Cohen: At last, America honours civil rights leader Medgar Evers

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PORTLAND, Maine — The Presidential Medal of Freedom is America’s highest civilian honour. Since John F. Kennedy established the award in 1963, every president has recognized “especially meritorious contribution” to the nation.

In a country that easily venerates and celebrates, relatively few have received the medal. It’s not like the Honours List in Great Britain or the Légion d’honneur in France, with thousands decorated annually. Or the Order of Canada, given to scores of Canadians a year.

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Over the last six decades, some 650 Americans have received the medal. There is no set number of awardees: Barack Obama awarded 117 medals over eight years; Donald Trump awarded 24 medals over four years. (Trump delighted in recognizing full-throated allies such as broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, and representatives Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan. Oddly, he honoured Babe Ruth and Elvis Presley posthumously, as if they’d been forgotten.)

Which brings us to the most recent honourees. They include politicians Al Gore, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn and Elizabeth Dole; talk-show host Phil Donahue; swimmer Katie Ledecky; and Michelle Yeoh, the Asian-American actress.

The most important one, though, is not widely known. When I heard his name, I gasped.

It was Medgar Wiley Evers. Medgar Evers, Field Secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi from 1954 to 1963. Medgar Evers, a decorated soldier who fought for freedom abroad and found none at home, who pursued justice in the most violent state in the Union.

Medgar Evers, who dressed as a field hand to find witnesses to testify in the trial of the murderers of Emmett Till in 1955; Medgar Evers, who helped James Meredith integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962; Medgar Evers, who led voting drives, desegregation marches and the Capitol Street Boycott in Jackson, Miss. in 1963.

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Medgar Evers, who was shot in his driveway on Guynes Street in front of his wife and children, hours after President Kennedy delivered a lyrical speech introducing the landmark Civil Rights Act.

Evers lived in constant danger. Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X — slain titans of the movement with whom he’s compared — he had no entourage. He worked alone, roaming the Mississippi Delta in his high-powered Chevrolet, a step ahead of the Ku Klux Klan, which wanted him dead.

He lived under a veil of threat — including telephone calls to his home — but refused to join the millions in the Great Migration north, fleeing terror.

“The life he chose to live and the risks he took to do right are a reminder of the history he made and our charge to keep,” says the medal citation. “In a life cut too short, Medgar Evers’s legacy casts a ray of light on our quest to redeem the soul of our nation.”

For all that though, Evers has remained in obscurity. Others in the movement have been honoured, including the three brave young civil rights activists murdered in Mississippi in June 1964, dramatized in “Mississippi Burning.” Evers was not.

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Some could not get his name right or explain what he did. (He’s called “a lawyer” in the citation. He wasn’t.)

His widow, Myrlie Evers, 91, has made his legacy her mission. It disappointed her that Medgar was not honoured by President Barack Obama, and it angered her when Donald Trump addressed her, in public, by her first name. She told me so.

It took years of lobbying. Bennie Thompson, who represents Jackson in Congress, was a tireless advocate. He proposed Evers for the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015, and more recently pushed Mississippi’s congressional delegation to appeal to Biden to honour Evers.

Now Biden has. Evers’s daughter, Reena, accepted the posthumous award at the White House last Friday. She was eight when her father was murdered, and remembers it vividly. Her family has spent a lifetime preserving his memory — first, by bringing his killer to justice in 1994, following two mistrials, and now, by seeing ensuring his legacy is recognized.

It has taken 61 years, but finally, belatedly, properly, the United States has honoured the heroic life of its native son, Medgar Wiley Evers.

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, commentator and author of Two Days in June: John F Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.

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