If the federal government suspected that the various civil rights organizations were working together, they now had the evidence. In 1962 the N.A.A.C.P., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality formally united, forming a new umbrella organization: the Council of Federated Organizations. Evers signed the compact on behalf of the N.A.A.C.P.
Despite the national N.A.A.C.P.’s admonitions, Evers continued to correspond with King and seek to work with him, using King’s Montgomery strategy to build a successful boycott movement in Jackson, Miss. From the winter of 1962 through the spring of 1963, the Jackson movement persuaded Black shoppers to all but abandon downtown shops where they could not be served with dignity, try on clothes, eat in the main dining area or hope to be employed. By May, when Evers delivered a historic televised address rejecting the mayor of Jackson’s lies about happy Black Mississippians under segregation, he had, if briefly, achieved the Kingian movement he hoped for in Mississippi. In doing so, he also became a top target of the White Citizens’ Councils, the state spy organization called the Sovereignty Commission and the Ku Klux Klan.
After Evers became the first major civil rights leader to be assassinated in the American South, on June 12, 1963, his widow, Myrlie Evers, stepped into his shoes. She was invited to speak from the main stage at the August 1963 March on Washington. An early draft of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered to a crowd of 25,000 in Detroit on June 23, 1963, even included a line about Evers and Emmett Till: “I have a dream this afternoon that there will be a day that we will no longer face the atrocities that Emmett Till had to face or Medgar Evers had to face, that all men can live with dignity.”
When King himself was murdered in Memphis in April 1968, his wife, Coretta Scott King, entered into a sisterhood of widows, forming a lifelong friendship with the widows of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. None of those men lived to turn 40.
When we celebrate King for his martyrdom and for the uniquely brilliant way he spoke the language of liberation, we should also remember Medgar Evers. King laid the groundwork for many transformative changes — in civil rights, voting rights, the fight against poverty and for a living wage and the subsequent shifts toward immigration expansion, women’s rights and L.G.B.T.Q. rights in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But all of these movements were built by coalitions, not by individuals.