Remembering Medgar Evers : writing the long civil rights movement / Minrose Gwin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gwin, Minrose.

Series:

Mercer University Lamar memorial lectures ; no. 53.

Mercer University Lamar Memorial lectures ; no. 53

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Evers, Medgar Wiley, 1925-1963.

Evers, Medgar Wiley.

Evers, Medgar Wiley, 1925-1963--Influence.

Evers, Medgar Wiley, 1925-1963--Songs and music.

Civil rights movements--Mississippi--Jackson--History--20th century.

Civil rights movements.

African Americans--Civil rights--Mississippi--Jackson--History--20th century.

African Americans.

African American civil rights workers--Mississippi--Jackson--Biography.

African American civil rights workers.

Civil rights workers--Mississippi--Jackson--Biography.

Civil rights workers.

African Americans--Civil rights.

History.

Mississippi--Jackson.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

232 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, [2013]

Summary:

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 her 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 accounts about Evers, 1960s gospel and protest music as well as contemporary hip-hop, the haunting poems of Frank X Walker, and contemporary fiction such as Kathryn Stockett's The Help and Gwin's own novel, 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." Book jacket.

Contents:

"He leaned across tomorrow" : Medgar Evers and the future

Where are the voices "coming from"? : James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, and the question of location

"Agitators" and aesthetics : Jackson's newspapers and the battle for collective memory

"It wears, it tears at the root of your heart" : Medgar Evers and the civil rights memoir

Music and Medgar Evers : the heartbeat of memory

The pocket and the heart.

Notes:

"A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund publication"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780820335636

0820335630

9780820335643

0820335649

OCLC:

793576323