Medgar was twenty-five years old—a tall, dark, handsome football player and World War II veteran. He and his elder brother, Charles, had what you might call “attitude,” which back then was risky for Black men in the South. Medgar had taken risks to register to vote, and he carried himself with a confidence and keen sense of the dignity he knew he was owed by the country he had defended against the Nazis in Europe.
~~~
Reverend Al comes right out where I wanted to be in his interview with Joy-Ann Reid on her heart-stopping book, Medgar & Myrlie...
NAACP had officially appealed to the Justice Department, asking for federal protection for Medgar and Henry, but according to Charles Evers, “the Justice Department hardly lifted a finger.”12 Myrlie watched as Medgar’s impatience, frustration, and exhaustion grew and his talk became more fatalistic. He told her one morning, after she’d spent the previous afternoon washing and ironing a full load of fresh shirts for him, that while he appreciated her efforts, he probably wasn’t going to need them. Other times, he came home and collapsed on the living room sofa, and she had to shake him and get him to move to the bedroom for a proper sleep. On the nights she couldn’t get him off the couch, she sat down beside him and eased his head into her lap. “I could feel the tension and bruises of the day slip away from him as I stroked his hair and rubbed his temples,” she recalled. “In a few minutes he would drop off to sleep, and I would sit there looking down at him, so tired, so much like a little boy who had pushed himself beyond all endurance.”13 His six-day workweeks were stretching to seven days—with no time for the fishing and hunting trips that had provided such a pleasing distraction for him. He had less time to toss the football with Darrell and the other boys on the block or to balance Reena on his knees while he did his Jack LaLanne morning workouts. Their family time together was at breakfast when Medgar talked to the children about his work. Once, Myrlie recalled, Darrell declared, “I hate white people,” and Medgar told him, “You’re wrong. You’re only hurting yourself . . . hating people is no way to live.” Another time, three-year-old Van made the whole table laugh, when he broke into a civil rights anthem, belting: “Let nobody turn you around!”
Invariably Reena, whom Myrlie called the house’s mini-mom, told her father he worked too much and needed to take some time off.14 Those moments of joy were far too fleeting.15
THOMPSON AND THE CITY OF JACKSON, ALONG WITH THE WHITE Citizens’ Councils, weren’t prepared to back down. After the Woolworth’s incident, the mayor obtained an injunction, naming Medgar, Salter, Ed King, the president and trustees of Tougaloo College, Dick Gregory, Gloster Current, the NAACP, CORE, and about a dozen others, enjoining them from “engaging in, sponsoring, inciting or encouraging mass street parades or mass processions or like demonstrations without a permit.” The activists were barred from “unlawful blocking of the streets or sidewalks, trespassing on private property after being warned to leave the premises or . . . congregating on the streets or public places as mobs, and unlawfully picketing business establishments or public buildings in the City of Jackson.”16 Thompson made it clear he intended to enforce the injunction. “They wanted things stopped and controlled,” Ed King said. “The injunction told us to stop lunch counter sit-ins, marches, demonstrations. . . . We appealed . . . and we got to the federal judge in Jackson for this district in Mississippi, who said that it was a very serious issue of the right to demonstrate and march. . . . You couldn’t even hand out literature. . . . We appealed to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, which upheld the local federal judge, as did the Supreme Court. [But] Medgar said, ‘You have to defy the court system, even if it’s been upheld by federal courts, even if we might win in the Supreme Court a year from now, the movement is destroyed.’” Medgar believed the boycotts and demonstrations needed to continue until Thompson backed down. And they did. While the NAACP general counsel Robert Carter added to the flurry of lawsuits by filing yet another—seeking to end segregation in all public accommodations in the state, activists held a sit-in at Primo’s Restaurant downtown, while a separate group successfully, if briefly, integrated the city golf course. Another group of more than two dozen knelt in prayer in front of the downtown Post Office and were hauled away by police.17 With city jails full to bursting, the stockading of activists in the fairground detention camp continued, too. On June 1, with more than 550 protesters—many of them children—packed into the prison camp, Medgar sent an urgent telegram to President Kennedy: “Please, mistreatment of Negro children and their parents reported behind hog wire confines of Jackson Concentration Camp. City, county, and State Law officers involved. Medical attention being denied. Injured in some cases. Urge immediate investigation by Department of Justice agents of these denials of constitutional rights to peaceful demonstrators and protests.”18 Roy Wilkins arrived in Jackson that same day and joined Medgar on the picket line in front of the downtown Woolworth’s—the same one where, less than a week before, violence and mayhem had met the small group of Tougaloo sit-in protesters. Medgar wore a handmade sign over his suit jacket and tie that read “End Brutality in Jackson.” He and Wilkins were quickly arrested by helmeted police brandishing cattle prods as press photographers captured images that would rocket around national newsrooms. Also arrested was Thelton Henderson, the first Black lawyer to serve in the U.S. Justice Department, who had merely been observing the demonstration, and Helen Wilcher, who had succeeded Aaron Henry as state NAACP president at Medgar’s urging when Henry stepped down. Henderson was quickly released. Wilkins, Wilcher, and Medgar were booked on charges of restraint of trade and released on $1,000 bonds. Hours later, young activists staged a march downtown that attracted the now-standard response from police and led to the arrest and detention of forty additional activists.19 Even with this dismal conclusion of the march, Thompson finally relented, agreeing to hire Black police officers and crossing guards and to “upgrade Negro city employees.” He said the negotiations for other demands, including school and public facilities desegregation, were “ongoing.” He also announced that Jackson voters would be asked to approve a $500,000 to $1 million bond to add more stockades to the detention camp.20 At the mass meeting that night, Wilkins took to the stage and spoke passionately, in terms Medgar had used before. “In Birmingham,” he said, “the authorities turned the dogs and fire hoses loose on peaceable demonstrators. Jackson has added