Hillary Clinton Is Speaking at Medgar Evers College Heres What to Know About the Civil Rights Icon
When Hillary Clinton delivers the commencement address at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn on Thursday, she'll be stopping by a City University of New York school named in honor of a major civil-rights icon. But, though Medgar Evers had been an important NAACP activist in his lifetime, it was his 1963 murder at the hands of a white supremacist that brought his name to national newspaper headlines. In fact, the first time that Evers' name appeared in the pages of TIME was in his obituary. As the only full-time worker for the NAACP in Mississippi, Evers  who had served in World War II and graduated from the school that is now Mississippi's Alcorn State University  had been accustomed to threats against his life and understood that he might go as a martyr. "I'm not afraid of dying," he said at one point. "It might do some good." After someone threw a gasoline-filled bottle into his carport, Evers said that if he died, it would be for a worthy cause cause "I've been fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.", Get your history fix in one place sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter, Evers was shot in the back in the middle of the night on June 12, 1963, as he was about to enter his home in Jackson, Miss. He was 37, a father of three. As people marched to demonstrate against the killing, police in Mississippi arrested and beat protestors. TIME's 1963 obituary for Evers chronicled the violence following his funeral, which brought in about 4,000 people, Medgar Evers College was named in his honor in 1970. Local police and the FBI quickly pinned the murder on a man named Byron De La Beckwith, whose fingerprints were on a gun that was found at the crime scene. A TIME report on Beckwith's background found that he was obsessed with racism and frequently touted his family's connection to the Confederacy. But two attempts to try him in 1964 culminated in hung juries. His case was revived around 1990 after an investigative series ran in Jackson's daily newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger. A hearing was rescheduled after Evers' widow produced a transcript of Beckwith's earlier trials, which had been thought lost. In 1994, Beckwith, 73, was found guilty.