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
a whole range of socioeconomic backgrounds. but as it got on toward the 1950s, as we were several decades into that migration, the people who by then were leaving tended to be those who were at the higher end of the spectrum. tended to be those who had the benefit of education. who had the means to seek out and have a hope of getting new jobs in new states that they were going to move to. an education offered a way out, and a lot of americans who had that, who were well educated and who knew they would have reasonably good prospects if they could get themselves to elsewhere in this country, with less discrimination, a lot of those people left because they could. some of them stayed. and one of those people who definitely had the means to leave, the means to leave and the prospects to leave, but who stayed instead was this man. mr. medgar evers born in mississippi in 1925. he served in world war ii. right around the time he turned 30, mr. evers tried to attend the law school at the univ
are we just hearing less about it because we re more sort of enured to the agenda? we re seeing a record number of bills introduced, skpa passed and signed. looking at your sort of list here of terribles, one of the most extraordinary things is every single one of the people you mentioned forwarding the bills and signing them, none of them will ever be pregnant. the thought these men are going to make decisions for women is incredible. in particularly after we went through an election, the american people spoke loud and clear, men and women, they believe these decisions should be made by women and their families. not by politicians. some of the one of the things we have seen is that bills and approaches to policy that have been effective at curbing access to safe and legal abortion in some states, like trap laws in mississippi, for example. shutting down clinics in that state. we re seeing other states copy those. but we re also seeing some innovation. i mean, i ve never, ever se