As the first NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, Medgar Wiley
Evers put his life on the line to investigate racial crimes
(including Emmett Till's murder) and to organise boycotts and voter
registration drives. On June 12, 1963, he was shot in the back by
white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith as the civil rights leader
unloaded a stack of "Jim Crow Must Go" T-shirts in his own
driveway. His was the first assassination of a high-ranking public
figure in the civil rights movement. While Evers's death ushered in
a decade of political assassinations and ignited a powder keg of
racial unrest nationwide, his life of service and courage has
largely been consigned to the periphery of U.S. and civil rights
history. In her compelling study of collective memory and artistic
production, Remembering Medgar Evers, Minrose Gwin engages the
powerful body of work that has emerged in response to Evers's life
and death-fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and songs from James
Baldwin, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, Lucille Clifton, Bob Dylan,
and Willie Morris, among others. Gwin examines local news accounts
about Evers, 1960s gospel and protest music as well as contemporary
hip-hop, the haunting poems of Frank X Walker, and contemporary
fiction such as The Help and Gwin's own novel, The Queen of
Palmyra. In this study, Evers springs to life as a leader of
"plural singularity," who modeled for southern African Americans a
new form of cultural identity that both drew from the past and
broke from it; to quote Gwendolyn Brooks, "He leaned across
tomorrow." Fifty years after his untimely death, Evers still casts
a long shadow. In her examination of the body of work he has
inspired, Gwin probes wide-ranging questions about collective
memory and art as instruments of social justice. "Remembered,
Evers's life's legacy pivots to the future," she writes, "linking
us to other human rights struggles, both local and global." A Sarah
Mills Hodge Fund Publication.
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