File:Medgar Evers, Assassinated Civil Rights Hero (The Peace Hat).jpg

Tony and I visited with Medgar Evers awhile back. He asked me to give you some information about this courageous man:

Medgar Evers served in the US armed forces during WWII, yet when he returned to his native Mississippi, like veterans all over the segregated South, he was forced to reenter a world of injustice and inequality. He began wirk for the NAACP in 1954, becoming Mississippi's first Field Secretary. Evers lived not only with daily harrassment, but with terrorist threats as he traveled throughout the state, trying to recruit NAACP members and to gather evidence against those who murdered black people. When James Meredith became the first African-American admitted to the University of Mississippi under federal protection in 1962, Evers visited him frequently. The victory for school integration prompted him to attack segregation in his hometown of Jackson. Evers' campaign began on May 28, 1963, with sit-ins at Woolworths. Just two weeks later he was shot to death outside his home.

On June 23, 1964, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens' Council and Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for Evers' murder. During the course of his first trial in 1964, De La Beckwith was visited by former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and one time Army Major General Edwin A. Walker. All-white juries twice that year deadlocked on De La Beckwith's guilt.

In 1994, 30 years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence, and Bobby DeLaughter took on the job as the attorney. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly good state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after having lived as a free man for the three decades following the killing. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January 2001.

sources: Library of Congress, Wiki