The Murder of Medgar Evers | The Crusader | 1

This episode contains descriptions and details that some listeners might find disturbing.

Listener discretion is advised.

It's the evening of June 11th, 1963.

The sun is just beginning to set over a residential neighborhood of Jackson, Mississippi.

A white compact car cruises along a quiet street, seemingly in no hurry to get to its destination.

To an onlooker, it might look like somebody out for a leisurely nighttime drive.

But behind the wheel, 42-year-old Byron Dela Beckwith is on a mission.

He peers carefully out into the darkening street, reading each house number as he passes.

Finally, he sees it.

Number 2332.

It's a single-story wood-frame house, a bungalow like most others on the street.

Nothing remarkable.

But Byron's pulse quickens at the sight of it.

He forces himself to drive away.

Can't risk anyone seeing him lurking outside.

Byron pulls into an empty lot just down the street, about 500 feet away from the house.

After turning off the engine, he sits behind the wheel for a while, trying to calm himself down.

He's excited, and that's no good.

He needs a steady hand this evening.

He turns on the car radio trying to distract himself.

The 10 p.m.

news is on, and the reporters are recapping a speech that President John F.

Kennedy's just made, a televised address to the nation on civil rights.

It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color.

Disgusted, Byron switches the radio off.

He doesn't want to hear more of that.

He's never like Kennedy, but this is a new low even for him.

In Byron's mind, the country is headed in the wrong direction.

It's a good thing there are regular men like him who'll do what needs to be done.

Newly energized, he gets out of the car and walks to the trunk.

He glances around, checking that the lot is really as empty as it looks.

There's a drive-through rest run on the other side of the lot, but nobody's coming in or out right now.

He pops the trunk and takes one last look around to make sure he's alone.

Then he reaches in and pulls out a sniper rifle.

Byron heads out into the darkened street, now walking with purpose.

Ahead of him, the house comes into view, number 2332.

There's a dim glow emanating from behind its drawn shades.

It's peaceful, but it won't be for long.

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

Throughout the 1960s, the United States was rocked by a series of brazen assassinations.

President John F.

Kennedy and activists Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

were gunned down in public.

The murders fueled a sense of unrest and dangerous political polarization in America.

Coupled with an increasing crime rate nationwide, the country felt unsafe on a knife's edge.

And for the Civil Rights Movement, it was a particularly dark time.

All three of those men, JFK, Malcolm X and MLK, were vocal opponents of America's entrenched racism.

Their deaths only made the dream of racial equality in the US feel more out of reach than ever.

But before any of this, one assassination set the tone for what was to come.

In the summer of 1963, Medgar Evers became one of the first martyrs of the civil rights movement.

At just 37 years old, he'd already made a name for himself by fighting for racial equality in the segregated South.

And his tireless activism had put a target on his back.

A target that proved too big for one man to ignore.

The man who killed Medgar Evers embodied the racism and white entitlement that consumed much of the South at the time.

Byron de la Beckwith grew up believing that his lineage and race made him superior to other people.

And when the world didn't hand him the things he believed he deserved, he looked for someone to blame.

When Byron gunned down Medgar Evers in his own driveway, it was only the beginning of a grueling, years-long ordeal for Medgar's family and friends.

Because despite overwhelming evidence against Byron, he was protected by a complex web of structural privilege and systematic racism in the state of Mississippi.

The very things Medgar had spent his life fighting against were the things that allowed his killer to walk free for decades.

This is episode one in a four-part series about the murder of Medgar Evers, the Crusader.

It's a chilly winter morning in 1936 on a rural road in southern Mississippi.

Eleven-year-old Medgar Evers trudges through the dirt alongside his older brother Charles.

They're on their usual walk to school, the same route they've been taking together for years.

It's a long way, close to 12 miles, but it's been a part of their routine for so long that they're used to it.

Today, though, Medgar is dragging his feet, trying to delay the inevitable.

He doesn't want to walk past the fairground.

Charles tells him to pick up the pace, but then he sees the look on his younger brother's face.

