He had planned to vote. But in 1946, a 21-year-old Medgar Evers left the courthouse in Decatur, Mississippi, without casting a ballot. Twenty armed white men, some of whom had been his childhood friends, had learned of his plans to vote and turned up to threaten him. Evers feared for his life. “I made up my mind that it would not be like that again,” he later wrote.
It wasn’t the first or last time Evers would experience bigotry or racial terror. During his career as a civil rights activist and NAACP leader, Evers became the target of those who wanted to uphold the South’s racist status quo. On June 12,1963, those threats became reality when he was murdered by a white supremacist in the driveway of his home.
Evers was born in segregated Decatur on July 2, 1925. As a child, he resented the deference he was expected to show to white people, and after serving in the U.S. Army and earning multiple medals during World War II, Evers returned in 1945 to a nation that denied him his citizenship rights at the polls.
