Charles Evers and Related Topics

Medgar Evers

American civil rights activist and the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi who was assassinated by a white supremacist.

The rifle used by De La Beckwith to assassinate Evers

The Evers house at 2332 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive, now the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, where Medgar Evers was fatally shot after getting out of his car.

Medgar Evers's grave in Arlington National Cemetery in 2007

A statue of Evers at the Medgar Evers Boulevard Library in Jackson, Mississippi

In 1969 his brother Charles became the first African American to be elected mayor of a Mississippi city in the post-Reconstruction era.

Thad Cochran

American attorney and politician who served as a United States Senator for Mississippi from 1978 until his resignation due to health issues in 2018.

Cochran during his time in the House of Representatives

Cochran with President Ronald Reagan in 1981

Senators Cochran (left) and Carl Levin (right) meet with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon to discuss the budgeting (April 10, 2013).

In the general election, he faced Democrat Maurice Dantin, a former district attorney who had triumphed in a four-way primary with the backing of Eastland, and Independent candidate Charles Evers, the Mayor of Fayette.

Ghosts of Mississippi

1996 American biographical courtroom drama film directed by Rob Reiner and starring Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg, and James Woods.

Bill Cobbs as Charles Evers

Charles W. Pickering

American attorney, politician, and jurist who served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi and, briefly, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Cochran won in a three-way general election against Democrat Maurice Dantin and Independent Charles Evers, a well-known figure in the civil rights movement.

The 1963 March on Washington participants and leaders marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial

Civil rights movement

Political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the United States.

The mob-style lynching of Will James, Cairo, Illinois, 1909

Lynching victim Will Brown, who was mutilated and burned during the Omaha, Nebraska race riot of 1919. Postcards and photographs of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.

KKK night rally near Chicago, in the 1920s

A white gang looking for blacks during the Chicago race riot of 1919

White tenants seeking to prevent blacks from moving into the housing project erected this sign, Detroit, 1942.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

School integration, Barnard School, Washington, D.C., 1955

Emmett Till’s mother Mamie (middle) at her son's funeral in 1955. He was killed by white men after a white woman accused him of offending her in her family's grocery store.

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after being arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus to a white person

White parents rally against integrating Little Rock's schools

Student sit-in at Woolworth in Durham, North Carolina on February 10, 1960

A mob beats Freedom Riders in Birmingham. This picture was reclaimed by the FBI from a local journalist who also was beaten and whose camera was smashed.

James Meredith walking to class accompanied by a U.S. Marshal and a Justice Department official

U.S. Army trucks loaded with Federal law enforcement personnel on the University of Mississippi campus 1962

Recreation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s cell in Birmingham Jail at the National Civil Rights Museum

Wreckage at the Gaston Motel following the bomb explosion on May 11, 1963

Congress of Racial Equality march in Washington D.C. on September 22, 1963, in memory of the children killed in the Birmingham bombings

Alabama governor George Wallace tried to block desegregation at the University of Alabama and is confronted by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach in 1963.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at the National Mall

Leaders of the March on Washington posing before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963

Bayard Rustin (left) and Cleveland Robinson (right), organizers of the March, on August 7, 1963

Martin Luther King Jr. at a civil rights march on Washington, D.C.

Malcolm X meets with Martin Luther King Jr., March 26, 1964

"We Cater to White Trade Only" sign on a restaurant window in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1938. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and spent a night in jail for attempting to eat at a white-only restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida.

White segregationists (foreground) trying to prevent black people from swimming at a "White only" beach in St. Augustine during the 1964 Monson Motor Lodge protests

Missing persons poster created by the FBI in 1964 shows the photographs of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner

Lyndon B. Johnson signs the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson (center) meets with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, and James Farmer, January 1964

Police attack non-violent marchers on "Bloody Sunday", the first day of the Selma to Montgomery marches.

Police arrest a man during the Watts riots in Los Angeles, August 1965

A 3,000-person shantytown called Resurrection City was established in 1968 on the National Mall as part of the Poor People's Campaign.

Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (and other Mississippi-based organizations) is an example of local grassroots leadership in the movement.

Armed Lumbee Indians aggressively confronting Klansmen in the Battle of Hayes Pond

Jewish civil rights activist Joseph L. Rauh Jr. marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963

Gold medalist Tommie Smith (center) and bronze medalist John Carlos (right) showing the raised fist on the podium after the 200 m race at the 1968 Summer Olympics; both wear Olympic Project for Human Rights badges. Peter Norman (silver medalist, left) from Australia also wears an OPHR badge in solidarity with Smith and Carlos.

Ku Klux Klan demonstration in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964

Attorney General Robert Kennedy speaking before a hostile Civil Rights crowd protesting low minority hiring in his Justice Department June 14, 1963

Meanwhile, the Deacons for Defense and Justice expanded into Mississippi and assisted Charles Evers' NAACP chapter with a successful campaign in Natchez.

James Eastland

American politician of the Democratic Party from Mississippi who served in the United States Senate in 1941 and again from 1943 until his resignation on December 27, 1978.

Senator Eastland with President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.

Official U.S. Senate portrait of Senator James Eastland

Partly because of the independent candidacy of Charles Evers siphoning off votes from the Democratic nominee, Maurice Dantin, Republican 4th District Representative Thad Cochran won the race to succeed Eastland.

Decatur, Mississippi

Town in and the county seat of Newton County, Mississippi.

Charles Evers, first post-Reconstruction African American mayor in Mississippi

Bill Waller

American politician.

His main opponent in the general election was Evers' brother, James Charles Evers, then the mayor of Fayette, who ran as an independent.

Bill Cobbs

American actor.

He played basketball coach and retired basketball player Arthur Chaney in Disney's Air Bud and Medgar Evers' older brother Charles Evers in Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi. He had a role in the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy and played fictional jazz pianist Del Paxton in Tom Hanks' That Thing You Do.

Fayette, Mississippi

City in Jefferson County, Mississippi, United States.

Charles Evers was elected as mayor in 1969 by the people of Fayette; he was the first African-American mayor elected in post-Reconstruction Mississippi.