The opening of “He Said He Wouldn’t Mind Dying–If,” Myrlie Evers’ eloquent 1963 essay in Life, about the assassination of her husband, civil rights leader Medgar Evers:

“We all knew the danger was increasing. Threats came daily, cruel and cold and constant, against us and the children. But we had lived with this hatred for years and we did not let it corrode us.

Medgar was a happy man with a rich smile and a warmth that touched many people. He was never too busy to listen or too tired to to help. But beneath that gentle sympathy lay strength that could not be intimidated. Lord knows, enough people tried. But it never worked and that, I suppose, is why they killed him.

I don’t know what makes one man feel so passionately the needs of his people. It began for Medgar when he was a little boy in Decatur, Miss., where he was born. A family friend was lynched, and years later Medgar could still recall the shock with which he turned to his father.

‘Why did they kill him, Daddy?’ he asked.

‘Well, just because he was a colored man,’ his father said.

‘Could they kill you too?’

‘If I did anything they didn’t like, they sure could.’

Medgar never forgot that blunt statement of the facts of Negro life in Mississippi.”

•••••••••••

“A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood / A finger fired the trigger to his name”: