In 1956 Medgar and Myrlie Evers bought a ranch house on Guynes Street, now Margaret Walker Alexander Drive, in the Elraine subdivision, which the National Park Service calls Mississippi's first modern subdivision designed for middle-class Black families. They planned for violence from the start. The house has a side entrance under a carport instead of a front door, furniture stood in front of the windows to block gunfire, and the children learned to crawl to the bathroom, where the cast-iron tub was judged the safest place. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail onto the carport on May 24, 1963. The house doubled as an extension of the NAACP office, with Myrlie running the Jackson field office behind the scenes.
Just after midnight on June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers came home from a meeting at New Jerusalem Baptist Church and was shot in the back as he got out of his car in this driveway. He died within the hour at the University Medical Center. Byron De La Beckwith, a white extremist, was tried twice in 1964 and both juries hung. A Mississippi jury convicted him on February 5, 1994, and he died in prison in 2001.
Myrlie Evers-Williams kept the house intact and gave it to Tougaloo College in 1993, and a state-funded restoration followed. Tougaloo conveyed it to the Park Service in 2020, making it the 423rd unit of the national park system. This is still a residential street. Rangers lead tours for small groups, and the Park Service suggests parking at Myrlie's Garden at the Missouri Street corner, so check nps.gov/memy before you go.
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