In observance of the fifty-fifth anniversary of his death, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum will host a program to commemorate the life of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. This free event, co-sponsored by the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute and the Mississippi Humanities Council, will be held Tuesday, June 12, at 6 p.m. in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium at the Two Mississippi Museums.
The evening’s events will include a program by MADDRAMA Performance Troupe, a poetry reading by Jackson State University instructor C. Leigh McInnis, and a special performance by Deanna Tisdale-Johnson. Afterwards, University of Texas at El Paso professor Michael V. Williams, author of “Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr,” will moderate a discussion on Evers’s early life and family, his career with the NAACP, and his death on June 12, 1963.
In 2003, Myrlie Evers-Williams donated the papers of her husband to the Mississippi Department of Archives & History. The collection consists of the papers of Medgar Evers as Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, and the papers of his family. The papers include primary documents relating to civil rights actions, petitions for improvements to black schools, affidavits signed by African Americans denied the right to register to vote, reports on investigations of racial incidents, materials used to develop speeches, and newspaper clippings from his files.
The family papers include correspondence, financial records, photographs, cards, and other items that reflect the activities and interests of Medgar Evers, his wife, and their three children. The Evers Collection can be accessed at the William F. Winter Archives and History Building. Many of these documents were used to create exhibits in the Two Mississippi Museums.
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opened alongside the Museum of Mississippi History in December 2017 in celebration of the state’s bicentennial. The Museum of Mississippi History explores the entire sweep of the state’s history. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, the first state-operated civil rights museum in the country, explores the period from 1945 to 1976, when Mississippi was ground zero for the Civil Rights Movement nationally. The museums are open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m.
For more information, call 601-576-6800 or visit http://www.mcrm.mdah.ms.gov.
