Mississippi House Rep. Bo Brown still remembers the morning in June 1963 when he got word that Jackson civil-rights leader Medgar Evers had been slain overnight. Brown, a student athlete at Tennessee State University at the time, was with his teammates when he got the news on the morning of June 12, 1963.
“Several of us from Jackson were on the field working. We were sodding the football field, planting seeds and watering the field,” Brown told the Mississippi Free Press on June 18, 2025. “The coaches told us, ‘You boys from Mississippi, go on in and call your folks back home and see what’s happening. Ya’ll go on home.’”
Before his death, Evers would visit Brown’s family’s home in Jackson to strategize with a group of activists that included his older sister, entrepreneur Thelma L. Sanders.
Evers, a 37-year-old NAACP field secretary, and his family lived under constant threat from white supremacists who were angry with him for his work. He organized voter-registration drives, led state-wide investigations into killings such as the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, worked to integrate the University of Mississippi and called for economic boycotts of white-owned businesses that would not serve Black patrons.
In late May of 1963, someone threw a Molotov cocktail in Evers’ home in an attempt to set it on fire. Days later, someone nearly ran him over with their car as he stepped out of the NAACP office. Then, around midnight on June 12, 1963, as he exited his car and headed toward the front door of his home, white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, who was lurking down in bushes across the street, shot Evers from behind, killing him.
While Brown did not attend Evers’ funeral, he said the procession from the M. W. Stringer Grand Lodge on John R. Lynch Street to Collins Funeral Home on Farish Street was the largest gathering of Black folks that he had ever witnessed.
Brown still marvels at the role that Evers, who was a few weeks shy of his 38th birthday when he was assassinated, took on for his community. “Ain’t that something … how courageous he was at that young age,” he said.
The Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute and Mississippi Votes Action Fund has partnered to host the 2025 Democracy in Action Convening: Medgar Evers at 100—a multi-day series of events at the Jackson Convention Complex to commemorate the activists’ life and legacy from Thursday, June 26, to Sunday, June 29.
Events include the following:
Thursday, June 26, 6-9 p.m.: VIP Reception with daughters of Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer Sr. and Robert F. Kennedy
Friday, June 27, 3 p.m.: “Journalism, Truth, and Civil Rights” conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Howard University’s Knight Chair in Race and Journalism and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning work, “The 1619 Project”
Saturday, June 28, 2:30 p.m.: “Leadership & the Fight for Justice” keynote speech with author and voting-rights activist Stacey Abrams and Arekia Bennett-Scott
Sunday, June 29, 11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m.: Interfaith Worship Service
You can see the full list of events here.
The Mississippi Free Press spoke with people who knew Medgar Evers and others who admire his commitment to the movement.
‘Demonstrating Here Until Freedom Comes’
Medgar Wiley Evers, a native of Decatur, Mississippi, enlisted in the Army a year after his brother, Charles Evers, and was stationed in France and Germany during World War II.
After receiving an honorable discharge from the military, he studied at Alcorn State University, where he met his wife, Myrlie. While there, he sang in the university’s choir, joined the debate team, and competed in track and football.
Medgar and Myrlie Evers spent some time living in Mound Bayou, a historic Black town founded by formerly enslaved people in Bolivar County, while he worked as an insurance salesman and joined the Regional Council of Negro Leadership under the mentorship of Dr. T. R. M. Howard. Spurred by the segregation that existed in the military and the mistreatment he suffered after returning to the U.S. from the war, he set his sights on advocating for the equal treatment of all Black people.
In one of his first organized demonstrations, Evers led a boycott of gas stations that would not let Black patrons use their restrooms. “Don’t buy gas where you can’t use the restroom,” read thousands of bumper stickers that he distributed at the time.
In January 1954, soon after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision desegregated public schools, he applied for entry at the University of Mississippi School of Law, but the University denied him admission. He joined the NAACP initially to help in its campaign to desegregate the University of Mississippi and went on to become the civil-rights organization’s first field secretary.
