Civil rights figure Charles Evers dies

Jackson (US), July 23: Charles Evers, who led an eclectic life as a civil rights leader, onetime purveyor of illegal liquor in Chicago, history-making Black mayor in deeply segregated Mississippi and contrarian with connections to prominent national Democrats and Republicans, has died. He was 97.

Evers — who was the older brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers — died on Wednesday of “natural causes” at a home in the Jackson, Mississippi, suburb of Brandon, where he was surrounded by relatives, Rankin County Coroner David Ruth said.

Ruth said the cause of death was not the Coronavirus,

and no autopsy is planned. Charles and Medgar Evers both served in the military during World War II, and they became active in the NAACP when they returned to their home state of Mississippi and continued to face discrimination. Medgar Evers had been field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP for more than eight years when he was assassinated outside his Jackson home in June 1963. In 1968, a former fertiliser salesman and selfavowed white supremacist, Byron De La Beckwith, went on trial twice in the killing, but all-white juries deadlocked and did not convict him.

The case was later revived, and a jury of eight African Americans and four white people convicted Beckwith of murder in 1994. The Mississippi Supreme Court upheld that conviction in 1997. “Before, the killer of a Black man would go free. Now we know you just can’t go out and kill a Black man or woman and nothing is done,” Charles Evers said after that Supreme Court decision. “Justice finally came.”

Charles Evers was appointed to lead the Mississippi NAACP after his brother was killed. In 1969, he was elected mayor of the southwestern Mississippi town of Fayette, becoming the first Black mayor of a multiracial town.