in disguise when he was doing that investigation. he dressed as a field hand on his trips to collect evidence for that crime. he was known to drive 100 miles an hour to get safely out of town and to try to shake anybody who was following him. that s what it took to be the field secretary for the naacp in mississippi in 1955. he worked for voting rights in mississippi before there was a voting rights act. when registering to vote or trying to vote meant risking your life and it particularly meant risking your life if you were trying to persuade others that they should register, that they should vote. mr. evers led boycotts of businesses that would not hire black workers or treat black customers equally. when mississippians decided to try to integrate their lunch counters by just sitting down at one, no matter what, just taking what was rained down on them for doing it, medgar evers made that protest possible in some major ways. he organized that sit-in at the woolworths lunch counter in
parks or malcolm x. they did make the evers home into a museum not long ago. if you want, you can go there, you can stand in the driveway. you can see it for yourself. the locals ask you be respectful. you re visiting a place where a family lived. a few months ago in mississippi medgar evers widow, she talked about her husband s decision to stay in mississippi knowing at the time what could happen to him. she said, he always said mississippi is my home. i love the place where i was born and i will do whatever i have to do to make it the best place in the united states of america. he would say to me, mississippi is going to be the best place in the country. and i told him, you have to be out of your mind. there s no way mississippi can become anything better than it is, and quite honestly i do not want any part of it and i do not know how you can do what you do. he said because it is the state of my birth and i believe in it. he gave his life not wanting to die, but he gave it gladly
everybody to the way things ought to be. he saw that as possible in the very difficult place where he lived in his very difficult own time. now for many of us who ve gone overseas and fought for this country, and fought for mississippi, we fought for alabama, we fought for north carolina, we fought for illinois, and we fought for every state in this union. now, we re going to stay here and see that the thing that the mayor has said become a reality. [ applause ] medgar evers stayed in jim crow mississippi, although he would have left. it s not that it was wrong to leave, but he felt for him it would be wrong to leave. that is where he was. he was in mississippi 50 years ago today. 50 years ago tonight. 50 years ago was the day that alabama s governor stood in the door at the university of alabama and blocked the door with his body so that african-american students could
not come in. it was the day that president kennedy pleaded with the nation for a civil rights act. 50 years ago today. and 50 years ago tonight, just after midnight, with the woolworths mob still fresh in the headlines and the reports of the alabama governor in the schoolhouse door and president kennedy making that speech on civil rights, with those reports not yet published in the morning papers, after midnight, 50 years ago, medgar ever was was killed. mr. evers was gunned down in his driveway in jackson, mississippi, when he pulled up to his house after an naacp meeting had run late. they taught their kids to drop to the floor at the sound of gunfire. after they heard the shots that night, hit the floor, they got up and opened the door, there was medgar evers, husband, father, dying. his car keys were still in his hand along with a stack of t-shirts that said jim crow must go. there was no conviction in his murder for another 30 years. medgar evers was never as famous as martin lu
of mississippi at ole miss. ole miss was not yet integrated and the school turned him down on the basis of his race. he then became the first field secretary in his state for the naacp and at that time that was a job that was not some kind of metaphor for bravery, it was the soul of bravery. right at the outset of mr. evers work in mississippi a 14-year-old boy was kidnapped off the porch of a store in a town called money, mississippi. he was taken in retaliation for him whistling or flirting or maybe just speaking to a woman who was white. the kid, emmett till, was black, 14 years old. he was tortured and then shot and his body was dumped into the river. when local law enforcement hesitated to prosecute anybody for the murder, it was medgar evers who took it upon himself to investigate that crime personally. the woman whom medgar evers married said her husband dressed