another touch to this expression of the Nazi spirit with the setting up of hog-wired concentration camps. This is pure Nazism and Hitlerism. The only thing missing is an oven.”21 Outwardly, Wilkins’s presence at the protest and his fiery speech at the Masonic Temple were a show of national NAACP support for Medgar’s headlong dive into grassroots protest. But behind the scenes, tensions were rising to a boil. Medgar had deliberately taken Wilkins to that Woolworth’s because with the injunction in place, he knew what would happen, and he hoped the high-profile arrests of himself and the national leader of the NAACP would get Washington’s attention and force the mayor’s hand. King said he was told that Wilkins believed otherwise: that despite the injunction they wouldn’t be arrested “just for picketing.” Still, Ed King had come away from Wilkins’s willingness to march with Medgar and particularly his speech at the mass meeting impressed and hopeful that perhaps the NAACP’s attitude toward Medgar’s activism was changing. King said he was quickly disabused of that hope during the NAACP strategy meeting upstairs at the Masonic Temple the very next night. Medgar’s allies at the meeting, including Houston Wells and his brother James, known as “J.G.,” reiterated their appeal for the national office to pay for full-time security for Medgar and for the Evers home, citing the firebombing attempt just days before, which could have injured or killed Myrlie and the children. But Gloster Current, who was in Jackson at New York’s behest, and who considered Medgar a friend, told the men the national organization had “more important things to do with its money” than to look after Medgar.22 King was stunned. But there was more to come. After the meeting, during which the national office’s priorities—voter registration and NAACP membership sign-ups—were reiterated yet again, Wilkins asked to speak with Medgar alone. Medgar motioned to Ed King to come with him anyway, and King said he felt that Medgar wanted someone to stand witness. Wilkins consented to King coming along. The Tougaloo chaplain had become one of Medgar’s closest aides and confidants. He said Wilkins must have presumed that, as a white Southerner and a college chaplain, King understood that this student militancy and insistence on continuing the cycle of protests and arrests, and drawing violent responses from authorities, was the wrong approach. The three men went into Medgar’s office and closed the door, at which point Wilkins unloaded on Medgar for getting himself and Wilkins arrested. As King described it, an angry Wilkins practically yelled at Medgar: “Who do you think you are? Another Martin Luther King? There’s too much Martin Luther King in this country now.’” The Kennedy administration, which had been a reluctant player in the desegregation events unfolding across the South, didn’t want “a second Birmingham anywhere in America.” “And Wilkins told Medgar, ‘If you work with Dr. King, and if you do not stop these demonstrations, you will be fired,’” King recalled. Medgar was diplomatic in the moment, and according to King, he told Wilkins he understood. After Wilkins left, Reverend King said Medgar told him that this was not the first time Wilkins had threatened to fire him. He said Roy Wilkins made the same threat a year before, over his support for James Meredith’s bid to enter Ole Miss. According to King, the administration wanted to quiet the violent opposition to integration until after Kennedy was reelected in 1964, and to keep the peace with the Southern, overwhelmingly Democratic, states. With the Birmingham upheavals finally cooled on May 10, Kennedy wanted a respite from the image of continual uprising in the American South. For that to happen, the civil rights movement needed to “get off the newspapers, get out of the streets,” as Ed King put it. The violent Woolworth’s sit-in had achieved the opposite result, and Wilkins was just as frustrated by Medgar’s insistence on backing the militancy of Mississippi youth as Kennedy was. Ed King, for whom militancy was the only course, even accused Wilkins of “carrying out the orders of Washington” in seeking to slow Medgar down. Thurgood Marshall and the other lawyers at the national NAACP had nonetheless backed Meredith’s bid; a sign that Wilkins’s opinions weren’t universally shared in the national office. But national had pointedly dissuaded Medgar from applying to Ole Miss Law School himself. Whatever Medgar and Wilkins’s past exchanges had been, this new rebuke stung Medgar, King said. He knew the NAACP was tired of bailing out protesters, whose tactics they opposed. He knew they opposed the sit-ins and marches, and that NAACP headquarters in New York had lost patience with him. The actions taken by Medgar’s Youth Councils and high school and college activists clearly defied New York and their mandate to concentrate on voter registration. But he also deeply believed that only direct action, from and by Black Mississippians, would turn the segregationist tide in the state. Medgar left the meeting feeling defeated. Myrlie wrote that “Medgar was more despondent that night than I had ever seen him. He had aged ten years in the preceding months. As he related what happened at the meeting, tears trickled down his cheeks.”23 And then there were the ongoing security concerns. Houston Wells and other friends of Medgar had begun pressing the national office to provide Medgar with security protection, in the form of bodyguards or, at least, armed patrols at the Evers home. The requests were repeatedly declined. “I was livid that the NAACP put so little value on Medgar’s life,” Myrlie wrote. When she told Medgar as much, he replied: “It’s okay. When my time comes, I’m going to go regardless of the protections I have. Besides, I don’t want anyone to get hurt trying to save me.”24 No one who knew Medgar believed he had a martyr complex. Far from it. His friends insisted vigorously that he wanted to live, for Myrlie and for their children. Since Van was born, they had even talked about having another child, as he had always wanted four. Myrlie had recently given Medgar the blessed news that she was pregnant again, which she’d discovered not long before the firebombing. They’d barely had time or space to absorb, let alone make plans, as they each felt their daily mission was to fight for their lives.25 On the night of Wilkins’s rebuke, as they lay holding each other after much tossing and turning, Medgar for the first time expressed doubts about bringing another child into the world,26 particularly in the state considered the most violent and segregated in the nation.27 Ed King said, “Medgar went through hell the next week or so. The National Office sent people down here to really control him.” NAACP headquarters was straining under the weight of $64,000 in bond debts,28 and Medgar, Salter, King, and others were in open defiance of New York.