He softens.

He tries to cheer Medgar up by telling him, maybe it'll be different today.

Maybe they'll be gone.

But as soon as they turn a corner onto the main road leading into town, Medgar's heart sinks.

He can see them already.

The specks of red on the roadside standing out against the brown and green landscape.

As they draw closer, he has the urge to avert his eyes, but he forces himself to look.

Willie Tingle deserves that much.

Last month, Willie was lynched by a gang of white men.

He was beaten, dragged through the streets of town, and hanged from a tree.

Ever since, his blood-soaked clothes have been tied to this fence at the fairground.

A warning and a threat.

Word was that Willie disrespected a white woman, as though that somehow justified his death, but what Willie did or didn't do was irrelevant to the people who killed him.

His mere existence as a black man in the Jim Crow South was enough for him to be killed.

And, it was enough for the men who did it to get away with it.

In 1936, those ragged clothes stiff with blood are a stark reminder of the world Medgar lives in, as if he could forget.

His whole life he's been learning that the color of his skin could be used against him.

It was small, surprising things at first.

Growing up, he'd been close friends with a neighbor boy who was around his age.

They were inseparable, playing together for hours in the scrubby farmland behind the Evers' house.

But then, one day, his friend abruptly stopped coming over.

The next time Medgar saw him out in public, the boy was with a group of other white kids, and they shouted the N-word at him as he passed by.

It was the first time Medgar understood that outside the safety of his parents' house, his race made him a target.

James and Jesse Evers knew this only too well.

They wanted to equip their children as much as they could to face a hostile world.

They were determined to make sure Medgar and the rest of his siblings got a real education, beating the odds for black kids in the South at that time.

But their hands were tied by a collection of local and state statutes known as Jim Crow laws.

During the 19th century, Jim Crow was a racist caricature of a black man played by white actors in minstrel shows.

Over time, the term became associated with laws that enforced racial segregation in most public facilities, including schools.

As a result, Medgar and his siblings were banned from attending most schools in the area.

Their only choice was a one-room schoolhouse where more than one hundred children of all ages were taught by two overworked teachers.

And because the state had no interest in enabling black kids to get an education, there were no buses to take them there.

So from the age of six, Medgar had to walk for miles every morning to get to school alongside his brother Charles.

It wasn't so bad.

The weather in Mississippi was generally mild, except for the sweltering summers, and the boys enjoyed each other's company.

But it wasn't always a peaceful journey.

Every time one of the school buses reserved for white children drove past, the kids inside leaned out the windows to yell racial insults at Medgar and his brother.

Sometimes they'd throw things.

When Medgar and Charles complained to their mother about this, she'd encourage them to prey on it.

A deeply religious woman, she'd always been a believer in turning the other cheek.

The best way to deal with white cruelty is with patience, she taught them.

Medgar loved his mother, so he did as she said.

And for a while, it worked.

But the older he got, the more injustices he noticed.

Thanks to Jim Crow laws, most restaurants in town wouldn't serve black customers.

And if they did, it was via a separate window at the back.

Black people couldn't try on clothes or shoes at a store.

They couldn't use the same drinking fountains, restrooms or parks as white people.

On the rare occasions when white and black people were allowed in a public space together, black people had to be served separately and last.

The disrespect and oppression of black people in Mississippi was so routine that it would have been easy to become numb to it.

And Medgar didn't ever want to become numb.

Even when he was still a boy, he felt the profound wrongness of it and the deep desire to do something.

Then, just a few months ago in 1936, a group of white men tied Willie Tingle to a wagon and dragged him through the streets in front of his horrified neighbors, including Medgar and his brother.

The attackers then shot Willie dead and hung his body from a tree at the local fairground.

Willie was a friend of Medgar's father, James.

He was the one who took Willie's body down from the tree and brought it to the local funeral home.

Not much rattled James Evers.

He was tough, known around town as a man not to be trifled with.

But after Willie's murder, Medgar could see that his dad was truly shaken, and that scared him.

