 |
Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement by Minrose Gwin
As the first NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, Medgar Wiley Evers put his life on the line to investigate racial crimes (including Emmett Till's murder) and to organize boycotts and voter registration drives. On June 12, 1963, he was shot in the back by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith as the civil rights leader unloaded a stack of "Jim Crow Must Go" T-shirts in his own driveway. His was the first assassination of a high-ranking public figure in the civil rights movement.
While Evers's death ushered in a decade of political assassinations and ignited a powder keg of racial unrest nationwide, his life of service and courage has largely been consigned to the periphery of U.S. and civil rights history. In this compelling study of collective memory and artistic production, Remembering Medgar Evers, Minrose Gwin engages the powerful body of work that has emerged in response to Evers's life and death—fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and songs from James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, Lucille Clifton, Bob Dylan, and Willie Morris, among others. Gwin examines local news account about Evers, 1960s gospel and protest music as well as contemporary hip-hop, the haunting poems of Frank X Walker, and contemporary fiction, including Gwin's own novel of racial violence in the summer of 1963, The Queen of Palmyra. In this study, Evers springs to life as a leader of "plural singularity," who modeled for southern African Americans a new form of cultural identity that both drew from the past, and broke from it. To quote Gwendolyn Brooks, "He leaned across tomorrow."
"In a time when forgetting is easier than remembering, Minrose Gwin brilliantly reconstitutes one of the signal moments of the civil rights movement and persuasively reconfigures its significance. Remembering Medgar Evers is both an all-important testimony to the necessity of the memory of the man, the moment, and the movement and a compelling explanation of Medgar's relevance and persistence in Black cultural production. Culling not only factual accounts from contemporary media sources, but also creative responses from writers and musicians, Gwin memorializes the long civil rights struggle in Mississippi and the role Medgar's life and death played in it. She skillfully merges the theoretical work of American literary and cultural studies with a moving analysis of the power of righteous social action and political justice in the United States." —Thadious M. Davis, author of Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature
 |
"In Remembering Medgar Evers, Minrose Gwin has woven an intricately textured appreciation of that stunningly brave man, his tortured time, and the deeper meaning of his arduous life and brutal murder. Toiling in relative obscurity to overcome white supremacy in Mississippi, brought down by a racist assassin who publicly exulted for decades thereafter, Evers was both unique and representative of black Americans' unfinished march toward full equality. Gwin makes sure that we cannot forget either reality." —Hodding Carter III, author of The South Strikes Back and Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under Jimmy Carter
"A worthy tribute to one of the Civil Rights Era's most important and overlooked figures, an essential interrogation of Medgar-Evers-themed works of some of the most important American artists of the last half century, and an intelligent examination of art meets activism." —Frank X Walker, author of Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers
"A well-researched book that both illuminates and analyzes the immense impact that Medgar Evers's life and assassination had on literary expression, memory, and protest. This important work provides insightful, and sometimes painful, examinations of the personal and psychological repercussions that martyrdom produces, while also dissecting the creative expressions of resistance and protest that resulted. Gwin's thorough attention to the development of literary works, music, poetry, and film inspired by Evers's murder further accentuates his importance to the civil rights struggle and the significance of a long civil rights movement approach to understanding social struggle and resistance." —Michael Vinson Williams, author of Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr