Medgar Evers was assassinated on June 12, 1963. Twenty-six days later, Jackson opened a new airport and named it after the segregationist mayor whose city had failed Evers.
A Pirep featured story · KJAN Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International, Jackson, MS
In June 1944, an eighteen-year-old American soldier from Decatur, Mississippi waded off a landing craft onto Normandy with the 325th Port Company. He was a sergeant in a segregated, all-Black unit in the Army Quartermaster Corps. His battalion was part of the Red Ball Express, the supply chain that kept Allied armor fed across Western Europe through the summer of 1944. His name was Medgar Wiley Evers. He came home in 1946 with the Good Conduct Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with two bronze service stars, and the World War II Victory Medal.
In the spring of 1946 he tried to vote in Newton County, Mississippi, with a group of Black veterans. They were turned away by armed white men at the courthouse.
Eight years later, in 1954, the NAACP made him their first field secretary in Mississippi. He moved to Jackson. He investigated the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, organized voter-registration drives, and helped James Meredith desegregate the University of Mississippi in 1962. On the night of June 11, 1963, he watched President Kennedy's speech to the nation on civil rights. He drove home from a strategy meeting and pulled into his driveway around midnight. Byron De La Beckwith, hidden across the street, shot him in the back with an Enfield rifle. Evers died at the hospital. He was thirty-seven.
Twenty-six days later, on July 8, 1963, the City of Jackson dedicated a new municipal airport in Rankin County. It was named Allen C. Thompson Field after the mayor who had publicly characterized the NAACP as outside agitators, and who would, the following year, authorize the city's purchase of an armored vehicle in anticipation of Freedom Summer.
It took forty-one years to change the name. In December 2004, the Jackson City Council voted six-to-zero to rename the airport for Medgar Evers. The change took effect January 22, 2005. In 2011 the name was refined to include his full middle name: Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport. The airfield's military designation is still legally Allen C. Thompson Field, but the airport that takes commercial flights, and writes its name on every boarding pass, is Evers's.
The 172nd Airlift Wing of the Mississippi Air National Guard — the first Air National Guard unit ever assigned the C-17 Globemaster III — still operates out of the same field. Buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, the man who came home from Normandy and could not vote in his own state finally has his airport.