Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Medgar Evers (American Activist)

Medgar Wiley Evers (1925–63) was an American civil rights activist. He was the Mississippi field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 1954–63. His assassination was a determinant in President John F. Kennedy’s call for new, sweeping civil rights legislation.

Born in Decatur, Mississippi, Evers was an army veteran and an insurance salesperson when he became the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi. He recruited new members and organized voter registration drives and economic boycotts.

In 1963, Evers was shot and killed in an ambush in front of his Jackson-Mississippi home by Byron De La Beckwith, a White Citizens’ Council affiliate. The case drew national attention, and Evers became a martyr to the cause of civil rights. His murderer was finally convicted in 1994, 30 years after the initial trial.

Evers’s brother Charles Evers and widow Myrlie Evers-Williams were also civil rights activists.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Medgar Evers

When a black Jacksonian looks about his home community, he sees a city of over 150,000, of which 40% is Negro, in which there is not a single Negro policeman or policewoman, school crossing guard, or fireman.
—Medgar Evers
Topics: Racism

In the racial picture things will never be as they once were. History has reached a turning point, here and over the world.
—Medgar Evers
Topics: Racism

I graduated pretty quickly. When I was eleven or twelve a close friend of the family got lynched. I guess he was about forty years old, married, and we used to play with his kids. I remember the Saturday night a bunch of white men beat him to death at the Decatur fairgrounds because he sassed back a white woman. They just left him dead on the ground. Everyone in town knew it but never said a word in public. I went down and saw his bloody clothes. They left those clothes on a fence for about a year. Every Negro in town was supposed to get the message from those clothes and I can see those clothes now in my mind’s eye…. But nothing was said in public. No sermons in church. No news. No protest. It was as though this man just dissolved except for the bloody clothes…. Just before I went into the Army I began wondering how long I could stand it. I used to watch the Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down a Negro with their car, or white gangs coming through town to beat up a Negro.
—Medgar Evers
Topics: Racism

Freedom has never been free … I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die, die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.
—Medgar Evers
Topics: Legacy

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