courtesy FBI.gov
Former Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, would have been 95 on July 2, 2020, but died before his 38th birthday after a white-supremacist sniper shot him at his Jackson home.
In the Spirit of Medgar:
July 8 - 21, 2020 • jfp.ms
State Flag Came Down the Week Slain Hero Would’ve Turned 95
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s a young girl growing up in Jackson, Miss., in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Reena Evers-Everette, the second child and only daughter of the iconic civil-rights activist Medgar Evers, had all the opportunity in the world to hate white people. Before the assassination of her father in 1963, which made him a black-freedom martyr nearly five years before Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the Evers’ house. It went under the car.
by Kayode Crown Evers’ wife, Myrlie, was able to get the bomb from underneath the car with the help of a neighbor before it did any damage. When her father came back late that night, he hugged Reena to say good night, and she asked him, “Do all white people hate us?” The answer he gave her that night marked who she is now. “He called me Sunshine (his nickname for her), and he said, ‘There is good and bad in every race; always look for the good.’ So that has stuck to me,” EversEverette said. Although her mother took the
children out of Mississippi after her father’s murder, Evers-Everette returned to Mississippi in 2012. She is now the executive director of The Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute in Jackson, set up to extend both of her parents’ legacies. She is also a fellow with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network, a multiracial group working together to face and heal racial division and inequities. ‘Divisive Flag’ Comes Down When the signature of Gov. Tate Reeves put an end to the 126-year reign of the former Mississippi flag with the
Confederate emblem on June 30, it was two days before what would have been the 95th birthday of Medgar Evers. That his daughter was at the signing ceremony—she wore a black mask with “EVERS” in white lettering—would surely make him proud, having lost his life to an assassin’s bullet in 1963 in his fight for racial justice in Mississippi. “He, along with so many ancestors who have been in the fight to eradicate injustices, was on such a high heavenly cloud of joy, even though it was not within their lifetime on earth. I felt the support in the spirit of my father that day,” Evers-