(Lena Horne visited Mississippi with Medgar and his family a number of times, as included in the book, but never mentions that she sang there... I tend to think she did and when I found this song, I had to include it!)
ON JUNE 7, LENA HORNE ARRIVED TO SUPPORT THE JACKSON Movement by appearing at an NAACP rally at the Masonic Temple that night. Medgar picked her up from the airport and brought her to their home for lunch. Myrlie was thrilled to have the actress and singer visiting them. She attended the mass meeting that night, and her heart swelled with pride as Ms. Horne talked about how blessed Mississippians were to have a leader like Medgar, who had allayed her every fear as they sped through the streets of Jackson in his Oldsmobile. The hall, jammed with more than three thousand people to see Horne and Dick Gregory, too, was captivated.
(Well, I found this video so I'm now sure that Lena also sang!I was never much for jokes, most kids don't. I hated the first time I watched a new TV program Archie Bunker! It was only later when I realized that the laughter could...help...)
“The battle . . . being fought here in Jackson, as elsewhere in the south, is our nation’s primary crisis,” Ms. Horne said. “Let it be understood that the courage and grim determination of the Negro people in these cities of the South have challenged the moral integrity of the entire nation.”29 Myrlie recalled that police “ringed the building and patrolled the halls and doorways inside. The press was out in force, and the words of freedom songs swelled and echoed and burst through the open windows to flood the air for blocks around. It was a night of tears and laughter, of high emotions, of unity and determination and brotherhood.
And all that was sought was to Live Free like the White man...
When the words of ‘We Shall Overcome’ rang from thousands of throats, we were overcome, and elderly Negro men wept along with high school girls.”30 “Freedom has never been free,” Medgar told the crowd that night. “I love my children,” he said to a hushed room. “And I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die and die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.”31 For all the pride and joy she felt in that moment, in her heart, Myrlie knew with an aching certainty that she would lose him. There was not even a question in her mind anymore. She felt incredibly lonely. It was unfair. She felt scandalously robbed before anything had yet been taken from her. At a small, private party after the mass meeting for the out-of-town guests that night, a Friday, Medgar and Myrlie shared a rare evening of much-needed laughs. When a group of friends began debating the wisdom of “young marriages,” Medgar joked that even though he had “robbed the cradle,” it had worked out quite nicely. Then he set Myrlie blushing by declaring to the room, rare for him in public, how much he loved her. They left the party separately: she took some friends home in her station wagon so she could pick up the children from the babysitter, and Medgar went to drop off some NAACP workers at their homes. Myrlie expected to be home first, but she was surprised when Medgar sped into the driveway just behind her. Once the children were in bed, he explained that he and several others had noticed three white men they didn’t recognize in the Masonic Temple that night. One of them was smoking a cigarette. His secretary saw this man had wandered upstairs to the floor where Medgar’s office was; he’d said he was just looking around and then left. One of the NAACP workers Medgar drove home said they thought they’d seen those same three men in a car, possibly following them after the party, meaning that maybe they’d followed them to the party as well.32 This news alarmed him enough that Medgar didn’t want Myrlie going into a dark house that night alone. They already lived with safety plans—never sit or stand by a window; always exit the car on the front passenger side, to be closer to the house’s front door; and avoid the large, wooded lot adjacent to the Youngs’ home. Medgar had walked that lot area during the day and had decided it was not safe. He discouraged the children from exploring and playing there. The woods formed the point of a triangle of streets where Missouri Street, which stretched behind the Youngs’ home, and Guynes Street ran into Delta Drive, where the businesses were white-owned. There was a cleaners, a small nightclub, a small restaurant called Dog and Suds, Joe’s Drive-In Theater, where Medgar had taken the kids to see Psycho, and Pittman’s Handy Andy Grocery. The following day, Saturday, June 8, Medgar spent all day at his office, intermittently driving down to Capitol Street to see that the boycott was holding up and how empty the streets were. He had begun periodically calling home to speak to each of the children, and on one of the calls that day, Medgar seemed shaken. He was being followed every day, by one or two police cars, but that day, he told Myrlie, as he was stepping out of his car, one of them had jammed “into reverse” and tried to back into him. “I jumped away just in time,” he told her. “I have witnesses . . . several other people saw it. It was no mistake.” This incident seemed to genuinely rattle Medgar, who didn’t frighten easily.33
THE NEWS FROM THE NAACP NATIONAL OFFICE AT THE STRATEGY meeting that day was not good. New York had begun “to cut off the bail bond money to end all large demonstrations,” Salter later wrote. They also packed the local strategy committee with conservative clergy, he added. Medgar, already under intense pressure from national headquarters, was “functionally immobilized. Knowing Medgar,” Salter added, “we felt his heart and mind were with the struggle in the field. He made no effort to bridge the quickly deepening gap, and his involvement from that point on was minimal. The national office was choking the Jackson Movement to death. It waned into almost nothing [by] the second week in June.”34 Medgar and Myrlie were awakened Sunday morning by the phone, and Myrlie had had enough. She snatched the receiver off the hook and put it right back down, insisting that Medgar get even a bit more rest. When the phone rang again as she was serving him breakfast, Myrlie lost her composure. She grabbed the receiver and told the person on the line, who was calling from the NAACP office and asking where Medgar was, that he would get there when he got there.35 Medgar was leading groups of Black protesters that day to white churches to attempt to enter the sanctuaries. It is an idea that Ed King said had come from Martin Luther King Jr., who favored challenging clergy to live up to their faith when it came to opposing racism and segregation. Unsurprisingly, the activists were all turned away. “Medgar made himself very visible, taking some Black people to First Baptist Church where Gov. Ross Barnett was a Sunday school teacher,” Ed King said. “Medgar could understand and [even] laugh about the media angle,” he added. