Research Showcase: “Too Great a Price”: National Responses to the Assassination of Medgar Evers
The forthcoming Volume VIII of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. provides a detailed discussion of the planning, execution, and consequences of the major events from September 1962–December 1963. This section will showcase the more unfamiliar aspects in our volume research, giving a broader glimpse into King’s activities and the nationwide scope of the civil rights movement.
By David Lai, Assistant Editor
The 12 June 1963 midnight murder of NAACP Mississippi state secretary Medgar Evers at the hands of white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith sent shockwaves across the country. In a press conference later that day, King called the shooting “shocking and tragic,” stating that it revealed “that we still have a long, long way to go in this nation before we achieve the ideals of decency and brotherhood.” However, like the modern killing of George Floyd, the national discourse surrounding Evers’ death split on fundamental questions like what factors led to the murder and how Americans should respond to it. For movement activists, the incident was yet another in a long line of tragedies proving that the status quo was broken and needing drastic reform. By contrast, Southern politicians dismissed Evers’ death as an isolated albeit regrettable incident, suggested that it happened because of movement agitation, and questioned whether it deserved greater coverage than other acts of crime. These themes continue to echo in today’s discussions surrounding racial justice and police brutality, as many pundits comment that wrongful police shootings occur due to individual police, cast blame on progressive activism stirring up tension, and raise up canards like increasing crime rates to claim that these are isolated incidents overblown by sensationalist media coverage.
Civil rights activists commemorated Evers as the most recent in a succession of martyrs whose untimely deaths demanded vigorous action. At Evers’ memorial service in Jackson, Mississippi, Roy Wilkins brought up previous murders of other NAACP staff members, including Florida state secretary Harry Moore, who was, along with his wife Hariette, killed by a bomb in 1951, and Mississippi officer George W. Lee, who was shotgunned in 1955. Wilkins observed that “we tend to forget pioneer fighters … the truth is that through all the years before our time men have fought for freedom. Now it is our turn, not to rewrite the record, but to add to it.” King, at an address before the Gandhi Society for Human Rights, placed the slaying alongside past lynchings of Emmett Till and Mack C. Parker, calling it an “inexpressible tragedy and an unspeakable outrage” that “should arouse the conscience of every American of goodwill.” Associated Negro Press editor Enoch P. Waters observed that beyond these individuals, violence against African Americans remained quotidian and that “there have been others, many others, slain, wounded, tortured, lynched, and run away from their homes for daring to defy those who would deny the Negro his rights as an American citizen.”
As such, movement leaders promised renewed efforts to change the segregated society that cultivated the assassins. Attending the Jackson memorial, United Nations ambassador Ralph Bunche observed that it stood as proof that “the Negro of today can be infuriated, but no longer can be intimidated” through terrorist violence. King similarly stated that the “greatest tribute” for Evers would be “to go out now with more determination, with bold determination, to implement the ideals and principles that he worked for for so many years.” Wilkins’ eulogy for Evers declared that, as NAACP staff, “we mourn him, but we are not cast down,” and that “for him we shall all try harder to hold our nation to the concept that ‘all men’” are created equal. He blamed Southern politicians who “have used unbridled political power to fabricate a maze of laws, customs, and economic practices which has imprisoned the Negro” because “by their deals and maneuvers they helped put the man behind the deadly rifle.” Civil rights lawyer Norman G. Kurland echoed Wilkins, charging that “unstable individuals … have been permitted, actively encouraged and even directed by many Mississippi leaders to suppress all who advocate or seek to advance equal rights.” At Evers’ later burial service at Arlington National Cemetery, Wilkins said that Evers “believed in his country. It now remains to be seen whether his country believes in him.” These tributes to Evers’ life looked beyond the individual assassin and saw the structurally racist underpinnings that supported Jim Crow segregation as ultimately responsible for his and others’ slayings.
By contrast, Southern opinion makers promoted a counternarrative that blamed Evers’ death on increased tension stemming from protests. Representative William Colmer (D-MS) decried the murder as a “dastardly act” and stated that Evers' killer deserved to be prosecuted, but he claimed that it was the “inevitable result of the agitation by the politicians, a biased press, and the do-gooders of this country under the false guise of liberalism.” The local Jackson Clarion-Ledger newspaper, in announcing a fund to locate Evers’ killer, also editorialized that “continued demonstrations can lead only to more bloodshed,” linking the assassination to the early June protests taking place in the city rather than the natural result of segregation.
Additional public figures elaborated on Colmer’s charge of a biased press, questioning why Evers’ case received more media attention than other notable murder cases. Representative Bruce Alger (R-TX) charged that the relative lack of coverage for murders of white individuals during the same time period stood as proof “that we are now indeed witnessing discrimination for Negroes and against whites with death being used one-sidedly as a political weapon.” The Shreveport Journal also published an editorial questioning why President Kennedy said he was “appalled at the barbarity” of Evers’ murder but did not address a rape case in Dallas, charging that “apparently he accepts as an everyday occurrence the knife-rape of a teenage girl by two Negroes.” By treating Evers’ shooting as an exceptional incident, Southern politicians could distance themselves from any responsibility to address the larger system enabling such incidents to occur with alarming frequency.
As expected, such arguments proved unpersuasive to movement leaders. Waters dismissed the idea that movement leaders were to blame, claiming it was only because of movement activism that “Evers’ slaying is a more horrible tragedy today than the murder of” past activists. Still, these Southern counterarguments show that polarized sentiment was also present back in 1963 and that many people then accepted Evers’ slaying as a personal tragedy rather than a systemic failure. Such claims continue in our present time, as certain politicians reject the notion that American society is still imperfect and instead rail against critical race theory as insufficiently patriotic, concluding that the many victims of police brutality are due to individually isolated incidents rather than the result of systemic biases in policing. They also excuse far-right extremism, even in the face of insurrection, with facile claims that a liberal media climate has misconstrued their actions and that Black Lives Matter and antifa activists are the true problem at hand.
Even as America wrestled with the implications of Evers’ killing, more notable assassinations would unfortunately continue to mark 1963. At the chapel service preceding Evers’ burial in Arlington, AME Zion bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood expressed his hope that “God grant that Medgar Evers may be the last black American to give his life to make the Constitution come alive for the full citizenship of all Americans.” Spottswood’s hope would be dashed only three months later with the 15 September bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, and Carole Robertson. And ultimately, the national debate surrounding the causes leading up to Evers’ assassination proved little comfort to his widow Myrlie. In her autobiography, she recalled visiting the White House shortly after the murder and that friends afterward asked her whether she had been “thrilled at the privilege” of meeting President Kennedy, who would also be felled by an assassin’s bullet only months later. She conceded that she “was pleased at the warmth, gentleness, and what seemed the genuineness of President Kennedy’s reception of us, but I could not consider meeting him a privilege. I had paid too great a price for that.”