Every Memorial Day, I try to visit Arlington National Cemetery. I try to do the same thing every July Fourth. I make it a point to visit the same six grave sites. Here they are, in descending order of the esteem I hold for each person.
1. Civil rights activist Medgar Evers: He was born on July 2, 1925. That’s why I try to visit his grave site on July 4. Evers was the field secretary of Mississippi’s NAACP branch in the 1950s and early 1960s.
When Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago youth, was lynched in Money, Miss., in 1955, Evers played a key role in publicizing the atrocity nationally and internationally. He was instrumental in getting James Meredith accepted to the University of Mississippi’s law school.
Evers doesn’t get as much credit for his civil rights work as Martin Luther King Jr. does, but he should. He was felled by an assassin’s bullet on June 12, 1963. As a veteran of World War II, he was qualified to be buried in Arlington.
You won’t find mention of Evers’ grave site in any of the cemetery literature. Several years ago I tried to get the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to kind of nudge cemetery officials into giving Evers’ grave site more prominent mention in the literature, to no avail.
Kweisi Mfume was president of the NAACP at the time. Even he didn’t know Evers was buried in Arlington. But Evers’ widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, thanked me for my futile efforts.
2. Audie Murphy: America’s most decorated soldier in World War II, and a darned fine star of Western movies to boot. There’s only one Western movie star I place above the immortal, incomparable John “Duke” Wayne, and that’s Murphy. I’d consider it almost criminal if I went to Arlington and didn’t visit his grave site.
3. Robert F. Kennedy: the man who could have been president in 1968 if an assassin’s bullet hadn’t taken his life. In the early 1960s, neither Robert Kennedy nor his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was very adept at handling the nation’s civil rights problems.
They completely botched the crisis at Ole Miss when rioters protested James Meredith’s admission to the law school. They even acquiesced to the resegregation of an integrated military police unit in an attempt to appease racists.
But it was Robert Kennedy who got on board with civil rights long before his older brother did. Gloria Richardson, a Cambridge, Md. activist, told me how impressed she was with RFK’s grasp of the civil rights situation.
4. John F. Kennedy: His presidency was nowhere as good as his admirers think it was, but I recall how devastated I was at the news of his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. That memory keeps me coming back to his grave site.
5. Joe Louis: yes, the Brown Bomber is buried at ANC. Like Evers, Louis served in the armed forces during World War II. He boxed in exhibitions and gave the proceeds to relief agencies for various branches of the military.
I remember his immortal quote about our war effort in its early days, which is what the nation needed to hear: “We’ll win, because we’re on God’s side.”
6. Lee Marvin: like Murphy, one of my favorite actors. Nobody quite played the heavy like Marvin. Remember him as the demented Liberty Valance in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” where he stole the show from John Wayne and James Stewart?
Marvin was actually one of the good guys, serving in the Marine Corps during World War II.
If you make it to ANC today, you might not want to pass on visiting these six grave sites.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