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Ross Barnett had let some Black people come into his church? Anyway, they were turned away, too.” Medgar was not arrested, as he had expected to be. “Maybe the white powers backed off it for a little,” King said. Medgar returned home before dinnertime and collapsed on the sofa, Myrlie remembered. She asked if she could do anything for him. “‘No,’ he said. ‘Just love me.’” Myrlie laughed and told him that wasn’t a hard thing to do. And then she took the phone off the hook for the rest of the evening.36 He was still asleep on the sofa when Myrlie and the children returned from evening church services, where she often played the piano for the choir. When he finally stirred, after the children had already gone to bed, Myrlie was sitting opposite him, just watching him sleep. It felt like a blessing seeing him rest. She told him that several church members had told her they were praying for him, and with his eyes still closed, he responded that he would surely need it. When he opened them and saw where she was sitting, on a chair facing the sofa and the front window, he gave a hard look. “Girl, if you don’t get up from there. You’re gonna get your head blown off,” he said to her, sitting up. Myrlie, who always had a comeback, quoted one of the things he would say to her. “My philosophy,” she told him, “is that I’m not going until my time comes.” He still insisted that she move out of sight of the window. “There’s no use courting it,” he said.37 She asked him where he expected her to sit, with his big self sprawled across the sofa, then squeezed in beside him, his head in her lap. He seemed relaxed, but he wouldn’t stop talking about their life insurance policy, vowing to find the money to pay the premium. For the first time, he expressed genuine fear that something might happen to him, and he made her promise that if anything did, she would take good care of their children.38 “I told him I couldn’t live without him,” Myrlie said. “Medgar was shedding tears at the same time. And he told me, ‘Myrlie, you are stronger than you think you are. You take care of my children.’ I’ll never forget that, never forget that. He trusted me. He felt that I had a strength that I knew I didn’t have. But he knew that I was a fierce protector, not only of him, but of our children as well. I’ll never forget that.” They lay on the sofa together that night and wept in each other’s arms. The following day, Monday, June 10, the family had breakfast, and Medgar spent much of the morning in the backyard with Van, tossing a tiny football while Myrlie took the older kids to school. When she returned, he asked Myrlie to take Van inside, so he could spend time on his own admiring the plum tree he’d planted there. Myrlie felt that something had shifted in Medgar. He was settled, and no longer afraid, but also palpably despondent. “Myrlie, I think we’re going to have our best year ever for plums,”39 he said, with a kind of empty optimism that made her feel more sad than hopeful.
MEDGAR RELEASED A DEFIANT STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO THE city’s latest injunction against demonstrations. In it, he slammed Jackson officials’ “unique capacity for speaking from two sides of their mouths . . . why spank a tottering infant? Why enjoin a ‘faltering’ movement, as they describe it? White leaders in Jackson gave the world the answer today. Their injunction proceedings have proven that our movement is sharp, vital, and inclusive. They are hurting inside. This is their outcry.” 40 Despite his bravado, Medgar was discouraged, and with the relentless obstruction of Black conservative clergy, paid operatives of the Sovereign Commission including press outlets like the Jackson Advocate, community resolve was indeed buckling. Medgar got home that night and read to the children before they went to bed. Once they were asleep, he and Myrlie talked in a way that left her more afraid than ever. “If I go tonight, if I go next week, if I go next year, I feel I’m ready to go,” he said, in a voice as calm as could be. Myrlie told him not to talk that way, and he told her she shouldn’t be afraid of death. “I know it’s hard not to be,” he said. “But it’s something that comes to everyone someday.” 41 He hadn’t told Myrlie that earlier that day, he’d been called by Felix Dunn, who headed the NAACP branch in Gulfport, Mississippi. Dunn said a local white attorney who was privately sympathetic to the movement had told him to warn Medgar that he should “be careful to have someone see him home each night and to arrange for guards around the house.” The attorney had it on good authority that “an attempt was going to be made on Medgar’s life.”42
On Tuesday, June 11, Medgar was up early, and after breakfast, Myrlie noticed he kissed each child on the forehead repeatedly. He held her close and lingered in the hug. He called home several times that afternoon. “What’s the matter, haven’t you got anything to do?” she remembered chiding him after the third call. “I just wanted to hear your voice,” he told her. “My love to you and the kids. I’ll see you tonight.”43 At his office, Medgar met with Aaron Henry to discuss their plan to travel to Washington, D.C., the following day to testify on behalf of the Mississippi NAACP before the House Judiciary Committee in support of civil rights legislation, and to coordinate their testimony.44 Salter recalled that he “saw Medgar late . . . [that] afternoon. He was dead tired and really discouraged—sick at what was happening to the Jackson Movement, but still too much an organizational staff man to openly challenge it. Back in January . . . he had openly pushed the national office, telling New York to speed up the Jackson school desegregation suit—in which two of his own children were plaintiffs—and hinted if they didn’t, he might resign his job.
