Remembering Medgar Evers

Assassinated 60 years ago today, the death of this civil rights giant should remind us that, unchecked, violent political speech activates physical violence and contempt for the law

Today, I reflect on the place of political violence in our nation’s history. If you know someone who would like to be part of this conversation, please:

President John F. Kennedy meets with representatives from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on July 21, 1961. Medgar Evers, Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary, is standing at the far left: less than two years later, he would be dead. Photo credit: Robert Knudsen; courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library/Wikimedia Commons.

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Sixty years ago today, civil rights activist and Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers, was shot and killed in his driveway by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Byron de la Beckwith. Evers, a 37-year-old decorated World War II combat veteran who survived the Normandy landings, graduated from Alcorn State College. He left behind a wife, Myrlie Evers-Williams, and three children: Darrell, James, and Reena.

The lethal assault on Evers was one of the very few white supremacist assaults on Black activists that made the national news in the early 1960s, a time when Black people were routinely attacked by elected and appointed officials. I could not find any complete accounting of how many people were shot, beaten, lynched, raped, blown up, or otherwise physically assaulted and killed in the 20 years between 1945 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. But Evers stands in for thousands of people who were terrorized, injured, and died to free Black Americans from an organized, right-wing political conspiracy to keep them poor, uneducated, and legally disenfranchised forever. 

There is no denying that political violence is what the white South stood for until the 1970s: Democrats then, they are Republicans today, and they are organized as a national movement. And just as we see today, the political violence that empowered and energized Byron de la Beckwith was openly organized and encouraged, and the perpetrators protected, by a conspiracy of white politicians elected by white voters. Like today’s right-wing attacks on Black Lives Matter and other social justice organizations, it was justified by false narratives that Black civil rights activism was a form of violence against whites that deserved a violent response.

Medgar Evers died at the hands of people whose ideological (and, in some cases, actual) descendants threaten our democracy with violence today. Currently, numerous Republican politicians, many sitting elected officials, warn that former president Donald Trump’s arraignment tomorrow in Miami will unleash a wave of civil violence on his behalf. Anticipating protests, Miami’s Republican mayor, Francis Suarez, will brief reporters this afternoon about security that will be in place to protect legal forms of protest and prevent violence.

As I reported earlier this year, since the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these calls to mass violence have not been successful. In April of this year, Trump issued a similar call to action after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged him with 34 felonies related to hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels. The predicted mob of MAGA faithful never showed; instead, a small collection of weirdos who did not even have the wherewithal and organizing strength to provide a sound system assembled to “defend” their leader.

Despite these continuous Republican calls for violence against the government, some open and some of the dog-whistle variety, I am less concerned about civil war than I am about lethal attacks on individuals, as we saw with Representative Gabby Giffords in 2011, or Paul Pelosi attack in November 2022. And, of course, these shocking attacks, issued in an atmosphere driven by violent Republican rhetoric, produce violence against all politicians. Although he was killed before anyone could ascertain his motive, in 2017, a gun-obsessed Bernie Sanders partisan sprayed a baseball field where the Republican House baseball team was practicing, wounding four, including Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA, 01).

The fact remains that it is Republican politicians who encourage this desire for armed conflict, rhetoric that positions the Biden administration as corrupt and an “enemy of the people.” Scalise, himself the victim of political violence, has used the language of government “weaponization” to characterize the new federal charges against Trump, a word that, in MAGA world, implicitly invites partisans to protect Trump—and by extension, themselves—with actual weapons. Clay Briggs (R-LA, 03) recently wrote to his audience on Twitter as if they were an army and he was restraining them from an all-out attack on the Miami courthouse where Trump will be arraigned tomorrow. “This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. POTUS has this,” he tweeted on June 8, implying that the federal government was literally at war with the former President and his supporters. 

And on June 10, Briggs wrote:

Patriots, we’ve manipulated the MSM to establish deep commo, now copy this… do NOT trip the wire they’ve laid for you. Maintain your family. Live your life. Know your bridges. Hold. Let Trump handle Trump, he’s got this. We use the Constitution as our only weapon. Peace. Hold.

