Medgar Wiley Evers was born on july 2 1925, in decatur, mississippi. He was the third of 5 children, his parents were jesse and james evers. He served in the united states army during world war 2 and went overseas to europe to fight. In 1948 he enrolled at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College where he competed on the debate, football, and track teams, sang in the choir, and was junior class president. He On December 24, 1951, he married classmate Myrlie Beasley. Together they had three children: Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise, and James Van Dyke Evers.

The couple moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a town developed by African Americans, where Evers became a salesman for T. R. M. Howard‘s Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company. Evers was also president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), which began to organize actions for civil rights, Evers helped organize the RCNL’s boycott of gasoline stations that denied blacks the use of the stations’ restrooms. Evers and his brother Charles attended the RCNL’s annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954, which drew crowds of 10,000 or more.  In the weeks before Evers was killed, he encountered new levels of hostility. His public investigations into the 1955 lynching of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi, and his vocal support of Clyde Kennard, had made him a prominent black leader. On May 28, 1963, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home. On June 7, 1963, Evers was nearly run down by a car after he came out of the NAACP office in Jackson, Mississippi. Evers also encouraged Dr. Gilbert Mason Sr. in his organizing of the Biloxi wade-ins from 1959 to 1963, protests against segregation of the city’s public beaches on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Evers, who was regularly followed home by at least two FBI cars and one police car, arrived at his home on the morning of his death without an escort. None of his usual protection was present, for reasons unspecified by the FBI or local police. In the early morning of June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy‘s nationally televised Civil Rights Address, Evers pulled into his driveway after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. Evers’s family had worried for his safety that day, and Evers himself had warned his wife that he felt in greater danger than usual. When he arrived home, Evers’ family was waiting for him and his children exclaimed to his wife, Myrlie, that he had arrived. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go“, Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Enfield 1917 rifle; the bullet passed through his heart. Initially thrown to the ground by the impact of the shot, Evers rose and staggered 30 feet before collapsing outside his front door.he was taken to the local hospital in jackson,where he was initially refused entry because of his race. His family explained who he was and he was admitted; he died in the hospital 50 minutes later. Evers was the first African American to be admitted to an all-white hospital in Mississippi,he became the first black man who was admitted into the hospital. Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery. 

On June 21, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council (and later of the Ku Klux Klan), was arrested for Medgar Evers’ murder. He was released because the all-white jury failed to reach a verdict. His wife never gave up on trying to get justice, she waited until a new judge was appointed and took her case to court. In 1994, De La Beckwith was prosecuted by the state based on new evidence. Bobby DeLaughter was the prosecutor. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed for an autopsy. De La Beckwith was convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after having lived as a free man for much of the three decades following the killing. (He had been imprisoned from 1977 to 1980 on separate charges: conspiring to murder A.I. Botnick.) In 1997, De La Beckwith appealed his conviction in the Evers case, but the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld it. He died at age 80 in prison on January 21, 2001. Prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter worked with Myrlie Evers to force another prosecution of Beckwith. After four years of legal maneuvering, they were finally successful. At the third trial they produced a rifle scope from the murder weapon with Beckwith’s fingerprints, they also had other witnesses who testified that Beckwith had bragged about murdering evers.