Years later, after UM denied him entry, Medgar and Myrlie Evers advocated on behalf of James Meredith, who would become the first Black man to enroll at the university in 1962. By then, the Evers had moved to Jackson, where they helped establish the capital city’s NAACP office.
He also advocated against voter-disenfranchisement tactics like poll taxes that made it harder for Black Americans to participate in the political process. By 1963, Evers encouraged Black Jacksonians to withhold their dollars from racist business owners in the city.
“Don’t shop for anything on Capitol Street. Let’s let the merchants down on Capitol Street feel the economic pinch,” he said in a May 20, 1963, speech broadcast by WLBT. “We’ll be demonstrating here until freedom comes to Negros in Jackson, Mississippi.”
He questioned why the City of Jackson, which was at the time over 40% Black, had no Black police officers or firemen and sparse representation in City departments. “Let me appeal to the consciences of many silent, responsible citizens of the white community who know that a victory for democracy in Jackson will be a victory for democracy everywhere,” Evers said.
‘Wounded By an Assassin’s Bullet’
Medgar Evers’ dedication to his work garnered admiration from his peers but made him a target of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the white supremacist Citizens Councils.
He regularly received death threats and, in preparation for potential tragedy, he and Myrlie Evers often led their children in practicing scenarios for what to do if someone shot into their home or set it ablaze.
“I’ve had a number of threatening calls. People calling and saying that they were going to kill me, that they were going to blow my home up, and that I only had a few hours to live,” he said in a 1962 interview with CBS.
In the early morning hours of June 12, 1963, as Evers’ wife and children awaited his arrival, white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith lurked in the bushes across the street. When Evers stepped out of his car, De La Beckwith—a founding member of Mississippi’s White Citizens Council—shot him in the driveway of their home.
In an interview for the PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize, Darrell Evers, the eldest of Medgar and Myrlie Evers three children, recounted seeing his father wounded in the driveway of their home.
“My mother went to the door, and she told us to wait behind. She went to the door and she screamed. At that point, she ran outside and curiosity got the best of me,” he said.
“I walked to the front door, and I just stood there. I saw my father,” he continued. “He was lying in a pool of blood. I had a very strong feeling that my father was taken care of, even though he was wounded by an assassin’s bullet. I felt that his soul was at peace. His soul was at rest.”
Before his death, Medgar and Myrlie Evers often discussed the danger that his involvement with the fight for civil rights could bring to their family.
Still, she accepted the role that he played in the movement and supported him along the way.
“The NAACP, the movement … they were the ‘other woman’ in my life,” Myrlie Evers-Williams said in an interview with Essence Magazine in 2020.
“So when it comes down to love and working together, you make a decision as to what you can tolerate and what you can build on,” she continued. “There was no way that anything was going to separate us but death. We were partners all the way through.”
After her husband’s assassination, Myrlie Evers-Williams (who remarried in 1976 to Walter Williams) delved deeper into advocacy and activism herself. In 1989, she established the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, which was eventually renamed to highlight her legacy as well. She served as the national chairwoman of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998, helping to restore the organization’s financial standing.
Although she moved her children to California in the years after their father’s killing, she maintained ownership of the home that they shared on Margaret Walker Drive. It is now a national monument.
Nearly five years after his death, the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York officially established Medgar Evers College, the newest of the four-year senior colleges in The City University of New York.
Events To Honor Evers’ Legacy
On the 50th anniversary of Medgar Evers’ assassination, Myrlie Evers-Williams lamented that because of the nature of his death, he is often remembered with sorrow.
Pamela Junior, former director of the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, echoed that sentiment in a June 18 interview with the Mississippi Free Press. From June 26 to June 29, Junior will join other speakers, artists and community organizers for The Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute’s 2025 Democracy in Action Convening—a four-day celebration honoring his work.
The events begin Thursday evening with a reception with Medgar Evers’ and Myrlie Evers-Williams’ daughter, Reena Evers-Everette; Attallah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X; Kerry Kennedy, daughter of the late U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy; and Bettie Dahmer, daughter of Vernon Dahmer, in a conversation about their fathers’ legacies.
