Medgar Evers

Before he was the NAACP's field secretary, Medgar Evers was a farm boy in Decatur. Born on July 2, 1925, the third of five children of Jesse and James Evers, he grew up on a small family farm while his father worked at a sawmill. Segregated schools meant that he and his siblings walked about twelve miles a day to class. In 1946, home from the Army, he and his brother Charles tried to register to vote in Decatur and were refused. He graduated from Alcorn in 1952 and was killed in Jackson on June 12, 1963.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dunn's Falls Water Park — 22 mi
  A 65-foot waterfall on the Chunky River built in the 1850s by an Irish immigrant, with a working water wheel and an 1857 grist mill, south of Meridian.
• Old Neshoba County Jail — 23 mi
  The 1955 jail in downtown Philadelphia where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were held on June 21, 1964, hours before they were murdered.
• Highland Park Dentzel Carousel — 23 mi
  The last two-row stationary Dentzel menagerie in the world, in its original carousel house in Meridian's Highland Park, a National Historic Landmark since 1987.
• Chahta Immi Cultural Center — 23 mi
  The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians' own museum and cultural center at Pearl River, with basketry, artifacts and the tribe's guidance on what visitors may see.

More markers nearby

• Sherman at Decatur — steps away
• Grierson's Raid — 8.8 mi
• Confederate Hospital — 8.8 mi
• Ross Alexander Collins — 16 mi