Medgar Evers Quotes

Here's an interesting form of murder we came up with: assassination. You know what's interesting about assassination? Well, not only does it change those popularity polls in a big fucking hurry, but it's also interesting to notice who it is we assassinate. Did you ever notice who it is? Stop to think who it is we kill? It's always people who've told us to live together in harmony and try to love one another. Jesus, Gandhi, Lincoln, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, John Lennon, they all said, "Try to live together peacefully." BAM! Right in the fucking head. Apparently we're not ready for that.

When you hate, the only person that suffers is you because most of the people you hate don't know it and the rest don't care.

Optimistic, because even though the year of Obama's birth Herbert Lee, a black farmer with nine children, was shot in the head for trying to register black voters, it was also the year the Freedom Rides rocked the South and established a generation of youth leaders. Optimistic, because even though the year of my birth the Klan bombed four little black girls in a Birmingham church and Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were gunned down, it was also the year that established our road map for today - America's dispossessed marching on Washington in unprecedented numbers to demand freedom and articulate our dream.

Despite everything that has happened, regardless of the pain of their loss, despite all the other nonviolent peaceful warriors who suffered and sometimes fell, I have never once considered giving up or giving out. I could not let myself get lost in a sea of despair, because I had faith that the truth is bigger than all humanity. The tragedy of their loss was a crisis of faith, but in that struggle I discovered that you can kill a Medgar Evers or a Jimmie Lee Jackson. You can kill three civil rights workers named Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. You can bomb four innocent little girls in church on a Sunday morning. You can even kill three of the finest leaders of the twentieth century, but you cannot kill the truth they represented. The truth marches on; it is not connected to the life of any one individual. When a person dies, the dream does not die. You can kill a man, but the truth that he stood for will never die.

There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of. In the 1960's, in my home town of Jackson, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered on night in darkness and I wrote a story that same night about the murderer (identity unknown) called "Where Is The Voice Coming From?" But all that absorbed me, though it started as outrage, was the necessity I felt for entering into the mind and inside the skin of a character who could hardly have been more alien or repugnant to me. Trying for my utmost, I wrote in the first person. I was wholly vaunting the prerogative of the short-story writer. It is always vaunting, of course, to imagine yourself inside another person, but it is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose. I'm not sure this story was brought off; and I don't believe that my anger showed me anything about human character that my sympathy and rapport never had.

The assassination of President Kennedy killed not only a man but a complex of illusions. It demolished the myth that hate and violence can be confined in an airtight chamber to be employed against but a few. Suddenly the truth was revealed that hate is a contagion; that it grows and spreads as a disease; that no society is so healthy that it can automatically maintain its immunity. If a smallpox epidemic had been raging in the South, President Kennedy would have been urged to avoid the area. There was a plague afflicting the South, but its perils were not perceived. Negroes tragically know political assassination well. In the life of Negro civil-rights leaders, the whine of the bullet from ambush, the roar of the bomb have all too often broken the night's silence. They have replaced lynching as a political weapon. More than a decade ago, sudden death came to Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore, N.A.A.C.P. leaders in Florida. The Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi, was shot to death on the steps of a rural courthouse. The bombings multiplied. Nineteen sixty-three was a year of assassinations. Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi; William Moore in Alabama; six Negro children in Birmingham—and who could doubt that these too were political assassinations? The unforgivable default of our society has been its failure to apprehend the assassins. It is a harsh judgment, but undeniably true, that the cause of the indifference was the identity of the victims. Nearly all were Negroes. And so the plague spread until it claimed the most eminent American, a warmly loved and respected president. The words of Jesus "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" were more than a figurative expression; they were a literal prophecy. We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. This may explain the cascading grief that flooded the country in late November. We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.

Medgar Evers certainly felt that way and told his wife, Myrlie, how furious he was that rather than help Mamie, the association “used her” to advance its cause.

cooled

Obama wore a dark-gray suit and a burgundy tie. Behind him, rippling in a gentle breeze, were more American flags than Maria could count. Speaking slowly, pausing after each phrase, Obama said: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy—tonight is your answer.” Little Marga came up to Maria where she sat on the couch. “Granny Maria,” she said. Maria lifted the child onto her lap and said: “Hush, now, baby, everyone wants to listen to the new president.” Obama said: “It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled—Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals, or a collection of red states and blue states: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.” “Granny Maria,” Marga whispered again. “Look at Granddad.” Maria looked at her husband, George. He was watching the television, but his lined brown face was streaming with tears. He was wiping them away with a big white handkerchief, but as soon as he dried his eyes the tears came again. Marga said: “Why is Granddad crying?” Maria knew why. He was crying for Bobby, and Martin, and Jack. For four Sunday school girls. For Medgar Evers. For all the freedom fighters, dead and alive. “Why?” Marga said again. “Honey,” said Maria, “it’s a long story.

It was wrong. It was wrong to pay the same dime yet have to walk to the back of the bus. It was wrong to have to pass a "white" school to go to a "colored" school. It was wrong to have Colored and White signs. It was wrong that Emmett Till was murdered. It was wrong that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was dynamited. It was wrong that Medgar Evers was shot in the back and bled to death in his own driveway. And whatever was not right could be, if not corrected, then certainly reproved by people with kinder hearts, better minds and the courage to speak out for their beliefs.

One fellow officer said a group that had gotten inside the Capitol told him, “Put your gun down, and we’ll show you what kind of nigger you really are!” The irony of that moment was that more than seventy years after Sergeant Isaac Woodard—after the civil rights movement; after the deaths of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and others; after the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional; after Black people’s continued service in every war; and after the election of an African American as president of the United States—we were just “niggers” to them, just like that Black veteran of World War II who had come home from war only to be beaten and blinded by white cops.

The McCone Report goes on to mention two other "aggravating events in the twelve months prior to the riot." One was the failure of the poverty program to "live up to [its] press notices," combined with reports of "controversy and bickering" in Los Angeles over administering the program. The second "aggravating event" is summed up by the report in these words: Throughout the nation unpunished violence and disobedience to the law were widely reported, and almost daily there were exhortations, here and elsewhere, to take the most extreme and illegal remedies to right a wide variety of wrongs, real and supposed. It would be hard to frame a more insidiously equivocal statement of the Negro grievance concerning law enforcement during a period that included the release of the suspects in the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, the failure to obtain convictions against the suspected murderers of Medgar Evers and Mrs. Violet Liuzzo, the Gilligan incident in New York, the murder of Reverend James Reeb, and the police violence in Selma, Alabama—to mention only a few of the more notorious cases. And surely it would have been more to the point to mention that throughout the nation Negro demonstrations have almost invariably been nonviolent, and that the major influence of the civil rights movement on the Negro community has been the strategy of discipline and dignity. Obsessed by the few prophets of violent resistance, the McCone Commission ignores the fact that never before has an American group sent so many people to jail or been so severely punished for trying to uphold the law of the land.

History treats kindly the courage of Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Ghandi, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harvey Milk, and, to a general degree, the millions of women who contested the patriarchy, but their own communities and contemporaries killed them for it.

From growing up in poverty to developing drugs that fight diabetes, seizures, and cancer, Dr. Frank L. Douglas has lived a life based on values, hard work, and self-control. Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream is a reflection on the events and people that made him into the man he is. In 1963, the year of the murder of Medgar Evers, Civil Rights marches, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, twenty-year-old Douglas arrived in the United States. A Fulbright scholar from British Guiana, Douglas studied engineering at Lehigh University, received his Ph.D. and M.D. from Cornell University, and did his Residency in Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins.