# @gettyimages on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CCJFfYvHIwH
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16446062-gettyimages-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/5785cbf844.jpg
- **Posted:** 2020-07-02T13:49:44.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Getty Images (@GettyImages) — https://gondola.cc/GettyImages

## Caption

"Freedom has never been free"
Civil rights activist Medgar Evers, pictured (center) in his capacity as NAACP field secretary, with executive secretary Roy Wilkins (left), being arrested whilst picketing outside of a Woolworth's department store in Jackson, Mississippi, 1963.
Born 95 years ago today, Evers served in the U.S Army during WWII, fighting in the Battle of Normandy, before joining the growing civil rights movement of the 1950s.
A graduate of what is now Alcorn State University, he was a shrewd, diligent campaigner & became a leading figure at the NAACP. Co-ordinating boycotts & voter registration drives, Evers led calls for the desegregation of schools & facilities. Involved with the pivotal applications of both James Meredith & Clyde Kennard to Mississippi universities, he also supported the Biloxi wade-ins, and led a public investigation into the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.
Targeted by white supremacists, Ever had escaped two assassination attempts before being fatally shot outside his home on 12 June 1963. President Kennedy had delivered the Civil Rights Address on national television just hours earlier.
Initially refused entry to the hospital in Jackson on the grounds of race, Evers became the first Black patient admitted to a segregated Mississippi hospital. He died fifty minutes later.
Buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honours & Robert Kennedy in attendance, 5,000 people marched in Evers' memory & to protest his death. His life continued to inspire the civil rights movement.
Despite first being arrested for the crime in 1963, it took thirty years before Byron De La Beckwith was convicted for the murder of Medgar Evers. The first trial had ended with the all-white jury in a deadlock, leaving De La Beckwith - a member of the Ku Klux Klan - to live as a free man in the intervening years, bar a jail-spell for conspiring to murder activist Adolph Botnick.
In 2005, the airport in Jackson was renamed in Evers' honour, and his home has been designated a national monument.
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📷: Bettmann/Getty Images  #GettyImages25 #PreservingThePast #GettyArchive⁠ #MedgarEvers #GettyImages ⁠

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gettyimages25, preservingthepast, medgarevers, gettyimages, gettyarchive

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