Medgar Evers (1925-1963), a martyr of the American civil rights movement, died 50 years ago today on June 12th 1963. He was the head of the NAACP in Mississippi, the most racist state in the nation.

When he was boy growing up in Mississippi a friend of the family was lynched. His bloody clothes hung on a fence for a year. No one said a word about it – not in the newspapers, not at church, nowhere. On Saturday nights whites would try to run down blacks with their cars for sport or go through town beating them up.

At 17 Evers left high school to join the army. He fought for America in the Second World War against the racist Nazis to free France and Germany.

When he and his brother came back from war, they registered to vote. But on voting day 200 armed whites blocked their way. Evers knew that if he did nothing, there would be no better world for his children. So he joined the NAACP. He got his high school and college degrees and by 1954 he was the head of the NAACP for the whole state.

The NAACP took the quiet, slow lawyerly approach of fighting for equal rights for blacks by doing it in court. So when James Meredith, for example, could not get into the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) because he was black, Evers arranged to fight it in court with the help of Thurgood Marshall.

But Evers went beyond that approach. He staged protests to fight the Jim Crow laws that kept blacks out of restaurants, libraries and even parks. He staged boycotts of white businesses that supported Jim Crow. He pushed to get as many blacks registered to vote as possible despite the laws whites passed to make it hard for them to vote.

His biggest enemy, though, was black fear, the fear that kept blacks from fighting for change. His biggest weapon was his own courage, courage that allowed him to stand up to whites despite all the death threats, despite the firebomb thrown at his house, despite being one of the blacks that whites in the Deep South most wanted dead.

On the evening of June 11th 1963 just before midnight Evers came back from a late-night meeting. He got out of his car carrying T-shirts that said, “Jim Crow Must Go”. In the bushes nearby someone shot him in the back. He fell forward. He crawled to the door, his keys still in his hand. His wife heard the shot and ran to the door. She found him at the steps, face down in blood. His three children shouted, “Daddy, get up!”

The neighbours came running. Some of them were white. When Mrs Evers saw her white neighbours, in that moment she wanted to take a machine gun and gun them all down.

And that was the turning point for Mississippi, the moment when anger overcame fear. In that moment change in Mississippi and throughout the Jim Crow South became unstoppable.

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