When Medgar was scared, his first impulse was to ask questions, to try and understand.

So one night after his dad got home from work, he asked him why Willie was killed.

James said it's because he was black.

After thinking for a moment, Medgar asked if this meant white men could one day kill him, too.

Never one to sugarcoat anything.

James looked his son straight in the eye and said, If you're doing something they don't like, they sure could.

The lynching of Willie Tingle haunts Medgar.

But what haunts him almost as much is the way his community responds, or doesn't respond.

Every day for the next several months, Medgar and Charles walk past Willie's bloody clothes on their way to school.

They've been tied to a fence at the fairground.

It feels unbearable to Medgar that nobody has taken down the clothes.

Worse, nobody in the local black community will talk about what happened.

It feels like Willie has been completely erased, like he's not only dead, but he never existed at all.

The one person Medgar can talk to is Charles.

He's always idolized his brother, and now their bond's more vital than ever.

The brothers are equally disturbed by what they witnessed, but where Medgar is distressed, Charles is angry.

That rage eventually lights a fire in Medgar too, and the boys start fighting back against the injustice that surrounds them.

When white kids throw things at them from the school bus, they throw rocks right back at them.

They also obtain and sell copies of The Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper which advocates equality and black empowerment, and is therefore declared dangerous and radical by white society.

These small retaliations ease Medgar's sense of powerlessness.

But by his teenage years, he's starting to feel worn down by the constant oppression and violence.

And unlike many of his neighbors, he's curious about the world beyond the Mississippi border.

So in the spring of 1943, when Charles drops out of high school to join the army, 17-year-old Medgar follows him without hesitation.

Shortly after enlisting in the Reserve Corps, both brothers are sent overseas to serve in World War II.

They spend the next three years stationed in England, Belgium and France.

For Medgar, the experience is mind-blowing.

Compared to his upbringing in the Jim Crow South, life in Europe feels utopian.

While racism isn't totally absent from society there, there's no segregation and no structural, openly encouraged discrimination against people of color.

In England and France, he notices that people generally treat black Americans with as much respect as they would any other American.

And interracial socializing is pretty normal.

In Paris, he even has a relationship with a white French woman who invites him over for dinner with her parents.

Back home, such a relationship would be illegal.

Here, it barely raises an eyebrow.

But despite Europe's more enlightened attitude toward race, Medgar can't escape American norms altogether.

The US.

Army is segregated, and black soldiers are banned from serving on the front lines.

So Medgar is limited to non-combat roles, helping with supplies and transportation.

He's part of the Red Ball Express, a truck convoy system manned mainly by black soldiers, and which delivers supplies to the allied forces.

He spends his formative teenage years in the middle of a century-defining conflict, and he's present for some of the war's most critical moments.

He's there on D-Day when the Allies begin the liberation of occupied Europe, and he's there when the fighting finally ends, when the good guys emerge victorious over the evil, when the world sees it's possible to fight for what's right and win.

All that to say, when the war ends in 1945, Medgar has changed.

No longer a teenager, he's a grown man, and he carries himself as such, taller, more confident, and with a sense of accomplishment.

He's risen to the rank of sergeant, and also been hardened by watching thousands of fellow soldiers die on the battlefield.

And above all, he now knows what it's like to live in a society without structural racism, where white and black people live side by side.

It's not a fantasy.

It exists.

He briefly entertains the idea of staying in France.

How could he not, given how much easier life is here?

But for all its glaring flaws, Mississippi is calling him, and he knows that he has work to do there.

He wants to make things better.

So after earning an honorable discharge from the Army, he begins packing his bags.

But when he returns home in the spring of 1946, Medgar will receive the opposite of a hero's welcome.

And his brutal transition back to life in the US will make it clear just what an uphill battle he's facing.

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It's a balmy spring morning in 1946.

On the outskirts of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a group of soldiers are piled onto a bus heading north.

These young men have all spent the last few years serving their country overseas, fighting alongside British and French soldiers to defeat the Nazis.

The atmosphere on board the bus is celebratory.

