Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement

Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures

by Minrose Gwin

As the first NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, Medgar Wiley Evers put his life on the line to investigate racial crimes (including Emmett Till’s murder) and to organize boycotts and voter registration drives. On June 12, 1963, he was shot in the back by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith as the civil rights leader unloaded a stack of “Jim Crow Must Go” T-shirts in his own driveway. His was the first assassination of a high-ranking public figure in the civil rights movement.

While Evers’s death ushered in a decade of political assassinations and ignited a powder keg of racial unrest nationwide, his life of service and courage has largely been consigned to the periphery of U.S. and civil rights history. In her compelling study of collective memory and artistic production, Remembering Medgar Evers, Minrose Gwin engages the powerful body of work that has emerged in response to Evers’s life and death—fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and songs from James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, Lucille Clifton, Bob Dylan, and Willie Morris, among others. Gwin examines local news accounts about Evers, 1960s gospel and protest music as well as contemporary hip-hop, the haunting poems of Frank X Walker, and contemporary fiction such as The Help and Gwin’s own novel, The Queen of Palmyra. In this study, Evers springs to life as a leader of “plural singularity,” who modeled for southern African Americans a new form of cultural identity that both drew from the past and broke from it; to quote Gwendolyn Brooks, “He leaned across tomorrow.”

Fifty years after his untimely death, Evers still casts a long shadow. In her examination of the body of work he has inspired, Gwin probes wide-ranging questions about collective memory and art as instruments of social justice. “Remembered, Evers’s life’s legacy pivots to the future,” she writes, “linking us to other human rights struggles, both local and global.”

A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography

232 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2013

About the author

Minrose Gwin is the author of three novels: The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise; and The Accidentals. Wishing for Snow, her 2004 memoir about the convergence of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, was reissued by Harper Perennial in 2011. Wearing another hat, she has written four books of literary and cultural criticism and history, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement, and coedited The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology. Minrose began her career as a newspaper reporter. Since then, she has taught as a professor at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Like the characters in Promise, she grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi.

Reviews

[Kribsoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This new book by Minrose Gwin, a literary scholar, and novelist, is the most intense survey of the various takes On the death of Medgar Evers in June, 1963 fifty years ago which I've ever read Not a reader of the New Yorker then I had no knowledge that the venerable Mississippi novelist Eudora Welty contributed a piece to the magazine shortly after the murder and I've yet to read the compilation of speeches and facts produced by his widow Myrlie Evers later to become a national NAACP leader after moving to Los Angeles but Bob Dylan's "A Bullet from the back of the bush took Medgar Evers blood he's only a pawn in their game continues to ring in my mind as it did when I reported for duty the summer after the murder as one of the "soldiers in the non-violent army" recruited to bear witness against the state sysetmatic murder and oppression policy Nor have I read Wille Morris account so my view is limited but I have never been so entranced by a serious academic book some with fifty or more footnotes a chapter so felicitously and compellingly written. She does fail to discuss Nashville's Will Campbell's intense memoire of himself and his brother during that period, Brother to A Dragon Fly and her take on Dylan's song seems awkward to such a devout fan or follower as myself but it certainly is an indepth and flowing study of the intersection of the Mississippi movement and the murderous impulse which flowed so strongly then and ever seems to be one of the deepest rivers of institutional hatred in the good old hating repressive jurisdictions of the USA

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minrose Gwin's book evaluates the remembrance of Medgar Evers' life through literature and music. It exposes a wealth of information about those who fought so diligently to preserve the legacy that Medgar Evers left, and those who fought hard to forget.