Medgar Evers and the NAACP Field Office in Jackson, Mississippi

In 1954 a World War II veteran named Medgar Evers applied to the law school at the University of Mississippi. He had grown up in Decatur, Mississippi, had served in the Army in Europe, and had finished college at Alcorn. The university turned him down. Ole Miss would not admit a Black student until James Meredith in 1962, and only then with federal marshals and soldiers on campus. But the rejection had an unintended consequence. Before the year was out, the NAACP hired Evers as its first field secretary in Mississippi, and he opened an office in Jackson. For the next eight and a half years, the most dangerous job in American civil rights work was his.

In short: Medgar Evers spent nearly nine years as the NAACP's Mississippi field secretary, documenting violence, registering voters, and organizing boycotts in Jackson. He was shot and killed in his driveway in June 1963, and his killer was not convicted until 1994, a delay that says as much about Mississippi's institutions as about one man's crime.

A job description written in danger

A field secretary did whatever needed doing. For Evers that meant driving thousands of miles a year on Mississippi's back roads, signing up NAACP members, and going into towns where Black residents had been beaten, threatened or killed in order to take down what happened before the story disappeared.

That last part of the work came early. In the summer of 1955, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago named Emmett Till was abducted and murdered in the Delta. Evers helped find witnesses and get information to reporters, part of the effort that turned a local killing into a national reckoning. The two white men charged were acquitted by an all-white jury in about an hour, and later described the killing to a magazine for money. Evers saw firsthand how the state's courts worked when the victim was Black.

The office in Jackson became a clearinghouse. People called with reports of night riders, of a sharecropper evicted after trying to register, of a man found dead. Evers wrote them down and sent them on to the national office, the Justice Department and the press. In a state where local newspapers often ignored or distorted such events, the paper trail itself was a form of protection, and a form of evidence.

He was, by temperament, an organizer more than an orator. He was methodical and stubborn. Friends and colleagues remembered him as funny and warm in private. He and his wife, Myrlie Evers, raised three children in a modest house in a Black middle-class neighbourhood in Jackson, a house that would become part of the story.

Why registration was the heart of it

To see why voter registration was so threatening in Mississippi, look at how the state kept Black citizens off the rolls without ever writing "whites only" into the law.

Mississippi's 1890 constitution created a system of hurdles that registrars could apply as they pleased: a poll tax, a long residency requirement, and a test that required the applicant to read or "interpret" a section of the state constitution to the registrar's satisfaction. In practice, white applicants passed and Black applicants failed, no matter what they wrote. Over the following years the state kept adding hurdles, including a requirement that the names of applicants be published in the local newspaper, which meant employers and landlords learned exactly who had tried.

The results were stark. In the early 1960s only a small fraction of Black adults in Mississippi were registered to vote, and in some majority-Black counties the number was close to zero.

Evers understood that the vote was the key to everything else, including who would serve as sheriff, prosecutor and judge, and therefore whether anyone would be charged when a Black Mississippian was murdered. He worked with local NAACP branches to hold registration drives and teach people how the tests worked. The progress was slow and the costs were high. People lost jobs and credit. Some were shot.

The Jackson movement of 1962 and 1963

By the early 1960s, younger activists were pushing for more direct action, and Evers threw himself behind them, sometimes ahead of the NAACP's national leadership, which preferred lawsuits to street campaigns.

In Jackson, students and local leaders organized a boycott of downtown white-owned stores that refused to hire Black workers or serve Black customers on equal terms. The demands were concrete: hire Black clerks and police officers, desegregate public facilities, take down "white" and "colored" signs, and set up a biracial committee to negotiate.

In late May 1963, students from Tougaloo College sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth's in downtown Jackson. A white crowd poured mustard, ketchup and sugar over them and beat some of them while police largely stood back. Photographs of the sit-in went around the country.

That spring Evers also did something few Black Mississippians had ever been able to do: he spoke on local television. After the mayor of Jackson used the airwaves to attack the movement, Evers demanded equal time under the federal broadcasting rules then in place, and the station gave it to him. He spoke calmly about what Black citizens in Jackson wanted, which was, in substance, the rights the Constitution already promised them. It made him even more visible, and more of a target. His home had already been firebombed earlier that spring.

Caught between the national office and the street

One of the least appreciated parts of Evers's job was that he answered to two audiences who often wanted different things. The NAACP's leadership in New York had built its reputation on careful litigation, the strategy that produced Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the same year Evers was hired. Lawsuits took years, but they produced binding rulings, and the national office worried that marches and mass arrests would drain its bail funds and hand segregationists an excuse for violence.

The students and young organizers arriving in Mississippi in the early 1960s, many connected to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, thought that patience had already been tried. They wanted pickets, sit-ins and jail. Evers sat in the middle. He had spent years watching the slow legal route, and he knew what it had and had not delivered in a state where federal rulings were openly defied. He also knew the cost of direct action better than most of the newcomers, because he was the one who drove to the hospitals and the funerals.