The national office had speeded it up—a little. But in this situation, he didn’t buck the national office. We had a long talk and, despite the internal divisions, an extremely cordial one, much like old times. He was more disheartened than I had ever known him to be.” 45 The situation for the Jackson Movement was bleak indeed. After 650 arrests, and with so many still being held in the hell of the fairground stockades, there was still no biracial commission, and few concrete gains, other than Thompson’s vague promise to add a couple of Negro police officers. Voter registration remained anemic in the Mississippi Delta, and the Voter Education Project had growing doubts about the efficacy of the COFO coalition in the state. There were the persistent threats and police harassment. Medgar mused to a friend, “I’m looking to be shot, any time I step out of a car.” 46 In Alabama that afternoon, Gov. George Wallace, channeling Governor Barnett, made himself a hero to white nationalists by defying a federal court order that allowed Vivian Malone and James Hood admittance to the University of Alabama. Wallace made his stand in front of Foster Auditorium before Alabama National Guard troops, federalized by the Kennedy administration, ensured that Malone and Hood would integrate the university as Meredith had done in Mississippi. Medgar and his team watched this unfold on television from the office. It was a welcome uplift. And then at 8:00 P.M. Eastern time, President Kennedy’s television and radio address began. The notes he sounded were not unlike those in Medgar’s televised speech. “Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free,” Kennedy said. “And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops. It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal. It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case.” 47 No president had ever put into words meant for a national audience such expressions of racial equanimity. Kennedy, who had not begun as a civil rights man, was speaking as much to the humanity of Black lives as Medgar did every day. He spoke from the same source of moral authority—the role of international moral warrior America had inherited in World War II. He presented to Americans the fundamental moral crisis that had plagued the nation from its very founding. And he was making an announcement. “Next week,” he said. “I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.” Kennedy touted the forward advances the Supreme Court had authorized and the executive branch’s modern commitments to hiring without regard to race. He also said there were things only the legislative branch could do. “I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments.” Kennedy went on to announce that with the pace of integration moving anemically, despite progress in “seventy-five cities” over the prior two weeks, the legislation he planned to send to Congress would “authorize the Federal Government to participate more fully in lawsuits designed to end segregation in public education,” and seek greater protection for the right to vote. It was a full-scale war on the Southern way of life, and an embrace, from the White House, of the “first-class citizenship” Medgar had been touting. “This is one country,” Kennedy said. “It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to 10 percent of the population that you can’t have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go into the streets and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.” Kennedy spoke for just fourteen minutes, but his words echoed into history. The speech was thrilling for Medgar and his fellow activists. It was the culmination of all their cajoling and demands of the White House. It was also a triumph for the NAACP, which the summer before had gathered at the White House to meet with Kennedy. For white Southerners, including the Klan and White Citizens’ Councils in Mississippi, it was a declaration of war. Kennedy’s bill called for the federally sanctioned desegregation not just of schools and colleges, but hotels, restaurants, shops, beaches, and other public accommodations—the very things activists were conducting sit-ins and marches to achieve.
MYRLIE HAD ALLOWED THE KIDS TO STAY UP AND WATCH KENNEDY’S speech. She and Van had curled up on the bed in her and Medgar’s room, while Darrell and Reena sat on the floor to watch. It felt like a singular triumph: the president of the United States echoing Medgar’s call for dignity, decency, and first-class citizenship for the millions of Black Americans whose grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ hands built this country and more than one million of whom had, like Medgar, gone to war for its ideals. Kennedy was a fellow World War II veteran, and it was striking that it fell to these veterans to take up the fight against racial tyranny at home that they had abroad. Myrlie felt prouder than ever that her husband had played a part in Kennedy’s transformation from reluctance to eloquence and action on the matter of segregation. She thought of her own father, whose bitter disappointment after serving his country had been so unshakable. Perhaps other Black men, sometime soon, would not have to carry that burden around. She drifted off, thinking how thrilled she would be to congratulate Medgar when he got home, and how she and the children would pepper him with questions until he begged them to let him get some sleep. After all, tomorrow was a workday.
A MASS MEETING WAS HELD AFTER KENNEDY’S ADDRESS, AT NEW Jerusalem church—a venue the Jackson Movement hadn’t used before. It was quite a comedown from the inspiration of the president’s speech, and a far cry from the packed auditorium that had gathered at the Masonic Temple for Lena Horne and Dick Gregory less than a week before. “The mass meetings had [quickly] collapsed to just token petty participation,” Ed King said. The Jackson Movement, King said, “had been destroyed because of the interventions of Washington putting pressure on the National NAACP.” The meeting lacked some of the basics of logistics and security that had become standard at the Masonic Temple. Instead, organizers tapped a group of teenagers, including then fifteen-year-old Hezekiah Watkins, whom they’d used in the past to pass out literature and leaflets outside prior mass meetings, to patrol the church grounds and watch for anyone who seemed out of place. After his nightmarish stint in Parchman, Watkins been drawn into the movement by Medgar and participated in the Jackson protests. He had gone from being an angry teenager whose little gang was spoiling for a fight with white Mississippi, to an activist who had spent time in the fairgrounds gulag the governor had built. He was enthusiastic about his assignment that night. “We were given guns because it had been stated that there was a plot . . . on [Medgar Evers’s] life.” The teens rode up and down the block on their bicycles before and during the meeting. “We were told if you see anything suspicious to come back and let us know, but if anybody tries to jump on you, you defend yourself. And we were all for it, to be honest with