In the six decades since Evers was murdered and the federal government enacted voting rights legislation, Black voter registration in Mississippi has increased dramatically. The airport and the main post office in Jackson have both been named for Evers for many years, and a statue of him stands at a busy intersection.Ībout 38% of Mississippi residents are Black - the largest percentage of any U.S. In 2013, she delivered the invocation during then-President Barack Obama’s second inauguration. She served as national chairperson of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998, winning the position within days of when Williams died of cancer. Mississippi’s white power structure in the early 1960s prevented most Black people from registering to vote, and most public schools remained segregated until 1970.Įvers-Williams said her home state needed to overcome division and “show the rest of this nation that Mississippi was not at the bottom of the heap, but that we could rise to be what we should be.” She and the children moved to California in 1964, and she raised them there.Įvers-Williams has been a civil rights activist in her own right. “And I realized it was just beginning because there were three children - Medgar’s children, my children - who were looking up to me.” “When my husband was shot at the doorstep of our home - JI thought my life was over,” Evers-Williams said. His wife worked alongside him as his secretary. He also investigated lynchings, beatings and other violence that Black residents suffered at the hands of white segregationists. As the first field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP beginning in 1954, he led voter registration drives and boycotts to push for racial equality. Evers was a World War II veteran who fought in Europe and then faced the hostile realities of a deeply segregated society after returning home to Mississippi.
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