medgar evers, civil rights movement - book - 1994 - Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers

Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers
Adam Nossiter
Addisson-Welsey Publishing Company
1994
303 pages

Medgar Evars was the outspoken Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP during the early phase of the American civil rights movement.  Evers was one of the first nationally known leaders of that movement, gaining recognition over his fight to desegregate public schools in the American south, one of the many struggles to end racial injustice that Evers waged.  As an outspoken leader for black rights in Mississippi, Evers faced constant threats of violence.  In June, 1963, Evers was murdered by a Jackson MS. salesman and White Citizens Council member named Byron de la Beckwith, who shot the civil rights leader to death in front of his home.  De La Beckwith’s murder trial resulted in a hung jury and he was permitted to walk free, often making not-so-subtle references to his crime in public conversation.  

Of Long Memory is a book about the long term cultural effects of the Evers murder on Jackson, and American, society.  The book’s author, Adam Nossiter, is a journalist with the New York Times, whose work often deals with racial politics in the American context.  In this book, Nossiter discusses the cultural trauma of the Evers’ murder, as in the year of this book’s publication, De La Beckwith was finally tried and convicted for the crime.  Nossiter investigates the social temperature before the trial, where many of the region’s whites were of the opinion that the 1994 De La beckwith trial was a waste of time after all those years.  Nossiter portrayed a society where Jackson’s white society was still willing to let a killer go free for the murder of a black man, only the rhetoric changed.  For area black’s, however, Evers murder was an open wound that couldn’t heal until Beckwith, who would frequently refer to the murder to show his willingness to use violence, was punished.

Nossiter begins his book with a journalistic look at Jackson’s contemporary racial climate. Early in his text, a meeting between the author and Byron De La Beckwith himself went awry (having devolved into anti-Semitic ravings).  Following this meeting, Nossiter’s text becomes a series of biographical sketches of the stakeholders in the Evers’ murder, then and now, with the lives of Evers himself, Evers brother Charles, original prosecuting attorney Bill Waller, and 1994 prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter profiled by the author.  With the exception of Medgar, each of these subjects were living at the time of Nossiter’s writing, and Nossiter had personal encounters (for better or worse) with all of them.  Nossiter discusses the lives of these individuals as they were after the murder - Waller and Charles Evers entered politics - and the assassin, Byron De La Beckwith became a prominent member of the white power movement.

Nossiter’s profile of Medgar Evars, of course, details his political life and the dangerous fight he was waging in Mississippi during the 1960s.  Evers’ story ends with his death, which shined a spotlight on the political power structure of white supremacy that reigned in the American southern states during that period.  The courts were a major instrument in maintaining white supremacy as a way of life, by allowing murderers of southern blacks to walk free.  Byron’s freedom, for decades, was symbolic of this power structure, of a society that permitted vigilantes to repress black leaders with extreme violence if required.  Nossiter discusses De La Beckwith’s final trial, resulting in his conviction, as a needed event in healing Jackson society.