Medgar Evers
Mississippi Martyr
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
Civil rights activist Medgar Wiley Evers was well aware of the dangers he would face when he challenged the status quo in Mississippi in the 1950s and '60s, a place and time known for the brutal murders of Emmett Till, Reverend George Lee, Lamar Smith, and others. Nonetheless, Evers consistently investigated the rapes, murders, beatings, and lynchings of black Mississippians and reported the horrid incidents to a national audience, all the while organizing economic boycotts, sit-ins, and street protests in Jackson as the NAACP’s first full-time Mississippi field secretary. He organized and participated in voting drives and nonviolent direct-action protests, joined lawsuits to overturn state-supported school segregation, and devoted himself to a career path that eventually cost him his life. This biography of an important civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers’s widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections, and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provides a detailed account of Evers’s NAACP work and a clearer understanding of the racist environment that ultimately led to his murder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams, a professor of history and African American Studies at Mississippi State University, offers a scrupulously researched biography of the civil rights pioneer Medgar Evers (1925 1963), who heroically reported on the lynchings, rapes, and murders of black Mississippians and organized civil disobedience in the streets of Jackson. His early life was marked by racial violence so severe, says Williams, that for Evers, "the question always remained, how far could you push before whites killed you?" and it is this that fueled his activism. From selling the Chicago Defender, the preeminent black newspaper of the prewar era, to his accession to Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, Evers never gave up the struggle to "form a new Mississippi that embraced all its citizens equally." The story of this admirable and principled man, whose nine years in a leadership post at the front lines of the civil rights struggle in "what could be historically termed the most racially oppressive state in America" ended at the age of 37 when he was shot dead by a white supremacist. Even if the book occasionally sacrifices smooth narrative for scholarly rigor and documentation, it's an important and readable study of this seminal leader and the history of the civil rights movement.