The war is won, and they're finally going home.

20-year-old Medgar Evers is seated toward the front of the bus looking out at the lush landscapes of his home state.

He's missed it more than he expected to.

He'd signed up willingly for military service, and he's proud of his accomplishments overseas.

But right now, all he can think about is getting to see his parents and his little sisters.

When they're getting close to Medgar's hometown of Decatur, the bus pulls over to the side of the highway and stops.

The driver approaches Medgar and tells him that he needs to move to the back of the bus.

Medgar can't believe what he's hearing.

He just spent four years fighting for his country.

And now that he's home, he's expected to hide away in the shadows while his white colleagues claim all the glory?

No, he won't do it.

He refuses to move.

And after a while, the bus driver gives up.

As they pull back onto the road, Medgar tries to put the whole thing behind him.

He tries to focus on his excitement to get home.

It's not long before they reach Decatur.

As the bus pulls into the station and parks, Medgar starts to gather his belongings.

But before he can stand up, he notices that a group of men aborted the bus.

Confused, he looks out the window trying to figure out if this is some kind of welcome party.

But then he sees that these guys are all staring at him.

Before Medgar can do anything, the men drag him off the bus and beat him to a bloody pulp, while the bus driver looks on.

It is the worst beating Medgar's ever had, and that's saying something.

This experience changes him forever.

In the months to come, he'll tell this story again and again, unable to move on from it.

It's a brutal and unforgettable reminder that even as a World War II veteran, even after putting his life on the line for his country, he'll never be respected by many of his fellow Americans.

At best, they see him as a second-class citizen.

And the Jim Crow laws provide the perfect excuse for this widespread bigotry.

Despite the trauma of what happened on the bus, Medgar is a natural optimist.

After settling back into life in Decatur, he re-enrolls in high school to finish his studies and gets involved in local activism.

His first focus is on voter registration.

Although black people technically have the right to vote in Mississippi, the voter rolls are still overwhelmingly white.

Newspapers publish lists of black people who register to vote, or even those who attempt to do so.

Being on those lists could get you kicked out of your home, fired from your job, or even targeted for violence.

Unsurprisingly, these tactics work, as do other voter suppression measures, like poll taxes.

Despite the risks, Medgar registers to vote as soon as he's home, and starts encouraging others to do the same.

In the summer of 1946, he and his brother Charles lead a group of black veterans to their local courthouse in Newton County, Mississippi, to register to vote en masse.

They're met by a group of angry armed white men who threaten to get violent if they don't leave.

Medgar's group are outnumbered, and so that day, they back down.

But Medgar is tenacious, and every obstacle thrown into his path only strengthens his resolve.

He's ready to fight for his rights, and he's beginning to understand why his parents were always so insistent that he and his siblings get an education.

In a system that's determined, designed even, to keep you downtrodden and docile, knowledge is power.

Two years after getting home from the war, Medgar uses his GI.

Bill benefits to enroll at a local agricultural and mechanical college.

It's not the college experience he wanted.

He's always dreamed of going to law school at the University of Mississippi, but that's off limits to him as a black man.

Still, he throws himself into life at Alcorn College, studying business administration alongside an impressive roster of extracurricular activities.

He's on the track, football and debate teams, all while carrying on his civil rights activism.

And like plenty of other college students, he makes time for romance.

At the beginning of his junior year, he meets a girl.

17-year-old Merle Beasley is a freshman, but she's not naïve.

When 25-year-old Medgar first approaches her in a mixer wearing his football uniform, she's intrigued but wary.

He seems like he might be a bit of a ladies' man.

Even if he's not, her family have worn Merle away from dating veterans, who they seem to feel are too brash to ever be relationship material.

But it doesn't take long for Medgar to win her over.

Once they start talking, it becomes clear that there's a lot more to this guy than a letterman jacket.

Medgar tells Merle about his service in World War II, and how his time in Europe changed his perspective.

She's struck by how smart he is, how worldly and how ambitious.

But most of all, she likes that his aspirations are to do something more than just make money.

