Honors for Evers
Stations to be named for civil rights icon
Next stop, civil rights history.
Gov. Cuomo announced Thursday that two Brooklyn subway stations will be renamed in honor of Medgar Evers, the slain NAACP field secretary who was assassinated outside his Mississippi home after a day of campaigning for voting rights and desegregation.
The subway station will honor the civil rights hero and the City University campus, Medgar Evers College, which bears his name.
“Medgar Evers was a hero whose life was taken during the historic movement to establish civil rights long denied to African-Americans in this nation, and New York is proud to be home to Medgar Evers College, an incredible institution providing high quality, career-oriented educational opportunities to a diverse student body,” Cuomo said.
“By renaming these subway stations in honor of the college, New York is not only celebrating a historic figure and institution, but embracing our diversity, which will always be our greatest strength, in our public spaces.”
The new stations, Franklin Ave.-Medgar Evers College and President St. Medgar Evers College, will be formally named in the fall. Maps, signs and other MTA materials will be amended over the summer, Cuomo said.
The renaming comes 50 years after the school was founded in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant with a mission to stand as a living tribute to Evers, and to educate a diverse community like the ones for which he gave his life.
The new station names are the result of legislation written by Assemblywoman Diana Richardson and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie. The project is being funded by a $250,000 legislative grant from Richardson. Neither the MTA nor New York City Transit will incur any additional costs.
“That this is happening during this critical period of change in our nation’s history is serendipitous,” said Richardson, a Medgar Evers College alumnus.
The renaming project also got the green light from Evers’ family,
“The entire Evers family was pleased to learn that Medgar is being honored in this manner,” said Evers’ daughter Reena Evers-Everette. “We hope that the station renaming will serve as a longstanding reminder to the public that transition is constant and that we must work continually toward making the world a better place.”
Evers-Everette was just 8 years old in 1963 when she witnessed her father’s assassination outside their home in Jackson, Miss. Evers, who was returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers, was gunned down in his driveway just hours after President John F. Kennedy’s nationally televised speech on civil rights.
He was carrying NAACP T-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go.”
The dying Evers was initially refused entry at a local hospital before the World War II veteran became the first African American in Mississippi to be admitted to an all-white hospital, where he died.
His killer, Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council in Jackson, was finally found guilty of murder in 1994, more than 30 years later, after all-white juries failed to convict him in two previous trials.