The daughter of Medgar Evers isn’t mincing words—she sees the same hateful currents that killed her father in 1963 coursing through America today. And frankly, she’s had enough.
Reena Evers-Everette, now a seasoned voice in civil rights circles, was just 8 years old when her father was assassinated outside their Mississippi home by a white supremacist. That act of terror was just the beginning of a string of political murders in the 1960s that shook the nation—JFK, MLK Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy all followed.
Fast forward to 2025, and the pattern feels hauntingly familiar. “It’s painful. It’s very painful,” said Evers-Everette during the “Democracy in Action” conference held in Jackson, Mississippi, just ahead of what would’ve been Medgar Evers’ 100th birthday. The gathering brought together daughters of other fallen civil rights icons, including Kerry Kennedy and Bettie Dahmer, and focused on the pressing need to confront today’s political violence head-on.
A New Generation of Violence
Let’s be blunt—the last few years have been ugly. A sitting lawmaker and her husband killed in Minnesota. Israeli Embassy staffers gunned down. Assassination attempts on a former U.S. president. America isn’t just tiptoeing toward its violent past—it’s sprinting there.
Stacey Abrams, ever the firebrand, didn’t hold back during her remarks. She condemned efforts by Trump allies to strip names like Medgar Evers from Navy vessels, calling it a political erasure of marginalized heroes. “They want to take his name off a boat because they don’t want us to have a reminder of how far he sailed us forward,” she said, spitting truth.
She also linked political violence with state-sanctioned aggression against protesters, especially under the Trump administration. “We cannot decry political violence and then send in the Marines to silence dissent,” Abrams argued, pointing to the hypocrisy of using military force on peaceful demonstrations.
Memory and Resistance
For Evers-Everette, the fight is personal. It’s not just about remembering her father’s courage, but about spotlighting the venom that ended his life. “We have to make sure we know what our history is,” she said. “So we don’t repeat the crazy, nasty, racist mess.”
Let’s be clear: LGBTQ people—especially queer people of color—have always been in the crosshairs of these overlapping systems of hate. From trans women murdered on the streets to drag queens banned from reading to kids, the same forces that silenced Medgar Evers continue to target the most vulnerable among us. When society tolerates any form of political violence, it sends a message: dissent will be punished, and progress comes at a price.
So as we honor Medgar Evers at 100, it’s not just a history lesson—it’s a warning. The bullets may be from a different decade, but the hate behind them is all too current.