Medgar Evers

This story is by Steven Pokin, who a white boomer guy who writes a column for the Springfield, Missouri, newspaper. He wrote it as a Facebook post on August 23 and made it public... a friend of mine shared it today. It's not a special anniversary in Medgar Evers' life (born July 2, 1925) or death (June 12, 1963) or anything.

Just a personal story showing the effect of seeing a piece of history in person:

This is where the two little sons of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers slept. When he had this house built in Jackson, Mississippi, he had the window you see elevated to make it less likely his children would be shot.

He had the house built without a front door for security reasons. The main entrance was at the side of the house, at the end of a car port.

His house was the only one on the street that had small stones and gravel on a flat roof. That way, it would not catch fire is someone tossed a lit torch on the roof.

He had his children’s mattresses placed directly on the floor to make them less visible targets.

He told his wife and children to sit on the floor while watching TV.

In 1963, he was the NAACP’s first Mississippi field director. Three times that year, someone had fired into his home.

As a boy, he had witnessed the separate lynchings of a black man and a 10-year-old black boy — who had made the mistake of going to the whites-only county fair.

On June 10, he was not home when someone tried to enter through the rear door of his home. His wife moved the refrigerator to block entry. They left the refrigerator there.

That week, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy spoke to the nation about civil rights, justice and a more perfect union. The President said it was coming and he asked the nation to give him time that, ultimately, he did not have.

Medgar Evers gave a speech in Jackson the night of June 11, 1963. He returned home — to this home — lugging many T-shirts that he planned to give out at a rally the next day. They said: “Say No to Jim Crow.”

He was excited about the President’s speech.

He parked behind his wife’s car in the driveway and was almost in the car port when an assassin across the street shot him with a high-powered rifle.

No ambulance came.

A neighbor took him to the whites-only hospital. Doctors were unsure if they should treat him. They were out of “Negro blood” and feared they could lose their medical licenses if they used white blood to try to save a black man.

Then, a white doctor stepped in and said none of that mattered and worked valiantly to try to save the life of Medgar Evers, who had served this country at the invasion of Normandy.

He died about 40 minutes after being shot.

The bullet entered his back, came out his chest, went through a window, went through an interior wall leading to the kitchen and left a dent in the refrigerator.

I touched that dent today. Then, I went into the bedroom and saw the mattresses on the floor with the Teddy Bears on them.

I have never before felt history the way I felt it today.

Did you learn about Medgar Evers in school? I learned something at some point, but it may have been through my own reading or viewing, and I don't think I knew many details, just that he was killed and was an NAACP field director (on an average day, I would have been lucky to have named his state as Mississippi). He was living with and confronting the existence of terrorism every day, and he was killed for it.

It seems as though there should be statues of Medgar Evers all over the South instead of Civil War generals, if folks feel the need for statues.