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Our History is American History - Medgar Evers

There's a song that says,
"Everyday is a day of thanksgiving, God's been so good to me. Everyday He's blessing me. Everyday is a day of thanksgiving. Take the time to glorify the Lord today."  I need to sing this song more b/c I have to remain in a thankful frame of mind b/c for the past few months, the Lord has kept me "clothed in my right mind" as the elders would say. If you don't know what that means, keep on living and you'll find out. It seems these days the testing of my right mind are coming more and more frequent. The attempts to re-write history, especially the history of Black people in the US, is rooted in racism. While I try to shake it off... it's a struggle. "Everyday is a day of thanksgiving, God's been so good to me. Everyday He's blessing me. Everyday is a day of thanksgiving. Take the time to glorify the Lord today." So what's new? Welp, the current administration wants to rename Navy ships named after prominent Americans and you can probably guess the reason. 😑 No? Well, here's a list of names... Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Medgar Evers, Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk, Dolores Huerta, and Lucy Stone. Is it clearer now? "Everyday is a day of thanksgiving, God's been so good to me. Everyday He's blessing me. Everyday is a day of thanksgiving. Take the time to glorify the Lord today." You likely have heard of at least one or more of these people. If you don't know their significance to American History, whereas the US Navy saw fit to christen ships in their honor, look them up. Since I'm nice and blogging is my therapy, here's a little nugget about Medgar Evers. Over here... on this blog... WE REMEMBER!!! "Everyday is a day of thanksgiving, God's been so good to me. Everyday He's blessing me. Everyday is a day of thanksgiving. Take the time to glorify the Lord today." 

Medgar Evers (1925-1963) was an African-American civil rights activist whose murder drew national attention. Born in Mississippi, he served in World War II having fought in both France and Germany during World War II before receiving an honorable discharge in 1946. In 1954, the year of the momentous Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which purportedly ended segregation of schools, Medgar quit the insurance business; he subsequently applied and was denied admission to the University of Mississippi Law School. His unsuccessful effort to integrate the state’s oldest public educational institution attracted the attention of the NAACP’s national office. Later that year, Evers moved to the state capital of Jackson and became the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. Although, Medgar Evers was denied admission to the University of Mississippi Law School, he was instrumental in the eventual desegregation of "Ole Miss" in 1962.

As state field secretary, Evers recruited members throughout Mississippi and organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations, and economic boycotts of white-owned companies that practiced discrimination. He also worked to investigate crimes perpetrated against blacks, most notably the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy who had allegedly been killed for talking to a white woman.

As early as 1955, Evers activism made him the most visible civil rights leader in the state of Mississippi and he and his family were subjected to numerous threats and violent actions over the years, including a firebombing of their house in May 1963. At 12:40 a.m. on June 12, 1963, Evers was shot in the back in the driveway of his home in Jackson and he died less than an hour later at a nearby hospital. Although accused killer Byron De La Beckwith escaped conviction, the unearthing of new evidence decades later resulted in Beckwith’s retrial and imprisonment.

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