Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr

5. The Black Wave: CONSERVATISM MEETS DETERMINISM

5. The Black Wave CONSERVATISM MEETS DETERMINISM The NAACP believes that Jackson can change if it wills to do so. If there should be resistance, how much better to have turbulence to effect improvement, rather than turbulence to maintain a stand-pat policy. —Medgar Evers Let it not be said of us when history records these momentous times that we slept while our rights were being taken by those who would keep us in slavery and by those who say that we are doing alright. —Medgar Evers Race had plenty to do with it [regarding James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss]. It was the overruling, overriding factor. We just had a Little Rock ten years behind time. —Former Mississippi governor J. P. Coleman I learned a long time ago from Martin King that peace is not necessarily the absence of turmoil; but peace is the presence of love and justice. And there ain’t going to be no peace until love and justice prevail. —Aaron Henry To live . . . [is] actually to be free and you cannot want to be alive and not want to fight for freedom. —Koigi Wa Wamwere 171 Williams2RevisedPages:Layout 1 9/7/11 9:53 AM Page 171 THE TRAGIC EVENTS of the 1950s made an indelible mark on Evers. As a result, his anger and frustration with the status of “Negroes” in Mississippi intensified during the 1960s. Correspondence during the early 1960s indicates that Evers leaned more toward nonviolent direct action as a primary method for achieving social and economic equality. He must have considered the possibility that with violence directed against African Americans intensifying throughout the state, nondirect tactics would take too long to achieve the desired result. His appeal for more direct action against the system of segregation was neither new nor unfamiliar to those who knew him. It was also apparent that Evers had not given up his dream of attending law school. In 1954, Medgar Evers had gained the attention of the NAACP by attempting to integrate the University of Mississippi Law School. Five years later, the NAACP was considering the benefits the association could reap if he obtained a law degree. Gloster Current apprised Robert Carter “that Medgar Evers [still] has ambitions of studying law.” Current inquired whether it was possible for Evers to continue his NAACP work and attend classes at “Baton Rouge, Southern University or Loyola during the week and work for us on weekends with a reduced schedule?” Current added that he “thought we [NAACP] would be better off if we had a home grown lawyer down there serving as field secretary.”1 Carter, however, believed that “it would be very difficult for him to study law in New Orleans or Baton Rouge and do the kind of job which you need him to do.” Although Carter did not seem optimistic that the plan would work, he suggested to Current that if Evers could “work it out and give you some idea of how it can be done,” they would be in a better position to evaluate the possibility of his succeeding.2 Thus, as late as 1959, Evers still desired to become an attorney and thus acquire another means of combating inequality but, again, leaving the state was not an option. Medgar Evers, at all cost, wanted to remain in Mississippi and use the law as another means of resisting the state’s oppressive regime, which was grounded in and founded upon oppressive legalities. Evers notified Gloster Current that he wished to “begin such study in September of 1959.” He admitted, however, that he did not wish to leave the state to attend law school. “I feel that since I have an application already on file with the University of Mississippi Law School (since January, 1954 and before employment with the NAACP),” Evers noted, “I would like to pursue that application to the fullest extent.” Although Evers understood that by pursuing this path his chances of acceptance dwindled, the process itself proved to be of greater importance to him. Thus, Evers proclaimed that the “attempt would be made to open the university to Negroes.” Furthermore, 172 Medgar Evers Williams2RevisedPages:Layout 1 9/7/11 9:53 AM Page 172 he believed that the publicity that would accompany such an endeavor might benefit NAACP membership in Mississippi by increasing “financial and moral support from such professionals, as teachers, who desire to go to the...