Medgar Evers

Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi, at 12:20 a.m. on June 12, 1963 — hours after President Kennedy had addressed the nation on civil rights, and ten days before the events that would produce the Civil Rights Act. Evers, the NAACP's field secretary in Mississippi, had spent nearly a decade as the most visible civil rights organizer in the most dangerous state in the country. He died on the concrete in front of his house while his wife and children watched from inside. He was 37 years old.

Evers was a World War II veteran who had stormed Normandy Beach and returned home to Mississippi to find that military service had changed nothing about how the state intended to treat him. He applied to the University of Mississippi Law School and was rejected on racial grounds. He organized voter registration drives across the state, investigated the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, and made himself the public face of a movement that Mississippi's white establishment was determined to destroy through every means available — including the bomb threats that arrived regularly at the NAACP's Jackson office.

His killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was tried twice in Mississippi in 1964. Both trials ended in hung juries composed entirely of white men. Beckwith walked free for 30 years, boasting openly of the murder at Klan gatherings. In 1994, a third trial — driven by journalist Jerry Mitchell's persistent investigation and by Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, who refused to stop pushing — produced a conviction. Beckwith was 73 at sentencing. Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery; 3,000 people attended his funeral.