Featured speakers over the four days include political analyst and national correspondent Joy Ann Reid, former Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams and investigative reporter and author of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones.
The series of events includes a fundraising concert, “A Night of Legacy and Liberation,” on Saturday, June 29, featuring comedian Rita Brent and artists like Tisha Campbell, Leela James, and Q Parker & Friends.
The following week, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History will offer free admission and guided tours at the Two Mississippi Museums, which includes the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, on July 2—a date that would’ve been Medgar Evers’ 100th birthday.
‘He Loved Farming. He Loved Fishing’
These events will honor Evers’ significance to civil and voting rights, but Pamela Junior said she hopes her exhibition of curated photographs during the Democracy in Action Convening will show a different side of Medgar Evers.
“He loved farming. He loved fishing … like regular people,” Junior said.
It is important to her that people see Evers’ joy.
“I want to show him laughing. I want to show his love for his children and his wife. I wanted to show him (as) friendly. I wanted to show him (as) beautiful. I wanted to show him handsome and just proud,” she said.
“And he was a cameraman. He loved to use a camera and take photographs,” she continued. “So in the exhibition, you’ll see photos that he’s taken.”
The events marking Evers’ 100th birthday come at a time when the contributions of Black military veterans and civil-rights activists like Medgar Evers are under threat of erasure from historical records.
‘It’s Not Going To Stop Us’
President Donald Trump’s broad assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that were designed to ensure equitable opportunities has placed Black history, including civil-rights history, in its crosshairs.
During his controversial Dec. 9, 2017, trip to Jackson for the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, the president called Medgar Evers “a great American hero.” But earlier this year, in a move to delete a section of an archive that honored the contributions of Black Americans to the U.S. military, Trump’s administration removed Evers’ name from the Arlington National Cemetery site.
U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi condemned the move.
“This is not a mistake. This is a choice,” he said in a statement following the removal. Later, an Arlington Cemetery spokesperson said the information on Evers was simply being moved to a different section of the website to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI orders.
The Trump administration has also indicated plans to rename Navy ships, including the USNS Medgar Evers—a cargo ship named for Evers in 2009. That news broke on the same day as the news that U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had ordered the renaming of USNS Harvey Milk—named after the Navy veteran and gay San Francisco politician who was assassinated in 1978.
Pentagon leaders say the renamings are part of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade and his fight against so-called “wokeness.” At the same time, the Trump administration has been restoring the names of military bases that were named after Confederates who fought to defend American slavery.
Hinds County District 2 Supervisor Wanda Evers, daughter of Charles Evers and niece of Medgar Evers, spoke before the Jackson City Council on June 17 regarding the Department of Defense’s consideration to strip her uncle’s name from the naval vessel.
“My uncle fought in the war, not just for us, but for everybody,” Wanda Evers said. “My dad loved his brother. He sat with Donald Trump and told this man how much his brother meant to him, what his brother stood for.”
“We are fighting this,” she continued. “You do this to a man who fought for our country? We are not going to tolerate it.”
The Council voted unanimously for a resolution urging the DOD against taking Evers’ name off of the ship.
Days before she is set to honor Medgar Evers’ legacy, Pamela Junior said she remains undeterred by the attacks on diversity and inclusion.
“All of these things will not stop us from talking about people that we honor. It’s not going to stop us. We’re going to continue to talk about Fannie Lou Hamer. We’re going to continue to talk about Medgar Wiley Evers,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on June 18. “We’re going to continue, but what we have to do is have the knowledge to be able to continue the stories so that the stories won’t get lost in the melee.”
She encouraged young people who want to commit themselves to today’s fights for equality and social justice to seek counsel from their elders who have faced similar fights. “The energy comes from the young people. So, if we work together to bring about that change, we have to listen to the (older) folks because they went through it,” Junior said.
“We don’t know anything like they know. We have not gone through what they have gone through,” she continued. “They can teach us. They can give us strategy.”
The Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute and Mississippi Votes Action Fund’s 2025 Democracy in Action Convening is June 26 to June 29 at the Jackson Convention Complex. Visit the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute to register for a single-day or multi-day pass.
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