Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr

Williams, a professor of history and African American Studies at Mississippi State University, offers a scrupulously researched biography of the civil rights pioneer Medgar Evers (1925–1963), who heroically reported on the lynchings, rapes, and murders of black Mississippians and organized civil disobedience in the streets of Jackson. His early life was marked by racial violence so severe, says Williams, that for Evers, “the question always remained, how far could you push before whites killed you?” and it is this that fueled his activism. From selling the Chicago Defender, the preeminent black newspaper of the prewar era, to his accession to Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, Evers never gave up the struggle to “form a new Mississippi that embraced all its citizens equally.” The story of this admirable and principled man, whose nine years in a leadership post at the front lines of the civil rights struggle in “what could be historically termed the most racially oppressive state in America” ended at the age of 37 when he was shot dead by a white supremacist. Even if the book occasionally sacrifices smooth narrative for scholarly rigor and documentation, it’s an important and readable study of this seminal leader and the history of the civil rights movement. (Nov.)