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TAKE 13 Medgar Evers

Continuing the Lewis and Clark-class tradition of honoring legendary pioneers and explorers, the Navy's newest underway replenishment ship recognizes civil rights activist Medgar Evers (1925-1963) who forever changed race relations in America. The Navy announced 10 October 2009 that the newest Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo/ammunition ship (T-AKE) would be named USNS Medgar Evers. The announcement was made by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus during a Jackson State University speaking engagement in Mississippi.

Designated T-AKE 13, Medgar Evers will be the 13th ship of the class, and is being built by General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego. As a combat logistics force ship, Medgar Evers will help the Navy maintain a worldwide forward presence by delivering ammunition, food, fuel, and other dry cargo to U.S. and allied ships at sea.

As part of Military Sealift Command's Naval Fleet Auxiliary Force, Medgar Evers will be designated as a United States Naval Ship (USNS) and will be crewed by 124 civil service mariners and 11 Navy sailors. The ship is designed to operate independently for extended periods at sea, can carry a helicopter, is 689 feet in length, has an overall beam of 106 feet, has a navigational draft of 30 feet, displaces approximately 42,000 tons, and is capable of reaching a speed of 20 knots using a single-shaft, diesel-electric propulsion system.

Medgar Evers (1925-1963)

At a time when America was wrestling to end segregation and racial injustice, Medgar Evers led efforts to secure the right to vote for all African Americans and to integrate public facilities, schools, and restaurants. Evers, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi, was a dynamic leader whose life was cut short by assassination. On June 12, 1963, the Mississippi native was assassinated in the driveway of his home. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Washington, D.C. with full Military Honors, having been a veteran of World War II. His loss at age 37 was a tragic reversal for the civil rights movement, but it galvanized further protest and drew the sympathetic concern of the federal government to his cause. Evers' death prompted President John F. Kennedy to ask the Congress for a comprehensive civil rights bill.

"It may sound funny, but I love the South," Evers once said. "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 someday. There are lakes where a man can sink a hook and fight a bass. There is room here for my children to play and grow and become good citizens - if the white man will let them."

Medgar Evers was born on July 2, 1925 in Decatur Mississippi. As the child of a Mississippi farmer, Medgar Evers experienced racism everyday. White children on school buses taunted him as he walked 12 miles each way to the ill-equipped school for black children. Friends became lynching victims. Evers joined the Army and served honorably in Germany and France during World War II. When he returned, he joined the NAACP after a mob of armed whites wouldn't let him enter the polls to vote. He enrolled in Alcorn College (1948-1952), a historically black institution located near Lorman, Mississippi, where he was an accomplished student and athlete. There he met fellow college student and his future wife, Myrlie Beasley ; the couple was married in 1951. Over the next two years, Evers worked as an insurance salesman in Mound Bayou and organized NAACP chapters throughout the Mississippi Delta.

Evers became a protégé of T.R.M. Howard, a black physician and businessman who founded both an insurance agency and a medical clinic in the Mississippi Delta. Howard also established the Mississippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a civil rights organization that employed a "top-down" approach, encouraging leading African-American professionals and clergy to promote self-help, business ownership, and, ultimately, the demand for civil rights among the broader black population.

Evers determined to see the freedoms he had fought for overseas established at home. He soon emerged as one of the Mississippi Regional Council's most effective activists. Like his mentor, he mixed business with civil rights campaigning, working as a salesman for Howard's Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company while organizing local chapters of the NAACP and leading boycotts of gas stations that refused blacks access to restrooms. ("Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom" read one bumper sticker.)

In 1954, Evers challenged the segregationist order by applying for enrollment at the law school of the all-white University of Mississippi, known as "Ole Miss." Evers was turned away, but his effort won him the admiration of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, and he was subsequently named the organization's first field secretary in Mississippi, a dangerous and lonely assignment.

As the first National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) field secretary in Mississippi (1954-1963), Medgar Evers worked to end racial violence and improve the quality of life for black Mississippians. Evers and his wife Myrlie established the NAACP office in Jackson, Mississippi in the mid-1950s. He tirelessly led marches, prayer vigils, voter registration drives and boycotts.

