On this day, June 12, in 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway in Jackson, Miss., shot by a Ku Klux Klan member.
Evers was instrumental in desegregating the University of Mississippi and investigating the death of Emmitt Till, a 14-year-old who was killed for reportedly flirting with a white woman.
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Carrying National Association for the Advancement of Colored People T-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go,” Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from a rifle, just hours after President John Kennedy gave a speech on national television supporting civil rights. White supremacist Byron De La Beckwith was charged in the death, but was set free after all-white juries failed to reach a decision in two trials. Three decades later, the state of Mississippi reopened the case. In February 1994, a jury found De La Beckwith, then 73, guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life and died in prison seven years later.
Evers, a World War II veteran who participated in the Normandy invasion, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
