A multi-county advisory committee has started work on a project to honor one of Mississippi’s most important civil rights heroes.
The committee, which includes former Newton County Election Commissioner and former Newton County NAACP President Walter Gardner, Union Ward 3 Alderman Billy McCune and East Central Community College history professors Brian White and Madison Price, is working on a project to preserve the legacy of slain civil rights activist and Decatur native Medgar Evers.
The project, which was formed in a partnership with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in March, is titled “My Story, My Space,” and its purpose is to study and research information about Evers and interview individuals who knew him personally.
Former judge and Tougaloo College adjunct professor Constance Slaughter-Harvey is president of the committee and said her meeting with Evers several decades ago inspired her to pursue a legal career.
“I met Medgar when I was a student at Tougaloo College in 1962. I went to Tougaloo to become a doctor, and when I met Medgar, I changed my major to law,” Slaughter-Harvey said. “He’s had an influence on my life.”
Gardner, a Decatur native who in June organized the first ever Underground Railroad Re-Run which traversed the routes that were used by escaped slaves on their way to freedom in the 19th century, said his working relationship with Slaughter-Harvey is what led him to be involved in the project.
“We’ve been knowing each other for nearly 50 years, and we’ve had interactions in regards to civil rights activities in one form or the other,” Gardner said. “She reached out to me to serve on this advisory board which I’m happy to do because it’s a very good cause. With Decatur being the place that he spent his childhood and young adulthood, it’s an opportunity for Decatur itself to be highlighted along the Civil Rights Trail.”
The committee held a meeting at Decatur’s Town Hall on June 28 and White said that some of the ECCC students who are assisting with the project have conducted several interviews with Evers’ former colleagues and friends and that they were in the process of transcribing them.
Evers was born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur to a farming family. Evers was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. He fought in both France and Germany during World War II, and received an honorable discharge in 1946.
Upon returning home to Newton County, he attempted to register to vote but was turned away by at the circuit clerk’s office. This denial was one of main events that spurred Evers’ to fight for voting rights for all African Americans, and a stone tablet commemorating the event was dedicated in front of the Newton County Courthouse several years ago.
In 1954, Evers became the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. As such, he organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations, and economic boycotts of companies that practiced discrimination. He also worked to investigate crimes perpetrated against blacks, including the murder of Chicago teen Emmitt Till in 1955 in Money, Mississippi.
On June 12, 1963, Evers was assassinated in front of his home in Jackson by Byron De La Beckwith, a white segregationist and founding member of Mississippi’s White Citizens Council. After hung juries during two trials in the 1960s, De La Beckwith was finally convicted for the killing in 1994.
Although Evers has been honored with several buildings and monuments in the state, including the Jackson-Medgar Evers International Airport, Harvey said that his hometown has often been left out and that was one of the things that prompted her to start the project.
“I felt concerned that Jackson had the Medgar Evers Museum, but he was born in Decatur and he was raised in Decatur, so why doesn’t Decatur have something? I’ve been raising that issue for about 25 years,” Harvey said.
Gardner has been involved with other projects to honor Evers in the past, serving as vice-chairman of that committee to construct the statue of Evers on the campus of Alcorn State University that was unveiled in 2013. Gardner also helped the Town of Decatur acquire the property where Evers’ childhood home stood. and there has been some discussion on possibly placing something there to honor him but nothing concrete has been planned yet. He said that he hopes the project will inspire the present generation just as his generation was inspired by Evers’ bravery five decades ago.
“It’s closer to my heart because of the sacrifice he was willing to make in those most dangerous years. To even approach equal rights and the right to vote, all of those things were very risky back in the 1950s and 1960s,” Gardner said. “Those were some dangerous and bloody days. But the man’s courage was just an inspiration to all of us younger people.”
Once completed, the committed plans to present the My Story My Space project as a gift to ECCC. The committee also announced that Michael Vinson Williams, author of the Evers biography “Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr” will be speaking in Decatur in September.
