Medgar Evers

Shot in the back on 12 June 1963 at his home in Jackson, Mississippi by Byron De La Beckwith; the NAACP field secretary was killed hours after a presidential speech on civil rights.

Overview

Evers, a war veteran and Mississippi first NAACP field secretary, organized boycotts and investigated killings, including the Emmett Till case, under constant death threats, a burning cross on his lawn among them. Returning home after midnight, he was shot with a rifle from the weeds across the street and died within the hour; his children witnessed the aftermath. Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and founder of white supremacist citizens councils, was tried twice in 1964 before all-white juries that hung. Based on new evidence, the state retried him in 1994, and he was convicted and died in prison. The justice delayed three decades became a landmark of the civil rights era and the subject of the film Ghosts of Mississippi.