capacity with younger and younger activists. Students from all-Black Lanier, Brinkley, and Holy Ghost high schools were ordered by their principals to cease their protest activity and responded by walking out of class.57 Medgar advised a group of high schoolers to get better organized before marching; after failing to take his advice, they were violently arrested. Once the NAACP bailed them out, the organization offered them training and flew in the national youth field secretary, Willie Ludden, to help give some order to the quickly spreading demonstrations. Myrlie recalled that the young protesters soon “knew how to drop to the ground and protect themselves” 58 from police baton blows.
“The students were more ready than any of us thought,” Ed King said. “And as negotiations with the city broke down, the white moderates turned back to silence. We had gotten a few of them saying that Medgar’s demands were reasonable and trying to put behind-the-scenes pressure on the city.”59 As the protest widened, that backing cooled.
Myrlie later wrote that the first round of student demonstrations “was prepared like a military campaign.” Picket signs were painted and assigned. March lines and assembly points were designated. When the students finally arrived to march to Capitol Street, “there was nothing to be seen but an enormous mass of humanity, flooding the street, spilling over the sidewalks.”60
More than five hundred Black junior high and senior high students marched downtown, according to Ed King, and they were quickly arrested. “Another thousand tried to march at different schools,” he said. Their schools were surrounded by police who blocked them from joining the main demonstration. Students were piled into the filthy beds of garbage trucks and taken to a makeshift prison camp at the city fairgrounds. “Bull Connor in Birmingham took [protesters] on school buses,” King said. “We used garbage trucks [in Jackson]. In theory, they were supposed to have been cleaned, but it was an example that things were worse here even than in Alabama.”
Thompson’s fairgrounds jail was surrounded by a chain-link fence and was so packed and fetid that it came to be nicknamed “Mississippi’s concentration camp.”61 The stockades quickly filled with high school students who were forced to stand for hours in the hot sun, with little food and few provisions. “Food was often thrown on the ground, and they were told, ‘Eat, dogs, eat,’” Salter later wrote. “Police sometimes urinated in the drinking water buckets. Physical brutality was commonplace. Medical assistance was nil.”62 There were few sanitary facilities: no toothbrushes or combs. The students were determined to remain there and refused the bail Medgar was hurriedly raising and frantic parents were scrambling to put together. The city wanted the students to sign pledges not to protest again if they were released, but the students refused. Medgar was caught between parents and their activist children. Finally, New York sent $200,000 in bond money to Jackson.
On the night the students were to be released, victorious in not having signed the pledges, their parents and supporters first waited for them inside the Masonic Temple. But Jackson police required parents to pick up each child individually, making the process as miserable as possible to the very end. When the students finally arrived at the Temple, they were greeted as heroes with cheers and applause by the gathered adults, many of whom were embarrassed by their own reticence compared to their own children’s valor. Myrlie wrote that “one young boy, describing the lack of facilities [in the jail] for brushing his teeth,” ended his time on the Temple stage “by crying out, ‘Look Mom! Cavities for Freedom!’ The audience screamed its approval.”63
Freeing the students didn’t end the crisis. Police fanned out across downtown Jackson, arresting anyone who tried to march or picket, or for any reason they could concoct. Their vans with barking dogs circled Black businesses and stalked Lynch Street, with officers writing down the license plate numbers of anyone who went inside the Masonic Temple. High school students threw rocks at the officers posted downtown, prompting more violent arrests. White citizens organized to pack and deliver box lunches to the police officers.
As the month of May continued, the drumbeat of arrests and police brutality grew daily. State police and Jackson police seemed to merge with gangs of Klansmen and the whole, violent mass converged on Jackson. The growing violence and the repeated arrests only increased the alarm in New York. The youth leaders in Jackson, along with local leaders like Salter and Ed King, wanted to continue the marches and sit-ins, to force the leaders of Jackson to relent on their demands for immediate desegregation. Medgar agreed with them, and young Jacksonians clearly did, too. But the national NAACP objected, as did conservative local clergy. They firmly favored a less confrontational course that focused on voter registration and NAACP membership appeals, in the hopes that more registered Black voters would yield more moderate government officials, while taking the fight against segregation to Congress and the courts. But this strategy presumed that the local officials who decided who could register and who could not, would ever relent and allow significant Black additions to the voter rolls, and it required a faith in Washington that the militant young activists did not share.
