The light blue house on Guynes Street would blend into the other ranch homes in this modest Mississippi neighborhood, if it weren't for the regular stream of tour buses and visitors pulling up. On this day, more than 50 students from New York will take the trip back in time with us.
It was here on this concrete carport in 1963 that civil rights leader Medgar Evers died while trying to crawl back to his home. The blood still stains the concrete ever so faintly. Evers had been shot in the back as he got out of his car.
The home immortalized in the movie Ghosts of Mississippi is decorated with 1950s furnishings that the filmmakers donated to the group that gives tours of the slain leader's house. One room, however, remains empty except for the panels that tell the story of the man who lived and died here.
They say in part: "Three incidents from his youth that Medgar would recall as shaping his life were being called 'nigger' by a white child he often played with, the lynching of a friend of his father's seen 'leering' at a white woman, and seeing Senator Theodore Bilbo speak about holding the wall of segregation to prevent 'little nigger boys'--while pointing to Medgar and his brother Charles-¡Vfrom one day asking for what Bilbo said belonged only to whites by right--the right to vote."
As a traveling salesman, Evers was horrified by what he saw in poor black homes across the Mississippi Delta and began organizing NAACP chapters across the region. In time, he gave interviews and addressed NAACP meetings from New York to California, along the way garnering the wrath of Mississippi whites steadfast against black equality.
On his last night alive, Evers addressed a group of 3,500 at the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street:
"It's not enough to just sit here tonight and voice your approval and clap your hands and shed your tears and sing and then go out and do nothing about this struggle. Freedom has never been free...I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die and die gladly if that would make life better for them."
His sacrifice came a little later that night.
As the New York teenagers emerged from the home, one stopped to take a picture of the concrete floor of the carport. I stopped him and offered to take a picture of him in front of the house instead. I thought, what in the world would a frame of a dirty floor mean to him later?
He explained: "I need to have a picture of the blood."
Occasionally, a teenager surprises me.