you,” he said. His only regret was that he wouldn’t be able to hear Medgar’s speech. He wouldn’t have missed much if he had been searching for inspiration. Salter recalled the meeting as tense. National NAACP staffers used the event to formally announce that the focus of the Jackson Movement would now officially be voter registration and that while the boycott could continue, there would be no more demonstrations of any kind. “NAACP T-Shirts were being sold by Medgar who had no enthusiasm at all,” Salter said. “He said virtually nothing at the meeting [and] looked, indeed, as though he was ready to die.” 48 Ed King recalled a time when James Meredith and Medgar had tried to explain to him the constant tension between activists on the ground and the national NAACP. Medgar, he said, asked: “Ed, do you think the NAACP exists by having fish fries and donations out of the poverty of Black people in America?” He reminded King that “there’s no Black middle class big enough” to fund a massive national organization. “The NAACP exists because of foundation money and rich whites and money from Wall Street. And the NAACP is controlled by the White House, the Justice Department, and no donations will go, that Washington does not approve of. And Washington does not want Dr. King and Medgar Evers working together.” Ed King had been schooled in the multiracial collaborative haven at Tougaloo, and it didn’t make sense to him that factionalism could exist in a movement that supposedly shared a single goal. Besides, he said, it was already too late. King believed that by June 11, 1963, Medgar had decided to shake off that sense of defeat and to trust his own instincts about how best to force a change in Mississippi. “Medgar called me aside and to a small room right at the entrance to the church,” King said, “and we talked. And it was like a religious experience. He had made up his mind. He was a liberated person. He said, ‘I am going to invite Martin Luther King to come to Jackson, to work with SNCC and CORE.’ And I said, ‘There have been these threats.’ And he said, ‘Yes, I will be fired from my job with the NAACP tomorrow or Thursday.’” Medgar said he expected his firing to make the news, maybe even nationally, not that it mattered. “I’ve made up my mind. And I think I’m doing what I have to do.” King said the conversation lasted ten or fifteen minutes, “and in a religious context that I don’t talk to many people about. . . . “I wasn’t his pastor, but I was close to him,” King said. “He knew I would understand everything he was talking about.... He was no longer the indecisive person who might be crying at his desk. He had mentioned to me at one point that he had trouble paying his life insurance and did not have enough... that was very heavy” on his mind. He knew what he wanted to do, and he intended to see it done. Charles Evers later recalled that “until ’63, Medgar mostly did what Roy Wilkins asked, but in ’63 Medgar began stepping out on his own. If Wilkins had fired Medgar that year, I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.” 49
AFTER THE MEETING, FOLLOWED BY DINNER AT A FRIEND’S HOME, Medgar dropped Gloster Current off at attorney Jack Young’s home, where he was staying in Jackson. It was nearly midnight, and Medgar seemed weary. He told Current, “Everywhere I go lately, somebody has been following me,” and so Current invited him to come inside. He felt certain Young would let Medgar stay until morning, so he could drive home at sunup. Medgar declined. “I’m tired,” he said. “I want to go home to my family.” They briefly revisited Medgar getting a bodyguard, which Current had rejected days before on the organization’s behalf. Medgar could never have afforded protection without the NAACP’s help, but regardless, he was too exhausted to discuss it further. Current recalled that as they parted, Medgar “just held my hand and held it and held it.”50 He got into his car, backed out of the driveway, and started for home. It was now just after midnight, June 12. Darrell and Reena had begged to stay up after the president’s speech and the news to watch The Untouchables, and Myrlie consented. It was summertime, so there was no school the following day, a Wednesday. She cuddled a sleeping Van on the bed and drifted off herself as Reena and Darrell sprawled out on the floor, elbows down, heads in hands, staring into the TV screen. They were lost in their escape to 1930s Chicago, where Elliot Ness and his band of FBI do-gooders battled organized crime, when they heard their father’s car pull into the driveway, at nearly half past midnight. For the two elder Evers children, that sound meant precious “dad time” and little gifts or sweets and time to play or cuddle before finally giving in and going to sleep. They sat up with a bolt of excitement. “Daddy’s home!”
However, their joy quickly turned to shock, as the low hum of Robert Stack and Walter Winchell was shattered by a single loud bang. It sounded almost like an explosion. The sound startled Myrlie and Van out of their sleep and she sat straight up on the bed, knowing instinctively what that awful sound was. The children reacted quickly, too, out of instinct and the instruction that Medgar had provided. Darrell grabbed little Van in his arms and cradled him. They went flat on the floor. Everyone was terrified. The bang was followed by a crash that made it clear something had come through the living room window. Myrlie told the children to stay down as she walked gingerly down the hallway toward the front door. Standing in the dark, she pulled the door open, to find her worst nightmare had finally become real. She screamed. It was loud and guttural and deep. She screamed and screamed, and she dropped to her knees. Medgar was lying facedown in a pool of blood, his torso on the low steps just outside the door. There was a long, semicircular pool of gore stretching from the porch, around the front of Myrlie’s station wagon, and toward the carpark where Medgar had parked behind Myrlie’s car. He was moving just a little, and his hand was outstretched, clutching his keys in his right hand. Myrlie was screaming so loudly and with so much shock and agony that Darrell and Reena forgot their training. They leapt up from the bedroom floor and sprinted down the hallway, Van tottering behind them. Soon, all three were beside their mother on the stoop, and everyone was crying. “Daddy, get up. Get up, Daddy. Get up!” Now the children were screaming, too. Myrlie was clutching at Medgar and trying to somehow pull him inside. She was yelling his name, and desperately praying. Scattered on the ground in front of him were the T-shirts and posters he was carrying from the meeting earlier that night. They read “Jim Crow Must Go.” Medgar had been shot in the back, with the bullet exploding out of his chest and crashing through the living room window. The bullet had knocked Medgar down, but he had used all his strength to drag himself halfway up the driveway and around the front of Myrlie’s station wagon toward the door. He clearly tried desperately to drag himself into the house, where his family, but also his guns, were. He seemed to