Medgar was caught in the middle, and Myrlie saw less and less of him as he zigzagged between his office, the picket lines downtown, and the fairgrounds jail, bail money in hand, and his office, where negotiations with New York were increasingly tense. The hate-filled phone calls to the Evers house were constant. Myrlie sometimes just left the receiver off the hook, but she couldn’t always do so because of other calls for help, for bond money, for Medgar’s presence at a rally or a planning meeting. They got an unlisted number, but Medgar gave it out to so many people, it quickly became known, too.
Driven back on his heels, Mayor Thompson gave a local television address to assure Jacksonians that the protests were being perpetrated by outside agitators and that the “good Negroes of Jackson” were quiet and content. Medgar demanded equal time in a letter not just to Thompson, but to President Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the Jackson Chamber of Commerce and the Junior Chamber of Commerce, the Mississippi Economic Council, and the Mississippi Bankers Association.64 The matter landed quickly in court, and to everyone’s surprise, not least Myrlie’s, Medgar was given twenty minutes to deliver a televised response to the mayor.
News of the impending speech brought so many fresh threats that Medgar was forced to tape it in secret, far from the local television studio. Myrlie knew that once the broadcast aired, the white Mississippians who up to that time had despised Medgar as a faceless troublemaker would now know exactly what he looked like. The danger of that was incalculable. When the speech was over, he could be recognized everywhere: at a stoplight in the city, on a lonely road in the Delta, in the light from the fuel pump at a gas station.”65 She listened to him as he practiced, and he tested lines on her and wrote and rewrote what would be the most important speech of his life.
Medgar met the moment. On May 20, the night his speech was televised, he spoke the truth of what it meant to be Black in Mississippi—which left a man, woman, or child with the constant burden of contempt, of not being able to receive a decent education, to travel without humiliation, or to attend the best schools in the state of your birth, to be employed where you might achieve your fullest potential, or simply to live without fear and the constant threat of violence or death.
“I speak as a native Mississippian,” Medgar told the television audience, including an untold number of white folk. “I was educated in Mississippi schools and served overseas in our nation’s armed forces in the war against Hitlerism and fascism.”66 He said the wider world was visible to Black people.
Tonight, the Negro knows from his radio and television what happened today all over the world. . . . He knows about the new free nations in Africa and knows that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson he cannot even drive a garbage truck. . . . Then he looks about his home community and what does he see, to quote our mayor: in this “progressive, beautiful, friendly, prosperous city with an exciting future”? He sees a city where Negro citizens are refused admittance to the city auditorium and the coliseum; his children refused a ticket to a good movie in a downtown theater; his wife and children refused service at a lunch counter in a downtown store where they trade; students refused the use of the main public libraries, parks, playgrounds, and other tax-supported recreational facilities. He sees Negro lawyers, physicians, dentists, teachers, and other professionals prevented from attending meetings of professional organizations.
He sees a city of over 150,000 of which 40 percent is Negro, in which there is not a single Negro policeman or policewoman, school crossing guard, fireman, clerk, stenographer, or supervisor employed in any city department or the mayor’s office . . . except those employed in segregated facilities. He sees local hospitals which segregate Negro patients and deny staff privileges to Negro family physicians. The mayor spoke of the twenty-four-hour police protection we have. . . . There are questions in the minds of many Negroes whether we have twenty-four hours of protection, or twenty-four hours of harassment.67
Medgar said Black Mississippians wanted the end of segregation and the right to register and vote without “special impediments imposed on him alone,” jobs above the menial level, and to be treated with respect in the places where they spend their money. “Jackson can change if it wills to do so,” he said. “If there should be resistance, how much better to have turbulence to effect improvement rather than turbulence to maintain a stand-pat policy. We believe there are white Mississippians who want to go forward on the race question. Their religion tells them there is something wrong with the old system. Their sense of justice and fair play sends them the same message.”68
Medgar concluded by saying the Negro “has been in America since 1619, a total of 344 years. He is not going anywhere else; this country is his home. He wants to do his part to make his city, state, and nation a better place for everyone regardless of color or race.” A victory for democracy in the State of Mississippi, he said, would be a victory for democracy everywhere.69
Myrlie had never been so proud of her husband. She later wrote that “it was the speech of an intelligent, thoughtful Negro; a Negro who stood without fear or subservience and spoke with self-assurance as an equal to the white man.”70
It was a speech that marked Medgar Evers for certain death.