Life & Death in Jackson

It was hot in Jackson, Miss., a torrid 102DEG. It was hotter still in the barnlike Masonic Hall in the Negro quarter on Lynch Street. There was no air conditioning, no electric fan. The 4,000 Negro people who squeezed into every seat, into every bit of floor space on the stage, in the aisles, along the walls, turned their faces to a flag-draped coffin. Trumpeters arose and began to play a dirge. The people sang: "Be not dismayed, God will take care of you."

This was the funeral of a man whose name was unknown one day and headlined across the nation the next. He was Medgar Evers, 37, Negro, father of three, N.A.A.C.P. field representative in Mississippi. A few nights before, he had been ambushed, shot in the back.

"They Saw It All." It was just past midnight, less than seven hours after President Kennedy's "moral crisis" speech to the nation, when Evers drove up to his Jackson home. He got out of his car with a bundle of T shirts, to be handed out next morning to civil rights demonstrators. Across the front of the T shirts was stamped: JIM CROW MUST GO. Evers took only a few steps. Then, from a honeysuckle thicket about 150 ft. away, came a shot.

The bullet tore into Evers' back, plowed through his body, pierced a window and a wall in the house, and came to rest beneath a watermelon on a kitchen counter. Evers' wife Myrlie cried to her three small children to fall to the floor. She ran outside. "Medgar was lying there on the doorstep in a pool of blood," she said. "I tried to get the children away. But they saw it all--the blood and the bullet hole that went right through him."

Soon state and local cops, along with FBI agents, were scouring Mississippi for clues. They found the assassin's weapon--a Springfield rifle mounted with a new telescopic sight--in the honeysuckle patch across from Evers' house.

The Target. The ugliness of the act aside, the killer of Medgar Evers could only have hurt his own blind cause. The national reaction was instantaneous. President Kennedy called it "appalling." In Mississippi, even segregationist Governor Ross Barnett denounced this "apparently dastardly act." Rewards totaling $21,000 were posted for information leading to the arrest of the killer.

As it happened, Medgar Evers, a World War II Army veteran, graduate of Mississippi's Alcorn A. & M. College, varsity football player and onetime insurance agent, was quite a man. And he had premonitions of martyrdom. "I'm not afraid of dying," he recently said. "It might do some good." As the N.A.A.C.P.'s only fulltime worker in Mississippi, he was a constant target for threats, but he pursued his course nevertheless. He directed a big civil rights rally in Jackson recently that brought in such big-name Negroes as Lena Horne. Only a few weeks before his death, somebody tossed a gasoline-filled bottle into his carport (it did not explode). "If I die," he said the next day, "it will be in a good cause. I've been fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Viet Nam."

Telephoned warnings were routine in Evers' life. "I've had a number of threatening calls," he said. "People calling me saying they were going to kill me, saying they were going to blow my home up, that I only had a few hours to live. I remember one individual calling with a pistol on the other end, and he hit the cylinder, and of course you could hear that it was a revolver. He said, 'This is for you.' And I said, 'Well, whenever my time comes, I'm ready.' "

Born in Decatur, Miss., Evers was raised in black ignominy. When he was 14, one of his father's closest friends was shot and killed because he was accused of insulting a white woman. The man's clothing lay in a field for months afterward. "I used to see the clothes when I went hunting," Evers recalled. "I can close my eyes and still see them."

Among Mississippi Negroes, the anger over Evers' murder coiled like a snake. Thirteen ministers began a silent walk, one by one, at widely spaced intervals toward city hall. To Jackson's cops, this was just another protest march--and up came the paddy wagons to haul the marchers off. Next day, the cops rushed a group standing on a porch, clubbed some Negroes, grabbed a white man, throttled him with a billy club, kicked and beat him till blood gushed from his wounds. A day later, Negro youngsters again moved down the street in ones and twos, carrying tiny American flags (it was Flag Day). They, too, were blocked by police, relieved of their flags, and carried off to a hog-wire compound.

Something Snapped. By Saturday morning, all was peaceful again in Jackson. The crowd that filled the Masonic Hall for Evers' funeral service was well behaved. When it was over, the Negroes lined up to form a cortege behind the coffin, walked 20 blocks to a funeral home. It was one march that Jackson's white city fathers had given the Negroes leave to make.

Then something snapped. Standing in front of the funeral home, a small group of Negroes began to sing. "Before I'll be a slave," they chanted, "I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord." Other Negroes joined in. "No more killin' here, no more killin' over here." Soon a whole chorus of swaying, hand-clapping people was sobbing, "No more Jim Crow over here, over here; I'm dead before I'd be a slave."

Somebody began running. "Don't run! Don't run!" shouted a man. A woman cried "Freedom!" And then the mob was off, racing toward the downtown section of the city. They got as far as the first intersection. There, cops waited with dogs, tear-gas guns and rifles. As the mob spilled toward the police, the people yelled, "Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!" The cops rushed the crowd. One dog leaped for a woman. Screams tore through the air as the police grabbed the woman and carried her down the street.

From every direction, patrol cars with singing sirens poured into the area. Firemen wearing their full gear pulled up with a truck and got ready to use their hoses. The cops barricaded the streets. Pushing, clubbing, shoving, cursing, they beat their way through the throngs, filled their paddy wagons with the Negroes and drove them off to jail.

Within an hour after it began, the riot was over, the passions spent. By nightfall, as blue-hatted cops patrolled the city, all was silent. But behind drawn shades, Jackson still seethed.

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