“Hold” as in: “hold your fire.” As one Christian nationalist put it on the right-wing site FreedomNews.TV, “All we need is an order, we’re ready.”

However, some politicians are ready to give that order, and this form of speech, whether implicit or explicit, is hazardous, according to experts. You may recall a 2020 political ad by former Navy SEAL and sitting Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R, TX-02) that portrayed the Texas GOP House delegation as special forces agents descending on Washington to "save Texas." Kari Lake, who still claims to be the rightfully-elected governor of Arizona, recently directed a warning to Trump special prosecutor Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and President Joe Biden a few days ago. "If you want to get to President Trump," she told a cheering crowd, "you're going to have to go through me and 75 million Americans just like me. And most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That's not a threat. That's a public service announcement."

After Steve Scalise was shot, former Republican Speaker Paul Ryan declared: "An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us." Now, that seems like an almost quaint sentiment for any Republican. Today's GOP revels in the fictional civil war their political consultants invented to divide the nation. And that strategy had produced a frightening taste for political violence that rivals the days when the Klan, and the politicians that protected and urged on its violence, ruled Mississippi and the rest of the South. As David Gilbert reported at Vice News, within minutes of Trump's indictment in Miami, posters on The Donald began threatening violence, "It's not gonna stop until bodies start stacking up," one post read. Other participants posted information that could lead an interested assassin to Attorney General Merrick Garland's family. "His children are fair game as far as I'm concerned," one wrote.

Let's be clear: threats of violence and calls to overthrow a legally constituted government and its agents are not covered by the First Amendment. It is a federal crime to threaten the President, or any public official, with harm. We need to start enforcing these laws—and holding social media platforms accountable for not just platforming but distributing and profiting from illegal and undemocratic speech.

Because we know how issuing such threats ended for Medgar Evers and thousands of courageous Black activists whose names will never be entered in a history book. We honor their memory by acting today.

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Short takes:

• At MSNBC.com, Anthea Butler wrote an essay about 700 Club founder and Christian evangelical politician Pat Robertson: the evil, grifting bastard finally went to his maker last week. Giving Robertson credit for reshaping the Republican Party into the fact-free, homophobic, moralizing force that it is today, “Robertson provided the template for how politics and conservative Christians, evangelicals, Pentecostals and charismatics alike, would pursue office,” Butler argues. “With his deft organizing and his usage of end-times imagery and conspiracy theories to appeal to his audiences, Robertson influenced the likes of  John McCain and Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, and, as we see now, Gov Ron DeSantis of Florida.” (June 11, 2023)

• Ms. Magazine’s Michael Li breaks down last week’s surprise SCOTUS decision upholding a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Two members of the conservative bloc—John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh—contributed to a 5-4 decision in Allen v. Milligan, good news for Democrats and Black voters across the South and Midwest. Li evaluates the decision as a “qualified win,” because if “the decision didn’t further dismantle voting rights protections, it also didn’t strengthen them. In many ways, in fact, the win in Milligan spotlights how thin the tools for fighting discriminatory line drawing have become.” (June 9, 2023)

• At The Nation, columnist Joan Walsh takes a deep dive into Cornell West’s foray into the 2024 presidential election, laying out West’s history as a supporter of disruptions that have cost Democrats dearly. West supported Ralph Nader’s bid in 2000, a candidacy that cost thousands of American lives and millions of non-American ones when George W. Bush led the nation into two disastrous wars. West “never apologized,” as other high-profile Nander supporters did, Walsh reminds us. “He didn’t see a third party playing a spoiler role to Democrats as bad—obviously, since he’s about to do it again. He did support Barack Obama in 2008, but he turned on him fairly quickly, making criticisms that went way beyond Obama’s political decisions. Then he supported Jill Stein in 2016.” What kept him on the bench in 2020, I wonder? (June 8, 2023)