He doesn't say it in so many words, but she can tell, he wants to change the world.

By the winter of 1950, Medgar and Merle are going steady.

Things get serious quickly and within a year, he proposes.

Merle's family are concerned, not because they don't like Medgar, they love him.

It's the fact that he's a civil rights activist that scares them.

They know that makes him a target.

By extension, it could make Merle a target too.

But the couple are in love, and it's clear to everyone who knows them that nothing is going to stop them from being together.

Medgar and Merle get married on Christmas Eve of 1951.

The following year, Medgar graduates and Merle drops out of college.

She's lost her enthusiasm for school and wants to focus on being a wife and mother.

They decide to move some 400 miles west to Mount Bayou, close to the border with Arkansas.

It's a big move, but Mount Bayou has particular significance for Medgar.

This city was founded in 1887 by former enslaved people and was envisioned as an autonomous, self-reliant community made up entirely of Black Americans.

Over the past several decades, Mount Bayou has flourished, becoming a much needed success story.

To Medgar, it's the ideal place for him and Merle to build their future together.

There, Medgar takes a job as a salesman for the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company, one of Mississippi's few successful Black-owned businesses.

The firm is owned by Dr.

TRM.

Howard, a pioneering entrepreneur and surgeon who's also active in the civil rights movement.

Howard is exactly the role model Medgar needs, an older, successful Black man who's built an enviable life for himself despite the odds, and is fighting for the same things as Medgar.

Under his boss's mentorship, Medgar becomes an officer of Howard's newly formed organization, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership.

The council aims to empower Black citizens by promoting education, economic opportunities, and voter registration.

Not long into his tenure, Medgar organizes a boycott of local gas stations that refused to allow Black customers to use their restrooms.

Back in Decatur, it always felt like he and Charles were trying to push a boulder up a hill.

But here, with Dr.

Howard as his mentor, Medgar is finally coming into his own.

And while Medgar finds his footing, the civil rights movement as a whole is also ascending to new heights.

In 1954, in a landmark case, the Supreme Court rules that segregation is unconstitutional, officially ending the practice nationwide.

Dr.

Howard encourages Medgar to seize this opportunity and finally follow his dream of going to law school.

It's a thrilling moment for Medgar.

It was painful to give up on this path years ago.

Now, Dr.

Howard's confidence is so infectious that he allows himself to think it's possible after all.

But although the University of Mississippi can no longer officially bar him, they still find a reason to deny him entry on a technicality.

The school claims his application is invalid because it didn't include two letters of recommendation from white people living in the same county as Medgar.

He'd sent them letters from people living in Newton County where he grew up.

When they reject him, Ole Miss says Medgar can reapply, but they've changed the rules so that applications now need five character references from the school's alumni.

Medgar sees this ridiculous new hurdle for the ruse that it is, and he's determined to fight the decision.

But he doesn't want to do it alone.

Enter the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

By this stage, the organization has been around for almost 50 years, after forming as a response to a deadly race riot in Springfield, Illinois.

It's based in Maryland, but has a number of chapters nationwide, all working to advance civil rights and end racial discrimination.

Thanks to his years of activism, Medgar has been aware of the NAACP for some time, and he enlists their help in his legal battle against the University of Mississippi.

But despite their combined efforts, the university won't budge, and Medgar decides to back down this time.

Still, Medgar catches the attention of NAACP leadership in the process.

They recognize the fire in them, the intelligence, and the dogged commitment to justice in the face of overwhelming odds.

He's exactly the kind of young man they need as they work to expand their operations in the South.

And so, Medgar is offered a life-changing opportunity.

In November of 1954, he, Murley, and their two young children relocate to Jackson, Mississippi's capital.

There, he becomes the state's first ever NAACP field secretary.

It's a natural continuation of his work with Dr.

Howard in Mound Bayou.

He organizes boycotts of businesses with racist policies, advocates for desegregation of buses and parks, and continues his voter registration efforts on a much larger scale.

