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This is the mural you can see driving south on 23rd, outside the entrance to the Medgar Evers Pool: The writing on his white shirt spells “Medgar knew what he was doing and what the risks were. He just decided that he had to do what he had to do.” The quote is from an interview that his widow, Myrtle Evers, gave to Ebony magazine years after he was assassinated: The writing in Evers’ black hair says “History has reached a turning point, here and over the world”, which was spoken by Evers in 1963 shortly before he was assassinated: The bricks on the right are labeled “Building blocks of the future NAACP”; Evers was field secretary of the NAACP from 1954 until his death in 1963: The image of a figure in a jail cell could be a reference to the time that Medgar Evers was arrested on June 1, 1963, for picketing a Woolworth’s store, just 11 days before he was assassinated: The vehicle labeled “metro” could be a reference to his efforts to desegregate the private buses in Jackson, Mississippi: along with the clear reference to his activism for voting rights and restaurant de-segregation: Finally, in the upper right portion of the mural are the words “Fire but yet sorrow”, above the name of his widow Myrlie Evers: I thought this might be a quote attributed to her or associated with her, but Google doesn’t list any pages containing that phrase, so I assume it was invented by the creators of the mural. The mural was created in 1999 by a youth arts program called Coyote Central, which is still in operation. (All of this is stuff I looked up or guessed at, so let me know if I missed something or got it wrong.) Happy Juneteenth! submitted by /u/bennetthaselton |
