Child Hood  
    Medgar Wiley Evers was born July 2, 1925, near Decatur, Mississippi.  Medgar was one of four children born to James and Jesse Evers.  Evers’s childhood was typical in many ways of Black youths who grew up in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression of the 1930s and in the years preceding World War II. As a youth, Evers’s parents showered him with love and affection, taught him family values, and routinely disciplined him when needed. The Evers home emphasized education, religion, and hard work.  

Adolescnece
    He attended school there until he was inducted into the army in 1943.  After serving in Normandy, he attended Alcorn College (now Alcron State University), majoring in businessadministration.  At Alcorn he met Myrlie Beasley, of Vicksburg, and the next year, they were married on December 24, 1951, Evers and his wife moved to Jackson.    The legacy of Medgar Evers is everywhere present in the Mississippi of today. This peaceful man, who had constantly urged that “violence is not the way” but who paid for his beliefs with his life, was a prominent voice in the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi.   Evers joined the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and helped organize chapters all over Mississippi. In 1954 the NAACP employed Evers as its full-time state field secretary. This main involved Evers in monitoring, collecting and publicizing data concerning civil rights violations.

Adulthood
    Medgar and Myrlie worked together to set up the NAACP office, and he began investigating violent crimes committed against blacks and sought ways to prevent them.  He served in the United States Army during Word War II from 1935 through 1945.  When he returned to the US, he met Myrlie Beasley and they married in 1`951.  Soon after he returned, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree and he began setting up local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP.)  He also organized boycotts against gas stations that did not let Blacks use their restrooms.  He then worked as an insurance agent until 1954 when segregation was declared unconstitutional.  Evers tried to get into the University of Mississippi Law School and was rejected.  He felt that discrimination was the reason.  This did get the attention of the NAACP, however, and that same year they appointed him as Mississippi's first field secretary.

Lasting Impact On Mississippi  
    Medgar Evers was killed by an assassin’s bullet. Black and white leaders from around the nation came to Jackson for his funeral and then gathered at Arlington National Cemetery for his interment. Following his death, his brother, Charles, took over Medgar’s position as state field secretary for the NAACP. The accused killer, a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith, stood trial twice in the 1960s, but in both cases the all-white juries could not reach a verdict. Finally, in a third trial in 1994 (and thirty-one years after Evers’ murder), Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.  Ten years after Medgar’s death the national office of the NAACP reported that Mississippi had 145 black elected officials and that blacks were enrolled in each of the state’s public and private institutions of higher learning.... In 1970, according to statistics compiled by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, more than one-fourth or 26.4 percent of black pupils in Mississippi public schools attended integrated schools with at least a 50 percent white enrollment. When Medgar died in 1963, only 28,000 blacks were registered voters. By 1971, there were 250,000 and by 1982 over 500,000.  Many tributes have been paid to Medgar Evers over the years, including a book by his widow, For Us, the Living, but perhaps the greatest tribute can be found in changes noted in Mississippi Black History Makers.

“It may sound funny, but I love the South. I don’t choose to live anywhere else. There’s land here, where a man can raise cattle, and I’m going to do it some day. There are lakes where a man can sink a hook and fight the bass. There is room here for my children to play and grow, and become good citizens—if the white man will let them....”