Murphy Browne © Wednesday June 8- 2016
MEDGAR EVERS ASSASSINATED JUNE 12-1963
“In the state of Mississippi many years ago
A boy of 14 years got a taste of southern law
He saw his friend a hanging and his color was his crime
And the blood upon his jacket left a brand upon his mind
Too many martyrs and too many dead
Too many lies too many empty words were said
Too many times for too many angry men
Oh let it never be again
His name was Medgar Evers and he walked his road alone
Like Emmett Till and thousands more whose names we’ll never know
They tried to burn his home and they beat him to the ground
But deep inside they both knew what it took to bring him down
The killer waited by his home hidden by the night
As Evers stepped out from his car into the rifle sight
He slowly squeezed the trigger, the bullet left his side
It struck the heart of every man when Evers fell and died.
And they laid him in his grave while the bugle sounded clear
Laid him in his grave when the victory was near
While we waited for the future for freedom through the land
The country gained a killer and the country lost a man.”
Excerpt from “Ballad of Medgar Evers”, sung by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Singers, composed by Reverend Matthew Jones, Sr.
The Reverend Matthew Jones, Sr. composed the “Ballad of Medgar Evans” to commemorate the life of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, who was lynched on June 12, 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi. Medgar Wiley Evers was an African-American civil rights activist from Mississippi who worked to end segregation at the University of Mississippi and gain social justice and voting rights.
Evers was born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, the third of five children of James and Jesse (née Wright) Evers. He grew up on his parents’ farm in segregated Mississippi and was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 at age 18. He fought in both France and Germany during World War II and received an honorable discharge in 1946.
In 1948, he entered Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University) in Lorman, Mississippi. During his senior year, Evers married a fellow student, Myrlie Beasley. They later had three children: Darrell, Reena and James. The couple moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where African-American entrepreneur Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard hired him to sell insurance for his Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company.
In 1954, the year of the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which purportedly desegregated schools in the USA, Evers resigned from the insurance business. He subsequently applied to and was denied admission to the University of Mississippi Law School. His unsuccessful effort to integrate the state’s oldest public educational institution attracted the attention of staff at the national office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Later that year, Evers moved to the state capital of Jackson and became the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi.
As an extremely effective state field secretary of the NAACP, Evers recruited members throughout Mississippi and organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations and economic boycotts of White-owned companies that practiced discrimination. He also investigated crimes perpetrated against African-Americans, most notably the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy who was murdered by two White men for allegedly whistling at a White woman in August, 1955 in Money, Mississippi. Evers consistently investigated the rapes, murders, beatings and lynching of African-Americans in Mississippi and reported the horrific crimes to a national audience, while also organizing economic boycotts, sit-ins, and street protests in Jackson.
On June 12, 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, Evers was leading a campaign for integration when he was shot and killed by a White assassin in front of his home. His wife and three small children heard the shots (he was shot in the back and a bullet ricocheted into his home) and witnessed him taking his last breath in the driveway of their home. The domestic terrorism that defined the era had claimed another victim. He became another martyr of the struggle. The martyrs include activists who were targeted for death because of their civil rights work, random victims of White vigilantes determined to halt the movement and individuals who, in the sacrifice of their own lives, brought new awareness to the struggle.
During the years of the Civil Rights Movement, African-Americans struggled to outlaw the discrimination of their people and gain voting rights. African-Americans were the victims of horrifying acts of violence at the hands of White Americans and the Jim Crow Laws ensured their disenfranchisement. The American government through agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sought and failed to destroy the integrity and might of African-Americans who were fighting for their rights.
It is truly amazing in hindsight that African-Americans in spite of the savagery of the White resistance, especially in the southern states, continued their struggle for civil rights. One of the reasons they were able to continue was the power of the music of the era. As we recognize Black Music Month throughout June it is important to remember the role music played in the Civil Rights Movement. Black Music played a paramount role in the Civil Rights Movement. Black Music was one way African-Americans could express their feelings to each other and the world. Black Music provided spiritual support and was used as a tool for peace as the movement led by Dr. King advocated peaceful, nonviolent protest. Black Music unified African-Americans under a common goal to stop the abuse, discrimination and exploitation of their people.
During the Albany Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. acknowledged: “The freedom songs are playing a strong and vital role in our struggle.”
When asked about the importance of the song “We Shall Overcome”, Dr. King responded: “One cannot describe the vitality and emotion this one song evokes across the south land.”
This song unified African-Americans and gave them hope that one day they would overcome the discrimination to which they were subjected. The Albany Movement was a desegregation coalition formed in Albany, Georgia, on November 17, 1961, by local activists, SNCC and the NAACP and ended in summer 1962. The organization was led by William G. Anderson, a local African-American doctor of osteopathic medicine. In December 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) became involved in assisting the Albany Movement with protests against racial segregation. It was the first mass movement in the modern civil rights era to have as its goal the desegregation of an entire community and it resulted in the jailing of more than 1,000 African-Americans in Albany and surrounding rural counties.
Black Music during the Civil Rights Movement also served as a reminder of the tragedies and hardships African-Americans were experiencing. In March 1964 at Carnegie Hall, Nina Simone sang “Mississippi Goddamn” as a reminder of the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, where four African-American children were killed. Simone, a versatile musical genius, excoriated the Jim Crow South and celebrated the strength of the African-American community as it struggled against discrimination with “Mississippi Goddamn”.
On the morning of September 15, 1963, Ku Klux Klan members planted and detonated a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama, killing four African-American girls. African-American musician John Coltrane wrote the song “Alabama” in response. In “A Change is Gonna Come” a self-penned song initially recorded for a benefit album to raise funds for the SCLC, Sam Cooke used his voice to protest racism and encourage faith in the possibilities for a more egalitarian USA.
The undeniable and hard-won successes of the Civil Rights Movement in ridding the South of statutory segregation and disenfranchisement did not create a society free of racism or racial discrimination in which genuine equality of opportunity could flourish. The movement nevertheless did go hand in hand with the rejuvenated sense of African-American pride and empowerment. Since then there have been several movements and individuals who continued the work of the martyrs and Black Music has continued to play a part in the successive movements.
The activism that led to the founding of Black Lives Matter and the United Nations declaring 2015-2024 the International Decade for People of African Descent are just two examples. There is always hope.
“Too many martyrs and too many dead
Too many lies too many empty words were said
Too many times for too many angry men
Oh let it never be again”
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