Medgar W. Evers -- And Today

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is the 39th anniversary of the death of Medgar Wiley Evers of
Mississippi -- a brave and honorable fighter for human rights -- and a very
dear friend. His identity was Afro-American but he was significantly and
very consciously part Choctaw.

His assassination  occurred in the context of our massive Jackson
[Mississippi] Movement of 1962-63 -- and in the midst of extraordinarily
brutal, violent and sanguinary repression:  the full range of city and state
and vigilante forces -- literally several thousands of hostile "lawmen" and
thugs and a huge concentration camp at the State Fairgrounds.

There are many of us who -- without falling prey to  linear chronological
deification -- do  mark certain calendar dates faithfully.  Beginning on
December 12, 1962, with the historic [and very quickly suppressed]  downtown
Jackson picketing [myself and Eldri and four of my Tougaloo students], our
well organized base for the Jackson Movement [which we had been building for
months]  now moved dramatically into the full-scale public arena, gathering
strength and momentum initially as an extremely successful economic boycott
of downtown Jackson and environs -- the economic nerve center of the
Magnolia State -- and then into huge demonstrations.

There are many significant dates/events through this great and very
effective saga.  On May 12, 1963, three of us signed a historic letter which
went to all major components of the Jackson and Mississippi power
structures -- and which took the Jackson Movement across the Rubicon into
its next stage:  large-scale and finally truly massive non-violent
demonstrations.  The three of us were Medgar W. Evers [Field Secretary of
the Mississippi NAACP]  and Mrs Doris Allison [President of the Jackson
Branch of NAACP] and myself [then John R Salter, Jr as Advisor to the
Jackson NAACP Youth Council -- and soon to be Strategy Committee Chair of
the Jackson Movement.]

Medgar was shot at 11:45 pm,  Tuesday, June 11, 1963 just outside his home.
We had been together in a meeting only shortly before.  He died right after
midnight, Wednesday, June 12.

Our response to his murder was to build the Jackson Movement ever higher --
and the courageous outpouring of grassroots Black people and Black students
was indeed  colossal.  In the end, Jackson was fundamentally cracked -- and
those cracks, joined by other great efforts around the state, spread and
deepened across Mississippi and far, far beyond.

Medgar's murderer, Byron de la Beckwith, who was tried twice in the
mid-1960s and freed via hung all-white juries, was finally convicted in 1994
and sentenced to life.  He recently died in the Mississippi state
penitentiary at Parchman.

There are many dates for us in this particular Holy Year -- with Medgar's
martyrdom at the apex.

Two important points:

The Jackson Movement was launched -- and  proceeded  bravely -- in the face
of massive opposition by the formal racist enemies.  But there was also
substantial subversion by a significant portion of the National Office of
NAACP and very much from the Kennedy administration.  In a large, civil
rights retrospective at Tougaloo and Millsaps colleges in late October and
early November, 1979, I  publicly denounced that "subversion by the
corporate liberals of New York and the self-styled "pragmatism" of those
splendid scoundrels residing in Camelot on the Potomac." And I hold to every
word of that to this very day.

Mississippi, as I've noted in my May/June 2002  "Closed Society" article in
the excellent socialist journal, Against the Current,  was very much
totalitarian in nature.  That hideous situation and comparable ones in the
hard-core South changed because of the again-and-again courageous efforts by
grassroots people and organizers -- and because of constructive outside
pressure that came from the Nation and World Beyond.

Today, the United States itself moves deeper and deeper, faster and faster,
into its own and increasingly tragic Closed Society morass.

And, once again -- as in all of Human History -- courageous and committed
action by grassroots people and organizers, and constructive pressure from
the outside World Itself, are the only means whereby this extremely
dangerous and people- strangling direction will be reversed and our  Journey
to the Sun resumed.

My recent "Closed Society" piece in Against the Current -- with a focus on
our national situation of today -- is on our large social justice website,
Lair of Hunterbear, at
http://www.hunterbear.org/closed_society_of_mississippi__a.htm


Mrs Doris Allison [now in her eighties] and I, the two surviving signers of
the Rubicon-Letter of May 12, 1963, talked extensively yesterday -- as we do
several times each month.  She and her equally brave husband, Ben, are the
God-parents of my now 20 year old grandson who lives with us here in Idaho.
[He, Thomas, is himself one-half Mississippi Choctaw.]

Much material on the Jackson Movement and its myriad of lessons is at
several locations on my large website www.hunterbear.org

I have a very substantial discussion of Medgar and his life and work in this
website page, "Medgar W. Evers: Reflection and Appreciation"
http://www.hunterbear.org/medgar_w.htm

My own very detailed book on the Jackson struggle -- Jackson,  Mississippi:
An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism -- is discussed at this website
link:
http://www.hunterbear.org/jackson.htm


Fraternally and In Solidarity -

Hunter Gray  [ Hunterbear ]
www.hunterbear.org  ( strawberry socialism )
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´





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