Charles Evers, who gave up life as a small blackmail to succeed his murdered brother Medgar Evers as Mississippi’s civil rights leader in 1963, becoming the state’s first black mayor since Reconstruction and a candidate for governor and senator from the States Together, she died Wednesday at her daughter’s home in Brandon, Miss. He was 97 years old.
Her granddaughter Courtney E. Cockrell confirmed the death. Mr. Evers was the third prominent civil rights leader to die in a week; the Rev. CT Vivian and Rep. John Lewis, who had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., both died on Friday.
Despite all their similarities: college graduates, relentless enemies of segregation, and violent racism, the brothers were quite different. Medgar (gentle, diplomatic, altruistic) became a brilliant organizer of civil rights. Charles (forceful, aggressive, ambitious) became a petty criminal and businessman, handling numbers, prostitution, and whiskey rackets in Mississippi and Chicago.
But nearly a decade after he was expelled from Mississippi, Charles Evers, galvanized by the murder that had made his brother a national civil rights martyr, left the scams, returned from Chicago, and replaced Medgar as field director of NAACP in Mississippi. organized registration campaigns for black voters, economic boycotts against white companies, and challenges to the white structure of the state Democratic Party.
Over the next decade, he became a national civil rights figure known in his own right. He was co-chair of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s Mississippi campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 and leader of Mississippi’s first racially integrated delegation to the Democratic National Convention that year in Chicago. She also ran for Congress in 1968, although without success.
The following year, he was elected mayor of Fayette, Miss., Becoming the first African-American in a century to hold that office in that 1,600-Delta city, the black majority of which had been kept out of polls for years for intimidation and violence. The election made headlines across the country, stunning a deep south that had been forced to confront its racist past and the implications of black voter power at the ballot box.
“The hands that picked cotton can now elect the mayor,” Evers said as he mapped out the changes for a biracial township that would drop Jim Crow ordinances and no longer tolerate disrespect by police and garbage not collected in the black neighborhoods. (Variations on that quote would emerge in the coming years in other political careers where black voting power had an impact.)
Congratulations from President Richard M. Nixon, former President Lyndon B. Johnson, Senators Edmund Muskie and Eugene J. McCarthy, and other national leaders. Civil rights notables and movie and television stars attended its inauguration. Leontyne Price sang “The Star-Spangled Banner”.
While reporters from national publications visited Fayette to assess progress, black and white residents continued to live on opposite sides of a social chasm. But Mayor Evers attracted $ 10 million for factory, business and medical center development, creating hundreds of jobs. And his civil rights campaign across the region made remarkable progress.
“The progress made by the NAACP in Mississippi under Charles Evers has been spectacular,” Current Biography said in a profile of him in 1969, “particularly in the predominantly black counties in the southwestern corner of the state, where Evers, an insurgent Democrat, has for the first time it mobilized black voting power and effectively challenged the traditionally white state party structure. “
With the publicity that made him a household name in the United States, Mr. Evers in 1971 became the first African-American candidate for governor of Mississippi. His career as an independent was supported by Coretta Scott King, the Black Caucus of Congress, Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York, and civil rights leaders across the country. In an effort to undermine critics, he detailed his dark past in memory, “Evers” (1971, with Grace Halsell), but was defeated by Democrat William Waller.
In 1978, Mr. Evers ran as an independent for a seat in the United States Senate that had been vacated by James O. Eastland. He finished third, with almost a quarter of the vote, a forceful sample that diverted the votes of the favored Democrat, Maurice Dantin, and helped elect the Republican, Thad Cochran, with a plurality of 45 percent.
After four non-consecutive terms as mayor of Fayette (he lost a reelection nomination in 1981 and won office in 1985), Evers lost the 1989 Democratic primary for a fifth term and withdrew from active politics. He moved to Jackson, but continued to reap profits from a mall he had in Fayette.
“It was time for a change,” he said after losing primary. “I’m tired of being in the front. Let someone else be up front. “
James Charles Evers, who rarely used his first name, was born in Decatur, Miss., On September 11, 1922, the oldest of four children to James and Jessie Wright Evers. His father was a worker and his mother was a maid, although they owned a funeral home and a sawmill. Charles and Medgar, who was three years younger, once saw a lynched family friend.
They walked miles to segregated schools. “We never understood why white children could ride their big bright yellow bus while we were splashing around in the mud,” Charles told the New York Times in 1968. “That bothered us. Although we were a little more fortunate than many, we never we feel so different from other blacks, and Medgar and I always said: When we grew up, we would change it. ”
Charles joined the army in 1941 and served in the Pacific in World War II. He finished high school after the war and in 1950 received a degree from Alcorn A. & M., a historically black university. (It is now Alcorn State University).
In 1951, he married Manie Magee. They had four daughters and she divorced in 1974. Information about her survivors was not immediately available.
After a year serving with his reserve unit in the Korean War, Mr. Evers settled in Philadelphia, Mississippi, who became famous for the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers. He opened a hotel, restaurant, taxi service, and gas station, became a disc jockey, and promoted prostitution and smuggling. The authorities and business rivals expelled him, and in 1956 he fled to Chicago and continued his business and scams there.
On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers was shot to death in an ambush at the entrance to his Jackson home. Despite clear evidence against Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist, two trials in 1964 ended in hanging juries. In 1994, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. He died as a prisoner in 2001.
Charles was a tough replacement for his brother. He carried a gun, hired bodyguards, and used strong arm tactics in boycotts against white companies. By attracting black customers to his own stores, he profited from the boycotts and alienated many civil rights leaders.
His tactic of a seven-year boycott of white merchants in Claiborne County, Miss., Became a First Amendment case in the Supreme Court in 1982. The merchants sued the NAACP, saying that Mr. Evers had done Carry out the boycott with threats to break the neck of anyone who violated it.
In reversing a Mississippi ruling, the Supreme Court held that Mr. Evers’s rhetoric “did not transcend the limits of protected speech,” adding: “A massive and protracted effort to change the social, political, and economic structure of a local environment. it cannot be characterized as a violent conspiracy simply by reference to the ephemeral consequences of relatively few violent acts. “
Mr. Evers thrived with supermarkets, liquor stores, and real estate in Fayette, Jackson, and other cities, such as journalist and author Ellis Cose. noted in a Times review of Mr. Evers’ memoir “Don’t Be Afraid: The Charles Evers Story” (1997, with Andrew Szanton).
“Had he been born in a different color or in a more rational time, Charles Evers could have become a famous magnate,” wrote Mr. Cose. “He has the prowess of a star seller, the tenacity of a pioneer, and the mockery of a PT Barnum.”
Julia Carmel contributed reporting.
