| Medgar Evers, born this day in 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi, was an African American civil rights activist whose murder in 1963 received national attention and made him a martyr to the cause of the civil rights movement. Byron de La Beckwith, the white segregationist who was charged with the murder, was freed in 1964 after two trials resulted in hung juries, but he was convicted in a third trial held in 1994. |