As early as 1955, Evers' name appeared on a death list. Yet he persistently appealed to blacks and whites to work together for a peaceful solution to social problems. At the time, however, whites' cooperation appeared very much in doubt. Two of the United States' most infamous modern lynchings occurred in Mississippi in those years - the 1955 killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till, and the 1959 lynching of Mack Charles Parker in Poplarville. Evers helped investigate the Till murder, a case that received extensive national attention. Despite strong evidence of the defendants' guilt, an all-white male jury took only 67 minutes to acquit them. One juror later asserted that the panel took a "soda break" to stretch deliberations beyond one hour, "to make it look good." (In May 2004, the Justice Department, calling the 1955 prosecution a "grotesque miscarriage of justice," reopened the murder investigation. But with many potential witnesses long dead and evidence scattered, a grand jury declined to indict the last remaining living suspect.)

Mississippi reacted harshly to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling and its order to desegregate the nation's public schools. Local white groups known as Citizens Councils vowed to resist integration at any cost. Evers, who had earlier been denied admission to Ole Miss, assisted other blacks' efforts to enroll there. In 1962, Air Force veteran James Meredith was admitted to the school by a direct order from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. State officials resisted the order, and Meredith managed to begin classes only after a night of rioting in which two people were killed and hundreds injured.

The eyes of the nation turned to Jackson in the early 1960s as Evers orchestrated a boycott of white merchants. As his efforts on Meredith's behalf intensified the segregationist hatred of Evers, he launched a series of boycotts, sit-ins, and protests in Jackson, Mississippi's largest city. Even the NAACP was occasionally concerned with the extent of Evers's efforts. When Martin Luther King Jr. led a high-profile civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, Evers stepped up his Jackson Movement - demanding the hiring of black police, the creation of a biracial committee, the desegregation of downtown lunch counters, and the use of courtesy titles (Mr., Mrs., Miss) by whites who dealt with black shoppers in downtown stores.

The city's reaction was ominous. Workmen erected on the nearby Mississippi State Fairgrounds a series of fenced stockades capable of holding thousands of protestors - a blunt message to those who considered protesting. Undeterred, Evers and his supporters fought on. Local blacks, including many children, took part in the subsequent rallies and store boycotts, marching and joining picket lines. These demonstrations represented a culmination of Evers's long years of civil rights work. A high point came when Evers appeared on local television to explain the movement's objectives. Whites were not accustomed to seeing black people on TV, especially presenting their case in their own words, and many were outraged.

Soon, attempts were made on Evers's life: When disgruntled racists hurled a firebomb into the Evers home in 1963, Myrlie Evers bravely put out the flames with a garden hose, a vehicle nearly ran him over. As Evers returned home on the night of June 12, 1963, he was ambushed and shot as he got out of his car. He died at his own front door.

The murder of so popular a leader enraged the black community. Over several days there were numerous confrontations with police in downtown Jackson. Even the whites who ran the city were shocked by Evers's death, for although he was an agitator, he was at least a familiar presence. The city fathers made the unusual concession of allowing a silent march to honor him, as civil rights leaders from across the nation arrived to pay tribute. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., with full military honors. Medgar's brother Charles assumed some of his duties with the Jackson campaign, and his widow, Myrlie, became a well-known activist and would serve as chairperson of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998.

It was Medgar Evers's fate to have his name linked with one of the most frustrating legal cases of the civil rights era. A fingerprint found on the telescopic gunsight near the murder scene was traced to Bryon De La Beckwith, a white segregationist, from Greenwood, Mississippi. He was charged with the murder. Byron De La Beckwith, scion of an old Mississippi family, was put on trial twice in the 1960s, but in each instance was acquitted by white juries. Not until 1994, a full three decades after Evers had led his fellow Mississippians in a crusade against bigotry and intolerance, was Beckwith convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001.

Ultimately, Evers triumphed, even in death. The year he was murdered, only 28,000 black Mississippians had successfully registered to vote. By 1971, that number had risen to over a quarter-million and, by 1982, to half a million. By 2006, Mississippi had the highest number of black elected officials in the country, including a quarter of its delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives and some 27 percent of its state legislature.

Myrlie Evers, the couple's daughter, two sons and the nation continue to honor the slain activist's memory. A statue of Evers stands in Jackson, Mississippi and Medgar Evers College stands in Brooklyn, New York.