He helped make a working arrangement between the two camps. He backed the Jackson boycott, spoke at mass meetings, and got arrested on a picket line, while still filing his reports and keeping the national office informed. It was not always comfortable, and historians have described real friction between Evers and his superiors over how far and how fast to push. That tension, between institutions that want to protect their gains and activists who believe the moment demands risk, has never gone away in progressive politics. Evers's example suggests it does not have to be resolved by one side defeating the other; it can be managed by people who respect what each side brings.

He also helped James Meredith in the long legal fight to enter the University of Mississippi, the same law school that had rejected Evers himself years earlier. When Meredith finally enrolled in the fall of 1962, it took a riot, two deaths, and thousands of federal troops to put him in a classroom. Evers had been right that the door could be opened. He had also been right about what it would cost.

The night of June 11, 1963

On the evening of June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy went on national television to say that civil rights was a moral issue and to announce that he would send major civil rights legislation to Congress. It was the strongest statement any president had made on the subject in generations.

Evers spent that evening at a meeting. He came home after midnight, in the first minutes of June 12, and pulled into his driveway carrying a stack of T-shirts printed with a slogan against segregation. As he stepped out of his car, he was shot in the back by a rifleman hidden in a stand of honeysuckle across the street. Myrlie and the children, who had been taught to drop to the floor if they heard shots, ran out to find him. He died at the hospital soon afterward. He was 37.

He was buried with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Thousands of people marched in Jackson after his funeral, and his death added urgency to the bill Kennedy had just proposed. The Civil Rights Act became law the next year, and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Thirty-one years to a verdict

The rifle used in the shooting was found nearby, with a fingerprint on the scope. Investigators traced it to Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman from Greenwood and a member of the White Citizens' Council. He was tried twice for murder in 1964. Both times the all-white, all-male jury could not reach a verdict. During one of the trials, a former Mississippi governor came into the courtroom and shook Beckwith's hand in view of the jury.

For decades that was where it stayed. Myrlie Evers moved to California, remarried, went to college, and never stopped pressing for the case to be reopened. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, reporting by The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson revealed that a state agency, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, had helped screen potential jurors for the defense in the second trial. Prosecutors reopened the case, new witnesses came forward to say Beckwith had bragged about the killing, and in 1994 a jury that included Black and white Mississippians convicted him of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison and died there in 2001.

It is worth stating the opposing argument fairly. Some people argued at the time of the retrial that prosecuting a man three decades later raised real questions about fairness: witnesses had died, memories fade, and the Constitution protects defendants against being tried endlessly for the same crime. The Mississippi Supreme Court considered the speedy trial and double jeopardy objections and rejected them, and the answer is persuasive: the earlier trials ended in mistrials, not acquittals, and the delay was caused in large part by a state apparatus that had worked to protect the accused. The defendant did not lose any protection the law gives. The state finally stopped protecting him.

The house, the vote, and the long middle

The Evers home in Jackson is now a national monument, run by the National Park Service, where visitors can see the carport where he fell. Myrlie Evers went on to lead the NAACP as chair of its board in the 1990s. Medgar's brother, Charles Evers, became mayor of Fayette, Mississippi in 1969, one of the first Black mayors in the state since Reconstruction, and later took political positions that surprised many, including endorsing Republicans. That too is part of an honest story: families and movements are not monoliths.

What strikes many readers now is how much of Evers's work was the unglamorous middle of politics. He did not win a single big victory in his lifetime. He counted registrants, filed affidavits, drove to funerals, and kept the books. The breakthroughs, the Voting Rights Act, federal registrars in Mississippi counties, Black sheriffs and legislators and members of Congress, came after his death, built on the lists he had made and the people he had found.

Those protections are not static. The Voting Rights Act he helped make possible has been narrowed by the Supreme Court more than once in recent years, most recently in Louisiana v. Callais in April 2026, when the Court held that the Act did not require Louisiana's second majority-Black congressional district and struck the map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Our voting rights and redistricting page follows what states do next. Whatever you think of that ruling, the practical upshot for organizers is familiar to anyone who studied Evers: the courts will not do the registering, the turnout, or the coalition building for you.

What you can do

Evers worked at the scale of one county, one family, one registration form at a time. That scale is still available to anyone.

1. Check your own registration first, then someone else's. The voting guide has every state's registration deadlines, voter ID rules, and mail and early voting options, with links to each state's election office. Use it with a neighbour, a relative who just moved, or a student who just turned 18.
2. Find the local branch. The organizations directory lists civil rights and voting nonprofits by state, including groups that run registration drives and train poll workers. Field work still runs on volunteers.
3. Contact the people who write election law. Through Find your representatives, enter your address to get phone numbers and contact forms for your U.S. representative, senators and state legislators, along with their latest votes. State legislators draw maps and set registration rules, and they hear from far fewer constituents than members of Congress do.
4. Follow the cases. Court Watch carries this term's Supreme Court opinions with the Court's own summaries and the emergency docket, which is where many election disputes now land first.
5. Visit, or teach. If you are ever in Jackson, go to the house on what is now Margaret Walker Alexander Drive. If you teach, put Evers on the syllabus next to the names students already know. He belongs there.