Miss Jackson.The same strain of political violence is still evident in American society, according to his daughter, even 60 years after civil rights hero Medgar Evers was slain by a white supremacist.
“It hurts,” Reena Evers-Everette stated. It hurts a lot.
Evers-Everette’s father, an NAACP field secretary, was shot dead in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, house when she was eight years old.
In 1963, a few months after Evers’ murder, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. Later that decade, U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy passed away, along with civil rights icons Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
According to analysts, the recent spike in political violence in America is probably the highest since the 1960s and 1970s. Two staff members of the Israeli Embassy were killed, a Minnesota state representative and her husband were assassinated, and then-candidate Donald Trump was the target of two assassination attempts in the last year alone.
The daughters of slain civil rights leaders, including Bettie Dahmer, the daughter of civil and voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer, and Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, joined his daughter at a four-day conference honoring Evers’ life on July 2, just before his 100th birthday. Medgar Evers at 100: A Legacy of Justice, a Future of Change, the 2025 Democracy in Action Convening, took place in Jackson.
Kennedy recalled praying for the man who killed her father after his death, saying, “I just was feeling so much pain, and I didn’t want anyone else to have to go through that.” I was saying, “Please don’t kill the person who killed him.”
Speaking at the ceremony, Stacey Abrams, a voting rights champion and two-time Georgia gubernatorial candidate, criticized the Trump administration’s attempts to remove activists’ names from Navy ships, perhaps including Evers.
Abrams told the conference attendees, “They want to remove his name from a boat because they don’t want us to have a reminder of how far he sailed us forward.”
In an attempt to recognize service veterans who were women, people of color, or members of the LGBTQ+ community, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has changed the names of ships and military installations that were granted during President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration.
Abrams compared the deployment of military force by the Trump administration against protestors in Los Angeles who were protesting against immigration enforcement measures to acts of radical political violence.
Abrams told The Associated Press, “Unfortunately, we cannot condemn political violence and then authorize the deployment of the Marines and the National Guard to quell protesters and not think that that contradictory message doesn’t communicate itself.” I want us to keep in mind that no one who is willing to speak for the people should have their life taken because of what they say, whether that person is Melissa Hortman or Medgar Evers.
Evers-Everette wants people to remember not only her father’s life and legacy, but also the animosity that resulted in his murder.
“We must ensure that we are aware of our past,” she stated. so that the wild, vile, and racist disaster doesn’t happen again.
