Thursday, June 2, 2016

What were the differences within the Civil Rights Movement after the death of Medgar Evers?

Medgar Evers was a Mississippi-born World War II veteran who returned to his native state to fight racism and segregation. As field secretary for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), Evers continually risked his life to help African Americans register to vote and to push for integration. Hours after watching President Kennedy give a televised speech about civil rights, Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his house in June of 1963. He was able to crawl to his wife and children in his house but died shortly thereafter at the age of 37.
Protests erupted in Jackson, Mississippi, in response to his murder, and Nina Simone wrote the song "Mississippi, Goddam." These protests continued to swell until the March in Washington in August of 1963. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called Medgar Evers's murder "shocking and tragic news" and said that Evers's murder would "make the Negroes more determined." King continued to push for progress though non-violent means.
However, as a result of Evers's death and the deaths of other leaders such as King, other leaders and future leaders of the movement became radicalized, and some eventually turned to the Black Power movement to advance civil rights. An example is Stokely Carmichael, who was the leader of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and who later became a leader of the Black Panther Party. Carmichael later said in an interview that after the assassinations of Evers and King (in 1968), "the anger of the masses here had to be seriously appreciated. Our people were steaming with anger" (see the source in the link below). Ever's murder was a radicalizing force for leaders such as Carmichael and helped eventually turn the movement away from King's non-violent campaign toward the Black Power movement.
http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eii/eiiweb/car5427.0967.029stokleycarmichael.html

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