John Whitehead's Commentary

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it. And we cherish our freedom at home. But are we to say to the world--and much more importantly, to each other--that this is the land of the free, except for Negroes....

We face, therefore, a great moral crisis as a country and as a people. In the sweltering heat on that June night in Jackson, Mississippi, another historic event was about to unfold at the home of Medgar Evers, Mississippi's NAACP field secretary. A World War II veteran and graduate of Alcorn State University, Evers had the reputation of being a peaceful man who constantly urged that "violence is not the way." But Evers' boycott of Jackson's merchants in the early 1960s and his outspokenness brought him within the crosshairs of those who wanted to maintain Mississippi as a rigidly segregated state. Nevertheless, despite threats of violence, he worked unceasingly to investigate violent crimes committed against blacks and seek ways to prevent them.

Throughout the years of turmoil, Evers never gave up on his home state. As he once said:

It may sound funny, but I love the South. I don't choose to live anywhere else. There's land here, where a man can raise cattle, and I'm going to do it some day. There are lakes where a man can sink a hook and fight the bass. There is room here for my children to play and grow, and become good citizens--if the white man will let them.

On that fateful night, Medgar Evers' wife and three children were still awake, waiting to find out what he thought of Kennedy's speech. The whole family jumped up when his 1962 Oldsmobile pulled into the driveway at twenty past midnight, and Myrlie, his wife, turned on the carport light.

Evers was returning from a strategy session with fellow civil rights activists. Several weeks before, unrest had filled the Jackson jail with some 700 black demonstrators. The Jackson demonstrations had made national news when a sit-in at the local Woolworth's lunch counter resulted in the beating of the demonstrators. And the focal point of the tension between the races had been Evers--who consulted Martin Luther King about how to conduct his movement in Jackson.

Arriving home, Evers was so tired that he dropped his usual precaution of exiting the car through the right-hand door, where he would have been shielded by the car and the house. Instead, he opened the left front door and stepped out onto the driveway. Evers' white dress shirt made a perfect target for the killer waiting across the street. There was a loud crash, as a bullet from a .30-'06 deer rifle exploded through Evers' back, tore through the front of his chest and hurled itself across his living room window and into the kitchen refrigerator. Due to their rigorous civil rights preparedness, the children and their mother dove to the floor like soldiers in a foxhole. When no more shots rang out, the children ran outside to find their blood-smeared father lying face down near the door. "Please, Daddy, please get up!" they cried.

Medgar Evers said nothing until neighbors and police hoisted him on a mattress and into a station wagon. "Sit me up!" he ordered. "Turn me loose!" Those were the last words Medgar Evers spoke. He died fifteen minutes after reaching the hospital.

Unrest grew as 5,000 demonstrators gathered outside the Jackson funeral home where Evers' body lay. Although the crowd was under a court-ordered public silence, some 100 young people defied the order and sang "Oh Freedom." When they broke into "This Little Light of Mine," the hand-clapping mass began to march through Jackson.

Overnight, the previously unknown Evers became a national martyr. "In Jackson, the unburied corpse of Medgar Evers already was a shrine to the altered state of American race relations," writes Taylor Branch in Parting the Waters (1988). "His murder was eerie and providential, so flushed with history as to seem perversely proper--shot in the back on the very night President Kennedy embraced racial democracy as a moral cause."

In a fitting farewell, Evers' casket was placed on a slow train through the South, headed for Washington, DC, where the body would lie in state and be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

In death, Evers inspired reappraisals, conversions and heroics on a grand scale. Many in the country, however, were still crazy with hatred. Thus, the killings did not stop with Medgar Evers. Several months later, four young black girls died when a bomb exploded in Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In 1964, three Mississippi civil rights workers (two of them white) were murdered by Klansmen. That same year, 50 marchers were hospitalized after police used tear gas, whips and clubs against them on their march to Montgomery. The assassinations of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. shocked the nation.

Early on, Martin Luther King saw that the road to freedom would not be easy. In a sermon he delivered in November 1956 in Montgomery, Alabama, King said:

Whenever you take a stand for truth and justice, you are liable to scorn. Sometimes it might mean going to jail. It might even mean physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death, then nothing could be more Christian.

As King noted, standing for truth is the greatest thing in the world: "This is the end of life. The end of life is not to be happy. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may."

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.