And though he hasn't been able to attend law school, Medgar still becomes heavily involved in the justice system, fighting for accountability and transparency in a number of crimes against black people.

And in 1955, he becomes involved in a seismic case.

That August, 14-year-old Emmett Till is kidnapped from his family's home in the Mississippi Delta by two white men.

He's beaten, lynched, and thrown into the nearby Tallahatchie River, where his body is found three days later.

When news of this horrific crime emerges, Medgar is deeply shaken.

He hears that Emmett was murdered because he supposedly whistled at a white woman in a local store.

The image of Willie Tingle's bloodied clothes comes back to him.

It's never really left him, and he's reminded of how powerless he felt back then.

But now, he has no intention of staying silent.

He lobbies NAACP leadership to make sure that the news of Emmett's murder is widely publicized.

As a result, unlike Willie's death, this crime is investigated and the murderers are brought to trial.

Medgar even helps to secure black witnesses who were willing to take the risk of testifying for the state.

But despite the efforts of Medgar and countless other leaders, Emmett Till's killers are acquitted by an all-white jury.

Months later, the killers sell their story to a magazine for $4,000, brazenly admitting to the crime in print without consequences.

It's a devastating and infuriating end, and one that only emboldens racists across the state.

White supremacist groups celebrate the murderers' acquittal and publish threats against those who testified against them.

Medgar's former mentor, Dr.

Howard, is reported to be on the Ku Klux Klan's death list after advocating for justice for Emmett Till.

In December of 1955, he moves with his family to Chicago for their safety.

He's not the only civil rights activist to leave the South during this period.

But Medgar himself, now 30 years old, is determined to stay put.

For better or worse, Mississippi is his home, and he's not ready to give up on it yet.

Throughout the rest of the 1950s, Medgar continues to campaign relentlessly for change.

Soon, his activism and advocacy will make him a prominent figure, not just in Mississippi, but on the national stage.

And that spotlight will come at a terrible cost.

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It's Monday morning in October of 1958, not long after dawn.

In Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers wakes up with a jolt, startled by the sound of a knock at his front door.

His heart rate quickens.

Nowadays, he's primed to regard any unexpected noise as a threat.

But as he peers through the bedroom window, he's relieved to see it's just the mailman.

Trying not to wake his wife, Merly, Medgar walks out into the foyer and answers the door.

The mailman hands him a large, flat package and asks for his signature.

It's been sent special delivery from Chicago.

His pulse quickens again, this time with excitement, as he recognizes the logo on the brown parcel paper, Ebony Magazine.

At last, they've sent him the advance copy of his article.

This is his first ever publication in the national press, and it's a huge moment for Medgar.

Under the headline, Why I Live in Mississippi, the article aims to answer a question he's been asked countless times, why he's still here when so many people like him have left for their own safety.

He's hoping that by addressing it in a national magazine, he can draw more eyes to his cause.

If more people pay attention to the issue, he's sure he can create real change.

Mississippi is, according to the stats, the most dangerous state in the US to be black at this time.

More black people have been killed via lynching in Mississippi than anywhere else in the Union.

But as Medgar writes, this is home, and whether the whites like it or not, I don't plan to live here as a parasite.

The things that I don't like, I will try to change.

And in the long run, I hope to make a positive contribution to the overall productivity of the South.

It's a characteristically optimistic statement for Medgar, who has an extraordinary ability to keep his eyes fixed on the horizon no matter what.

But he's not in denial.

He knows that things are getting more and more dangerous.

Thanks to his growing fame, he now receives regular death threats from white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.

Some of the threats are clearly just talk, but some of them are credible.

And as a result, his life has gotten a lot more complicated.

When he attends NAACP events now, Medgar is often escorted home by some combination of FBI agents and police cars.

He also makes modifications to the house which he and Murley live in with their children to make it harder to attack from the outside.

He chose the house in the first place because it doesn't have a front door.

Instead, its main entrance is a side door that can only be accessed via the carport.

In the case of an attack, this would give him and his family more protection.

After they move in, Medgar also has the window sills raised two inches to provide more protection in the event of a drive-by shooting.

