“Voter Voices” is a series of Mississippians sharing their thoughts on voting rights, the state’s history of voter suppression and the new gerrymandering push embroiling Mississippi, the South and the nation after the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Louisiana case gutted the federal Voting Rights Act’s requirements for majority Black districts.
Reena Evers-Everette witnessed rage at Black voting when she was just a child.
Before she was born, her father, Medgar Evers, fought the Nazis in World War II. After years of fighting, the war ended, but the hate didn’t.
He marveled at the fact he and other Black soldiers had fought in a war that should have granted them all the rights of citizenship, but when they returned home they had to fight racism all over again that barred Black Mississippians from restaurants, restrooms and voting booths.
Medgar Evers was ready to fight again. Black soldiers were good enough to bleed and die for their country, but now they couldn’t vote? They couldn’t be equal citizens?
By the time he celebrated his 21st birthday in 1946, he was fed up. He and his brother, Charles, and other Black veterans marched to the Newton County County Courthouse to cast their ballots in the election.
Medgar Evers Credit: National Park ServiceBut when white men saw them, they aimed their guns at the Black men in uniforms. The Axis soldiers had failed to kill them. Now it seemed a Mississippi mob wanted to finish the job.
Being turned back made Medgar Evers even more determined to keep fighting. Months after his daughter, Reena, was born in 1954, he became the first field secretary for the state NAACP. Those duties included helping Black Mississippians cast ballots — a constitutional right they had long been denied.
Some of Medgar Evers’ friends, Lamar Smith and the Rev. George Lee, were gunned down because they dared to help others register to vote. Another friend involved in voting work, Gus Courts, survived an attempted assassination and fled to Chicago, where he called himself a refugee from terror.
After Charles Evers encouraged Black Mississippians to vote, he, too, was run out of the state.
Medgar Evers stayed. He fought for voting rights and against “second-class citizenship.” He headed up a boycott of Jackson stores that refused to serve Black customers at the lunch counter or let them try on clothing.
Once, Evers-Everette picked up the phone and heard an angry caller say that he planned to kill her father. The call shocked her and made her realize that his work had made him a target.
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On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy addressed the nation on television, saying, “It ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal. … This is not the case.”
Hours later, early on June 12, an assassin gunned down Evers in front of his family.
“He never stopped being a soldier — a soldier for justice,” said Evers-Everette, who was 8 at the time and now serves as executive director of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute that is named for her parents.
“Voting is a sacred right, the most important right for us in our democracy, and now some want to steal that right away,” she said. “I hope and pray that people will join me in the fight to protect the right to vote so that it can never be taken away in Mississippi or anywhere else.”
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law two years after Medgar Evers was buried in Arlington National Cemetery and after countless other people had been threatened, brutalized or killed in their efforts to secure full access to the ballot for Black people in the U.S. The federal law led to significant changes, including the redrawing of federal, state and local voting districts that increased Black and Latino representation in elected offices.
The U.S. Supreme Court this spring handed down a ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case that weakened the Voting Rights Act and prompted several states, mostly in the South, to draw new maps that are eliminating some majority-Black congressional districts.
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