Medgar drove me around Mississippi, introducing me to every person he thought I needed to know. He could talk business with Black lawyers and doctors and chat with farmers about how the crops were growing, from Indianola to Hattiesburg. All the while, he taught me about Mississippi. People embraced me because Medgar told them to. He introduced me to countless locals whose practical knowledge helped keep me safe. I would never have survived without him.
The bullet that tore through Medgar’s flesh on June 12, 1963, changed the movement forever. Returning from an NAACP event after midnight, he was shot in the back as he got out of his car and walked toward his house. The country couldn’t deny the truth of what had happened to Medgar. I remember hearing the word assassination used for the first time to describe the killing of a Black activist. Death was always possible, but some deaths we’d had time to prepare for—after a wrong turn down the wrong dark road, or whistling at a white woman. That’s what death had looked like for us before. The act of registering Black people to vote and the quest to dismantle the American power structure made us feel a different kind of terror. We were going to change the country, after all, and that meant we were going to face coordinated, organized, directed murder.
In the 1950s, Mississippi formed a government entity called the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission with the goal of preserving segregation. The commission actively spread disinformation and privately funded white-supremacist groups. The state helped prepare the legal defense for Medgar’s assassin. Long before that, the commission had been a daily nemesis in our lives, routinely employing spies to attend our meetings and follow us around. Some of these spies were Black people who had been paid off. All we could do was go about our regular business and hope for the best.
Whatever sense of adventure we were feeling disappeared with Medgar. We weren’t just fighting racists and cops. We were fighting the entire government. This is something we had always known, but the way Medgar was killed became a ringing in our ears that kept us from sleeping.
For me, losing Medgar ripped my soul apart. The last words I said to him—“Someone’s gonna get killed riding around with you”—still bounce off my walls at night and haunt me when I wake up, sweat trickling down my chest. Why Medgar? Why him and not me?