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Medger Evers Essay

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Medger Evers

Prejudice is an unfavorable opinion or feeling, formed beforehand (e.g., before even meeting a person) based on non-personal characteristics (e.g., skin color, religious, gender). One form of prejudice is racism. Racism is negative attitudes and values held by people about other people based on their race. It is this attitude which causes one to discriminate against another. Discrimination is treating people unfavorably on the basis of race, color or sex. Prejudice and discrimination were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. This era was a time of hatred, a time of violence, a time when black people were colonized by the white colonizer, and it was a time of white-on-black racial violence. Because of this hatred, the whites …show more content…

Unfortunately, many Americans today have never heard the name of Medgar Evers, a man who willingly, and literally, put his life on the line of hate that divided the races in the South. Ironically, many young Americans, including African Americans, who grew up after these turbulent years have forgotten leaders, such as Medgar Evers, who brought about the powerful tides of change.
Medgar Evers was born in 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi. After serving in the U.S. Army, he began to establish local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (better known as the NAACP), whose primary focus is the protection and enhancement of the civil rights of African Americans and other minorities, while attending Alcorn A&M College. (NPR). In 1952, after graduating college, he sold insurance in rural Mississippi. It was during this time that he grew enraged at the oppression of the black people in his state and became more active in the NAACP where he became the first field secretary in Mississippi, where he struggled to bring equality to his home state of Mississippi. A state in which he loved with hope and rarely with despair, and it was his hope that sustained him, a state with such blatant discrimination that blacks dared not even speak of civil rights, much less actively campaign for them. Evers recalls a time in 1954, when he

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