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From the Publisher
“In Remembering Medgar Evers, Minrose Gwin has woven an intricately textured appreciation of that stunningly brave man, his tortured time, and the deeper meaning of his arduous life and brutal murder. Toiling in relative obscurity to overcome white supremacy in Mississippi, brought down by a racist assassin who publicly exulted for decades thereafter, Evers was both unique and representative of black Americans’ unfinished march toward full equality. Gwin makes sure that we cannot forget either reality.”—Hodding Carter, University Professor of Leadership and Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill“This is a book that should be widely read, shared with others, and placed in a spot of honor in every library. It tells important and all too often forgotten stories of the times with clarity and passion. It is a treasure.”—Myrlie Evers-Williams
"A worthy tribute to one of the civil rights era's most important and overlooked figures, an essential interrogation of Medgar Evers–themed works of some of the most important American artists of the last half century, and an intelligent examination of art meets activism."—Frank X. Walker, author of Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers
"In a time when forgetting is easier than remembering, Minrose Gwin brilliantly reconstitutes one of the signal moments of the civil rights movement and persuasively reconfigures its significance. Remembering Medgar Evers is both an all-important testimony to the necessity of the memory of the man, the moment, and the movement and a compelling explanation of Medgar’s relevance and persistence in black cultural production. Culling not only factual accounts from contemporary media sources but also creative responses from writers and musicians, Gwin memorializes the long civil rights struggle in Mississippi and the role Medgar’s life and death played in it. She skillfully merges the theoretical work of American literary and cultural studies with a moving analysis of the power of righteous social action and political justice in the United States."—Thadious M. Davis, author of Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature
Overview
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 ...