Murder Most Foul 1963

an excerpt from chapter 4, King of Soul.

Mississippi, 1963: If ghosts could speak, they would probably confirm what Uncle Cannon was saying. As he sat on the lowered gate of his black Ford pickup truck, with one leg on the ground and the other swinging beneath the tailgate, the old Mississippian spoke some of his thoughts about the state of affairs in the state of Mississippi. His friend, Geehaw Kent stood listening. “The murder of Medgar Evers was a tragedy: he was a young man,” Cannon said. “He had slogged his way across Europe, along with thousands of other Allied soldiers, to arrive triumphantly in Germany and then knock the hell out of the Nazi war machine. So he contributed to that great collective effort through which we won the big war. But then he came back to Mississippi and was told—what the hell—to go to the back of the bus.” “So, at the end of his homeward journey, Medgar entered, almost involuntarily, into another great war, but it was a war of a different kind. It was an old war that had been started by old men. That is to say: men who we think of as old because they had lived and died in the prior era, and yet some of them were still living—men who, in days past, had retained, even cultivated, the prejudices and the limitations of their ancestors. “Last year, only six months before Kennedy was killed, Medgar Evers was shot dead in his own front yard in Jackson Mississippi. He had just come from speaking to some brothers and sisters at New Jerusalem church.” “Now, this summer, you know we had bunches of them starry-eyed college students from up north come down here and try and help the Negras get the vote. Over in Meridian, a few of them were trying to get the blacks organized to boycott a store that wouldn’t hire some of them same blacks who shopped there every day, every week, all year long for years and years. Then about two months ago, three of them students disappeared. Kinda mysterious, don’t you think?” https://www.amazon.com/King-Soul-Louis-Carey-Rowland/dp/1545075115 Listen: Underground Railroad Rides Again