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Medgar We believe that there are white Mississippians who want to go forward on the race question. Their religion tells them there is something wrong with the old system. Their sense of justice and fair play sends them the same message. But whether Jackson and the State choose to change or not, the years of change are upon us. In the racial picture, things will never be as they once were. Medgar Evers, in a radio address a few weeks before his shooting I first met Medgar Evers around 1959 or 1960. As the newly elected field secretary of the NAACP, he traveled the state organizing youth chapters of the organization. My friend Albert Garner was the president of our chapter, and I worked alongside him. We usually met upstairs in his room at Hotel Plaza, a black-owned business in Greenwood that catered exclusively to African Americans , as its sign clearly stated: “Hotel Plaza for Colored.” Located near the junction of Highways 49 and 82, the hotel was one of the main hangouts for blacks at the time. I remember Medgar to be a gentle, unassuming, and soft-spoken man, not at all bombastic. He made his points without resorting to loud or flowery language. He was clear and organized. But one could tell that he was determined and motivated to get done whatever job lay before him. Medgar, at thirty-seven years of age in 1963, was the first and youngest of the major civil rights leaders to be assassinated. Certainly Malcolm X and Medgar 176 Martin Luther King were more visible on the national stage. Medgar limited his activities for the most part to Mississippi. He was our own homeboy, who loved his native state. “There’s land here,” he said in an interview for ebony magazine, “where a man can raise cattle and I’m going to do that some day.” No one could accuse him of being an outsider, as King was often labeled in his campaigns for racial justice throughout the South and nation. Born in Decatur, Mississippi, in 1925, Medgar saw violence by whites against blacks at an early age. He told Jack Mendelsohn, author of The Martyrs, that white kids used to throw rocks at him and called him and other blacks filthy names. At around eleven or twelve years of age, he witnessed the lynching of a family friend because the man had “sassed a white woman.” The victim’s bloody clothes were left on a post as a reminder to any other blacks who might think of getting out of place. As a young man, Medgar served his country in World War II, only to find upon his return that he had more formidable foes in Mississippi than he had found among the Germans and Japanese. Following his honorable service to his country, he decided to register to vote. The registration went all right, but when he tried to actually cast a ballot, a gang of whites stood in his way. He recalled the incident to Mendelsohn: “We fought during the war for America, and Mississippi was included. Now after the Germans and the Japanese hadn’t killed us, it looked as though the white Mississippians would.” Evers concluded, “I was born in Decatur, was raised there, but I never in my life was permitted to vote there.”1 It was as a student at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi, that he met his future wife, Myrlie Beasley. After graduation, Medgar became a salesman for an insurance company, which paid him a salary sufficient to support his wife and himself. Around this time, he joined the NAACP to attempt to pave the way for other blacks to vote. Indeed, when we consider the full range of protests and boycotts in which he was involved, it was the right to vote that lay closest to his heart. This was in line with the objective identified by the Mississippi Ministerial Improvement Association as early as 1958. Their primary goal was to use every legal means to encourage registration and voting. Certainly it was in an attempt to secure voting rights for blacks that brought Medgar and other activists to Greenwood. And it was on this issue that he faced his greatest threats and challenges from whites. As Albert Garner and I talked to Medgar, we didn’t realize then that he was under constant surveillance. Everything he did from around 1956 until his death in 1963 was carefully monitored. It was...

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