Medgar Wiley Evers was born on 2 July 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi, and served in the US Army during the Second World War, landing at Normandy, before returning home and earning a business degree at Alcorn College, where he met his future wife, Myrlie.
After being denied admission to the University of Mississippi Law School because of his race in 1954, Evers became the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, organising voter registration drives, boycotts and investigations into racial violence across one of the most dangerous states in America for such work.
Evers played a central role in investigating the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and worked to desegregate public facilities and the University of Mississippi, becoming a prominent target of white supremacist hostility, including the firebombing of his home in May 1963.
On 12 June 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy's televised address on civil rights, Evers was shot and killed in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, becoming one of the movement's most prominent martyrs.
Evers's murder galvanised national support for civil rights legislation, and although two initial trials of Beckwith ended in hung juries, he was finally convicted in 1994, three decades later; Evers was posthumously awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
- First NAACP field secretary in Mississippi
- Led voter registration drives and desegregation campaigns across Mississippi
- Investigated the murder of Emmett Till
- Posthumously awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal
- His assassination helped galvanise support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964
- Organising work often carries the highest personal risk. Evers's years of voter registration and desegregation work in Mississippi made him a marked target for white supremacist violence.
- Justice delayed does not mean justice denied. It took three decades and two hung juries before Evers's killer was finally convicted in 1994.