Today in Labor History June 12, 1963: Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in his home in Jackson, Mississippi by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan. Evers, a World War Two veteran, had been the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi. He was organizing to end racial segregation at the University of Mississippi and other public facilities. He had also been active in organizing to integrate Mississippi’s public, all-white beaches and parks, including Civil Disobedience actions, like “wade-ins,” in Biloxi. Evers had been under constant surveillance by the FBI. They followed him home every day, but on the day of his assassination they were absent. Several all-white juries in the 1960s failed to reach verdicts with De La Beckwith, but he was finally convicted in 1994 based on new evidence. He died in 2001.
Bob Dylan wrote his song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about Evers’s assassination. Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” is also about the Evers case. Phil Ochs’s classic satirical folk song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" refers to Evers, as do his songs "Another Country" and "Too Many Martyrs." And Malvina Reynolds references Evers's murder in her song "It Isn't Nice."
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