be trying to talk, but no sound was coming out. A second shot rang out. This one was even closer. Myrlie thought for certain the whole house was about to be under siege. The children were in a complete panic, begging their father to please get up. This was the strong man who could do anything. He had to be able to do this, too. Across the street, Johnnie Pearl Young, who had been up, unable to sleep, heard the gunshots clear as day. “I was sitting up in my kitchen, sewing,” she said. “And all of a sudden, I heard those shots: boom, boom.” The second shot had been fired by Houston Wells, Jean’s husband, who when he heard the gunfire ran out from next door and fired into the air to try to frighten the assassin (or assassins) away. He was still in his underwear and T-shirt; after firing, he ran back inside to get dressed. He quickly ran back outside and across the gory carpark while Jean stood on her front porch in shock and tears, aching for her friend. “All of us were on the patio then,” Myrlie said. “Too late. That was it. My life, my love, was gone. There were three little children standing there.” “He must have been awfully tired,” Myrlie later recalled. “Because he got out on the driver’s side, and we had determined that that was not the thing to do. You get out on the other side, which was closest to the door, and there was less of a chance of being a target. But he got out on the driver’s side that night, and he was the perfect target.”51
FOR MRS. YOUNG, THE NIGHT WAS FULL OF SHOCKS. HEARING Myrlie’s screams was just so unusual—not something you’d expect from the couple—and her first thought was to walk over and admonish Myrlie for hollering so loudly. “I got across the street,” she said, “And there was Medgar down on the [ground] just pumping blood like water. It scared me so bad I forgot what I even went over there to tell her. I turned around and ran straight back to my house.” Young’s husband had managed to remain asleep through the gunshots and screams, but she shook him awake, yelling, “Get up, get up. Something has happened to Medgar! When I said that, he [pulled] a pair of pants on and forgot his shirt, and he passed me and ran back over there across to Myrlie’s house.” By the time the Youngs got to the Evers house, Houston Wells and another neighbor had already pulled the twin mattress off Reena’s bed and carried it outside to use as a gurney. Two police officers had arrived, responding to multiple calls. One of them later said there was so much blood, it looked like someone had butchered a hog.52 It was the summer before her tenth-grade year, and Carolyn Wells (later Carolyn Wells Gee) was taking advantage of the chance to stay up late. Her younger sister was close friends with Reena, and Carolyn had once spent a nervous night in the Evers home babysitting the Evers kids. Her parents didn’t allow their children—including Carolyn’s younger brother Terry, who was best friends with Frank Figgers—to participate in marches or protests, but the children knew that their parents were NAACP members, and their phone sometimes rang with death threats from white racists. When she heard the gunshot and screams, Carolyn and her younger sister peered out their bedroom window, which was standing height and directly faced the Evers carport. “I went to my window because I heard crying and screaming,” she said. “I saw [Mr. Evers]. He was laying halfway across the steps on the porch, and Myrlie and the children were standing over him crying and screaming. Police came out but the ambulance never came.53 Mrs. Young and Jean Wells were soon guiding Myrlie and her sobbing children back inside the house. Mrs. Young recalled saying, “Let the men take care of it, Myrlie. I don’t want you out there listening. And I don’t want you looking at your husband. You know he’s been shot. . . . And I don’t want you to keep on hollering and screaming. You are going to upset these children [even more].” Medgar’s friends rolled him onto his back and placed him on the mattress. With the officers’ help, they placed the makeshift gurney into the back of Wells’s station wagon. Medgar had been shot through his back. The bullet had cracked his ribs and tore through a lung.54 His eyes were open, and he was breathing rapidly. The men covered him with a blanket, and as Jean and Johnnie Pearl kept Myrlie from going back outside and climbing into that station wagon with Medgar, the car sped off to University Hospital. Medgar was still trying to speak but managed to get out just two short sentences that he half whispered as the car barreled down the road and blood gurgled from his lips: “Sit me up,” he said, and then, “Turn me loose.”55 Two doors down from the Everses, Dr. Britton took a frantic call from Myrlie and dashed out his front door. He hopped into his car and followed Wells’s car to the hospital. Britton was the Everses’ personal physician, and he had delivered Van and often treated the family free of charge. He hoped that as a member of the Federal Civil Rights Commission, he could get the segregated hospital to take urgent action to save Medgar’s life. When they arrived there, Medgar had been wheeled into the Negro wing. Britton yelled to the all-too-passive white physicians, “Do you know who this man is? This is Medgar Evers, field secretary of the NAACP.” That caused them to take action,56 but there was no saving him.
BACK INSIDE HER HOME WITH HER CHILDREN, MYRLIE COLLAPSED in prayer and tears. She sobbed and sobbed that she could accept God’s will. She knew in her heart that Medgar was gone. She snatched up the telephone again and called Jack Young’s home, and he handed Gloster Current the phone in time to hear Myrlie scream: “They’ve killed my husband! They’ve killed my husband!”57
Italic Emphasis Mine
~~~
I mentioned in Part 1 that there is extensive history leading up to the life of this couple, as well as the background on what was happening in Mississippi. I was glad that Joy quickly covered the important highlights in the video above, because I wanted to highlight, sadly, his death... Why? Because I want my readers to know exactly what I feel and think about this book. There have been many others I called most important... They were about the reality of the man who was our past president. They talked about those who use religion in their political acceptance of that man. A man we all know to be a liar, a rapist, a criminal, and an egotistical sociopath who has incited all of the worst hatred that America has known since the last decade...
This book covers the lives of our Black neighbors in America... MY friends who I have gone to school with, with whom I worked, and with whom I got to know through their writing... I have shared my own experience of living with two autistic children in my family while one black writer was stationed in Germany with only a few friends he felt comfortable enough to talk with. I've talked and shared with a friend who shared her personal experience within the church about sexual abuse... I have, however, read many more books that were wonderful to read, and confirming my long-held belief that the only difference between us was a color...
