How the assassination of Medgar Evers galvanized the civil rights movement
In 1963, the activist and WWII veteran was murdered hours after the announcement of landmark civil rights legislation. It took 30 years to convict his killer.
He had planned to vote. But in 1946, a 21-year-old Medgar Evers left the courthouse in Decatur, Mississippi, without casting a ballot. Twenty armed white men, some of whom had been his childhood friends, had learned of his plans to vote and turned up to threaten him. Evers feared for his life. “I made up my mind that it would not be like that again,” he later wrote.
It wasn’t the first or last time Evers would experience bigotry or racial terror. During his career as a civil rights activist and NAACP leader, Evers became the target of those who wanted to uphold the South’s racist status quo. On June 12,1963, those threats became reality when he