Medgar worries more for his wife and children's safety than his own.

He teaches the kids to drop to the floor and crawl if they hear gunshots, making sure to stay underneath the windows.

If they see someone scary outside, he tells them to run to the bathroom, lock the door and shelter in the tub.

These are unthinkable conversations to have with your children, but Medgar tries his best to make them seem like a game for them.

Always by his side, Murley's been nothing but supportive of Medgar's career as an activist and accompanies him to protest marches and voter drives.

She's proud of his growing stature as a black leader, despite the cost it's come at.

And she tries to put on a brave face, even as things get increasingly scary.

She assures Medgar that now that he has FBI and police protection, nobody will dare touch him.

But then comes May 28th, 1963.

Medgar is out of the house all day, organizing a sit-in at a local lunch counter to protest segregated seating.

That evening, Merle has the house to herself after putting the kids to bed.

Ordinarily, she'd relish a little alone time, but she feels uneasy.

She didn't sleep well last night, again.

Too many worst-case scenarios rattling around her mind.

She walks through the bungalow towards the bathroom, planning to draw herself a bath.

But as she reaches the threshold, she hears something that stops her in her tracks.

A metallic crash coming from the left side of the house, followed by a strange kind of sizzling noise.

And then she smells smoke.

Merle races towards the side door, bursting outside just in time to see flames erupting in the carport.

Instinctively, without pausing to think, she grabs hold of the garden hose and turns it on, spraying water directly onto the fire before it can spread.

Moments later, when a fire truck arrives, the haze of shock clears enough for Merle to understand what's just happened.

Somebody threw a fire bomb into her house.

Somebody just tried to burn her family alive.

Thanks to Merle's quick response, there's no serious damage to the house, but the damage to the family's morale is devastating.

It's not just the feeling of not being safe in their own home.

It's the unexpected loss of community.

After the fire bomb, people Medgar and Merle have known for years start crossing the street to avoid being seen with them in public, in case they're targeted by association.

For Medgar and Merle, things have never been worse.

And yet, for the national movement, that spring has been a triumphant period.

President John F.

Kennedy has taken up the fight for equality and is drafting a major civil rights bill, which could make segregation a thing of the past.

After so many years of struggle, it feels extraordinary that the president of the United States is in their corner.

But it's hard for either Medgar or Merle to really process the excitement of what's happening.

They're too consumed by dread and by the overwhelming sense that something terrible is just around the corner.

On the morning of June 11th, just a couple of weeks after the firebomb, Medgar leaves the house early.

He's chairing an NAACP meeting, which is due to last all day, and he tells Merle not to wait up for him.

He kisses his children goodbye as usual and tells them he loves them.

Everything seems normal.

But when Merle walks him to the door, he lets the mask slip for a moment.

He tells her, Merle, I'm so tired.

He seems deflated, in a way Merle's never seen before.

The death threats, the daily exposure to horrific truths, the endless struggle for rights that should be inherent, all of it has left him exhausted.

But more than that, he's scared.

And Merle doesn't want him to know that she is too.

She hugs him and tells him everything's going to be all right.

And then he goes to work.

Medgar calls home several times throughout the day, which is unusual for him.

And on every call, he tells Merle he loves her.

It's almost like he knows that the time to say it is running out.

From Airship, this is Episode 1 in our series on The Murder of Medgar Evers.

On the next episode, the story of white supremacist Byron Dela Beckwith and how a racist society both radicalized and protected him.

We use many different sources while preparing this episode.

A few we can recommend are Medgar and Murley, Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America by Joy Anne Reed, Of Long Memory, Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers by Adam Nossiter, and Ghosts of Mississippi, The Murder of Medgar Evers, The Trials of Byron Dela Beckwith, and The Haunting of the New South by Mary Ann Vollars.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details.

And while in some cases, we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing by Mohammed Shazi.

Sound design by Matthew Phelan.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Emma Dipton.

Managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callen, William Simpson, and Lindsey Graham.