Later in the book, Myrlie talks about why Medgar loved the State--its beauty and his early life. When he first saw Myrlie, she was very young, years younger then the man who would be her husband. It was obvious from Joy's writing that she could see the love that they shared for each other... I saw it, too, as I read her book...
You will note that within the excerpt, there are many footnotes provided. Joy-Ann has done an outstanding job of research, then putting it together into a cohesive chronology of events, mostly from Myrlei's perspective. A tale that covered events that never should have happened! And then it continued--the assassination of important leaders: Malcolm X, Dr. King, President Kennedy... Lawlessness reined supreme among those white haters of the time...
It often comes to me that laws are created because of what lies are said, and what hateful acts are done in response to those lies... I'll be providing Part 3 as Medgar's family begins to live again...without him... One of the first things covered is that Myrlie chooses to relocate out of Mississippi...
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.”
~~~
WE The People are called to much these days, I believe. We The People who lived, learned of, or have studied the history of our nation, including Black History, knows just how fragile democracy - freedom - is! And never more so. President Kennedy, according to this book, was slow to come to the realization that he would have to become involved--even though an election was coming up! He did finally act... He was murdered...
Are we to believe that there is so much hate in America that we cannot withstand what is now occurring? Are we to accept that one man who made a deal with a group of evangelical christian leaders and chose to back him, and then continues to lie to their followers on just one or two single issues that fall short of what the majority of Americans want? Joy's book reminds us just how recently we had gone through, in some ways, far worse than we are going through now... It was in my lifetime! My LIFETIME that men and women who were trying to live free was stopped for one reason only: HATE For me, after reading this fantastic commentary of early life tragedies that many had no real idea of--we lived in the north--or there wasn't the Internet to learn daily of exactly how hate was ruining the democracy for which our ancestors fought...
When a child begins to learn--to watch what is happening in their lives, we also begin to question, even what those who may hold a prominent place in our lives... My sister once asked me if I thought she was a racist... I told her I didn't know... She looked at me and immediately pointed out the one black woman who headed up a foodbank operation where our church shared in... One black woman...
I think of my first black girlfriend many times, so that when I started working on a university campus, I was seeing and interacting and working with black men and women daily as well as other races... I remember one family situation that comes to mind often. I had gone to a basketball game with my new sister-in-law at which I spoke to many including one black man in particular. I knew him, a professor, with whom I had interacted during my job... I remember she asked something about him and as we talked I said something like, yes, I had thought about intermarriage but my main concern, always, was about the children of that marriage because of the times we lived in...60s... Then, one day, my aunt who had often been my babysitter while my widowed mom worked, asked me about dating black men? I looked at her, "What?!" I don't even date! What are you talking about? She then told me that my new sister-in-law told her that I would consider dating black men...She then went on to share that she had hinted around long enough about needing a new coat that finally my aunt gave her money, probably hoping she would leave... That was my first experience with a hidden hater and liar... Although we were about the same age, I knew I would never dare become friends with someone I could trust...
Talking behind somebody else's back is often done, I know... Even "soap operas" became a fad when talking about personal lives became so open... and... broadly shared. It is wrong in my opinion... But it occurs even more often now, with the internet... People think nothing about bad-mouthing someone they don't even know, purely because of what they think they know--or have been told...
And our past president is the most guilty of this sin! While demanding total loyalty, he cuts people to pieces. Now, he is even doing more so these days. Surely, he has reached a psychotic break wherein he lies outwardly to his cult of sycophants, spewing hate, violence, lies and more against anybody and everybody... yet continues to garner favor... He did it slowly many years ago, forming the personality of a man who totally lacks empathy or sympathy...
Just like, I quickly say, that those in the South were doing back in history! They pretended to their citizens that both blacks and whites were quite happy being separate in their lives... Of course, the fact that their housing was substandard, that they could not grab a meal at a local restaurant, or go to a movie showing in the local theatre was "not seen" by those whose hate had overcome any other emotion of a normal human.
I have come to respect--and greatly admire--those who have been downtrodden. The indigenous people who lived on our nation's lands and suddenly invaded and murdered... The Black slaves who were bought and paid for by rich white men, working as slaves thereafter, never to know a day of freedom... and if they tried to escape, they were brought back by the law because they were OWNED!!! HOW can we call ourselves a christian nation and show such hate, I have to ask... The answer is that we are NOT.
Many left other lands to come to America to find freedom, and, many times, seeking religious freedom. Now, those same people who I have to assume were those who hated and murdered the indigenous tribes and terrorized slaves, to gain their freedom... are NOW seeking to Make America Great Again (MAGA) by going backward in time, to when the white man ruled supreme in all things...
Can you pick up all the lies this man is telling to those who WANT to believe him because of their own hate...
Remember, Biden had provided a program on the first year in office on border security. NO republicans have been willing to support his program proposals... then a few republicans got tired of the unwillingness to help and they put a bill forward... Only to have Trump cry foul he wanted to use the border as his campaign! The majority of republicans stopped everything, caring not, really, about the border, because they continue to be those...who...hate...
I strive to speak Jesus most of all...
Hate can be an Addiction!
Let's Do An Intervention for All Who Hate
VOTE blue all the way on each and every ballot!
Until ALL Americans ARE FREE
God Bless
Gabby
And my own testimonial Songs...
God is Watching...
God is a God of Love
God is a God of Truth
Speak Truth to the World
We All Know Hate and Violence is NOT of God
Hold our heads up...
And Don't Be Afraid of the Republican Dark...
Follow the Light of God!
Walk On, Speak Out, We Are Never Alone!
Jesus Died For Us
Why didn't millions follow His Words
Love Our Neighbors As Ourselves...
!!!
This Book Resulted in This Post
Words Need to Be Read, Absorbed
And His Spirit Will Be Upon Us!
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