Medgar Evers Is Assassinated in His Driveway
The NAACP's Mississippi field secretary is shot hours after President Kennedy's national civil rights address
Quick facts
- Location
- Jackson, Mississippi
- Role
- NAACP Mississippi field secretary
- Convicted
- Byron De La Beckwith, 1994, after two hung juries in 1964
What happened
Medgar Evers, the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, had spent nearly a decade investigating lynchings, organizing voter registration drives, and pushing for the integration of the University of Mississippi. On June 12, 1963, hours after President Kennedy's televised address endorsing civil rights legislation, Evers was shot in the back in the carport of his Jackson, Mississippi home as his wife Myrlie and their three children waited inside. Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and fertilizer salesman, was tried twice in 1964; both all-white, all-male juries deadlocked, and he went free. Mississippi did not convict him until a third trial in 1994, when new witnesses testified he had boasted of the murder for decades, including at a Klan rally; he was sentenced to life and died in prison in 2001.
Why it matters
The National Park Service calls Evers's death the first murder of a nationally significant civil rights leader, and the 31-year gap before his killer's conviction became its own argument for why federal, not just state, enforcement of civil rights law was necessary.
How we know
The National Park Service preserves the Evers home as a national monument and documents the carport shooting from FBI and Mississippi court records; the 1994 conviction is documented in contemporaneous news coverage of the trial testimony.
Sources
- Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, National Park Service. History & Culture · Primary source (author-declared)nps.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- HISTORY (A&E Networks). White supremacist convicted of killing Medgar Evers · Reputable sourcehistory.com · The domain "history.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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