55 years ago today (June 12, 1963) – Civil rights activist and NAACP field secretary Medgar Wiley Evers was murdered by a white supremacist in the driveway of his home in Mississippi.
Before becoming involved in the civil rights movement, Evers served in the U.S. Army and fought at the Battle of Normandy during WWII. By the early 1950s he was working with the RCNL and NAACP to end segregation of schools and public facilities and enforce voting rights in the South.
On June 11, a standoff between Alabama Governor George Wallace and the federal government at the University of Alabama led to the mobilization of the National Guard and the registration of two black students, Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood, at the university. That evening, President Kennedy gave a speech on civil rights in the United States, defining the issue as a moral fight and proposing what would become President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964. Evers had stayed late at an NAACP meeting that evening to listen to the speech. He returned home in the early hours of June 12th and was gunned down, in front of his family, by a white supremacist and Klansmen who was convicted of the murder in 1994. Evers was 42 years old at the time of his death.
Every moment counts; let's capture them.