Evers, Medgar(1925–
63): Murdered Mississippi
NAACP field secretary.
Moore, Amzie (1911–
82): Businessman and
NAACP activist who invit-
ed SNCC to transform
Mississippi.
three times more on a white student than on a black one. With most black
children attending only elementary school and half of their teachers without
a high school diploma, 70 per cent of black Mississippians were functionally
illiterate. There was one black dentist, five black lawyers, and sixty black
doctors in the whole state. With so few doctors, a black baby was twice
as likely to die in childbirth as a white baby. Although the state reported
534 lynchings by the early 1950s, including two men roasted to death by
blow torches, no white accused of murdering blacks was ever convicted. A
half million black Mississippians gave up and migrated to northern cities,
especially Chicago. Without the ballot, blacks who remained were powerless
to improve their miserable lot.
To stop such misery, three black veterans returned to Mississippi after
World War II. Far from welcoming them back, many white Mississippians
were enraged by wartime breaches of racial etiquette, particularly magazine
pictures of German women sitting on black soldiers’ laps. Such rage led to
the murder of a black man in the delta each week for months. Medgar Evers,
a survivor of the bloody Normandy invasion, saw much of the state’s racism.
Whites stole his grandparents’ farm, lynched a close family friend who
offended a white woman, spat on him as he walked to school, and flashed
guns to block him and his friends from voting. After the University of
Mississippi’s law school excluded him, Evers became the state’s first NAACP
field secretary, tirelessly encouraging blacks to vote, file lawsuits, and join the
association. Amzie Moore, a gas station operator in Cleveland, was shocked
when he saw a black family of fourteen half-naked children, who had no
food, no beds, and no heat in their home. To change sorry situations like this,
Moore helped organize the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a local
version of the NAACP. Moore would sing gospel songs at church services
and then pleaded with blacks to vote. Angered by the gang rape of two
black girls, a pharmacist named Aaron Henrystarted an NAACP chapter
in Clarksdale and soon headed the state’s affiliate. Vowing to make jails
‘Temples of Freedom,’ Henry conducted voter-registration drives and boy-
cotts to integrate schools and all public facilities. He was soon convicted of a
fabricated morals charge in a town he had never visited; his wife was fired
from her teaching job; and the Henry home and drugstore were shot at
repeatedly.
As NAACP activists organized, white Mississippi counterattacked. The
state established a cloak-and-dagger spy agency, the State Sovereignty Com-
mission, which employed misinformation, espionage, intimidation, and
extortion to keep blacks from crossing Jim Crow’s lines. The commission fun-
neled $5,000 a month in state tax money to the Citizens’ Councils, which
was used to bribe black editors and ministers to oppose integration, pay
informants to betray the civil rights movement, and spread the gospel of100 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Henry, Aaron (1922–
97): Pharmacist who
headed Mississippi’s
NAACP, COFO, and MFDP.