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Authors: Maryanne Vollers
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your family,” Jim Evers said in a voice like a slow roll of thunder.
Medgar jumped up and left the table. He was twenty-eight years old, and he still couldn’t dispute his father. But he would not be treated as anything other than a man. Not by anyone.
Myrlie Evers remembers that nobody could understand what was driving Medgar. She thinks even he didn’t realize how far he would have to go, or why.
Only a few months later Jessie phoned her sons to tell them Jim Evers was dying. Charles, who was teaching school and coaching football and running a funeral business in Philadelphia, carried him to the closest hospital, in Union. Medgar jumped in his car to meet them. What he found was appalling. The nurses had put the old man on a cot in the damp hospital basement. There was nothing Charles or Medgar could say, no kind of hell they could raise, that would get that man upstairs where the whites were treated.
The brothers took shifts staying with their father. Medgar was with him the night he died. Jim Evers was suffering a hemorrhage, and Medgar was standing over him, waiting for the end, when he heard a terrible commotion outside the hospital. A nurse came down and asked for Medgar’s help. She led him to a frightened black patient with a bleeding leg. There had been a shooting, and a white lynch mob was roiling outside, hoping to string up the wounded man. There was nothing Medgar could do. Eventually the mob gave up. But Medgar’s father died in that hospital basement listening to the sound of white men muttering “nigger.”
Charles drove down from Philadelphia with his own hearse and took Jim Evers’s body away from the hospital. Then he dressed his father for the funeral.
The state Board of Higher Learning went through the motions of considering Medgar Evers’s application to the University of Mississippi Law School. Evers was even called in for a personal interview with the state attorney general and soon-to-be-governor, James P. Coleman.
Coleman grilled Evers about his motives for applying, why he wanted to be a lawyer, and why he wouldn’t apply for a grant to attend an out-of-state school. Medgar answered the questions calmly, including the last one: Where would he live and dine if he were accepted at Ole Miss?
Medgar said he planned to live where everybody else lived: in a campus dormitory. “I’m very hygienic. I bathe every day. And I assure you that this brown won’t rub off.”
Three days after Myrlie gave birth to a daughter, Reena, Medgar was notified that his application was rejected. There was a problem with his letters of reference. The board had ruled that his recommendations had to come from the county where he resided, not the county where he was born. It was too late to reapply for the fall term. He could try again next year.
But by the time that decision was made, the stakes had changed in the segregation game.
On Monday, May 17, 1954, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Earl Warren, read the court’s decision in the case of Brown v . Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas: “We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” He gave the southern states until October to come up with a plan to integrate.
The race-obsessed government of Mississippi had been monitoring the Supreme Court for years, watching for early warning signs that the unthinkable integration of schools would become the law. Anticipating that the battle would probably be lost, the legislature had tried to find ways around the inevitable decision. As early as 1952 the state was officially studying the disparity between black and white education, and by 1953 the legislature appropriated thirty million dollars to “equalize” Negro schools. The idea was to approach the Plessy v. Ferguson standard of “separate but equal” facilities that had been established in 1896. In
Medgar jumped up and left the table. He was twenty-eight years old, and he still couldn’t dispute his father. But he would not be treated as anything other than a man. Not by anyone.
Myrlie Evers remembers that nobody could understand what was driving Medgar. She thinks even he didn’t realize how far he would have to go, or why.
Only a few months later Jessie phoned her sons to tell them Jim Evers was dying. Charles, who was teaching school and coaching football and running a funeral business in Philadelphia, carried him to the closest hospital, in Union. Medgar jumped in his car to meet them. What he found was appalling. The nurses had put the old man on a cot in the damp hospital basement. There was nothing Charles or Medgar could say, no kind of hell they could raise, that would get that man upstairs where the whites were treated.
The brothers took shifts staying with their father. Medgar was with him the night he died. Jim Evers was suffering a hemorrhage, and Medgar was standing over him, waiting for the end, when he heard a terrible commotion outside the hospital. A nurse came down and asked for Medgar’s help. She led him to a frightened black patient with a bleeding leg. There had been a shooting, and a white lynch mob was roiling outside, hoping to string up the wounded man. There was nothing Medgar could do. Eventually the mob gave up. But Medgar’s father died in that hospital basement listening to the sound of white men muttering “nigger.”
Charles drove down from Philadelphia with his own hearse and took Jim Evers’s body away from the hospital. Then he dressed his father for the funeral.
The state Board of Higher Learning went through the motions of considering Medgar Evers’s application to the University of Mississippi Law School. Evers was even called in for a personal interview with the state attorney general and soon-to-be-governor, James P. Coleman.
Coleman grilled Evers about his motives for applying, why he wanted to be a lawyer, and why he wouldn’t apply for a grant to attend an out-of-state school. Medgar answered the questions calmly, including the last one: Where would he live and dine if he were accepted at Ole Miss?
Medgar said he planned to live where everybody else lived: in a campus dormitory. “I’m very hygienic. I bathe every day. And I assure you that this brown won’t rub off.”
Three days after Myrlie gave birth to a daughter, Reena, Medgar was notified that his application was rejected. There was a problem with his letters of reference. The board had ruled that his recommendations had to come from the county where he resided, not the county where he was born. It was too late to reapply for the fall term. He could try again next year.
But by the time that decision was made, the stakes had changed in the segregation game.
On Monday, May 17, 1954, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Earl Warren, read the court’s decision in the case of Brown v . Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas: “We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” He gave the southern states until October to come up with a plan to integrate.
The race-obsessed government of Mississippi had been monitoring the Supreme Court for years, watching for early warning signs that the unthinkable integration of schools would become the law. Anticipating that the battle would probably be lost, the legislature had tried to find ways around the inevitable decision. As early as 1952 the state was officially studying the disparity between black and white education, and by 1953 the legislature appropriated thirty million dollars to “equalize” Negro schools. The idea was to approach the Plessy v. Ferguson standard of “separate but equal” facilities that had been established in 1896. In
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