A Widow's Thirty-Year Vigil

Shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers pulled into the driveway of his home on Guynes Street in Jackson, Mississippi. The NAACP field secretary had spent the evening at a rally. As he stepped from his car carrying a stack of "Jim Crow Must Go" T-shirts, a bullet from an Enfield rifle struck him in the back. His wife Myrlie and their three children rushed outside to find him crawling toward the door. He died less than an hour later at the local hospital. He was thirty-seven years old.

Byron De La Beckwith was charged with the murder, but two all-white juries deadlocked in 1964, and Beckwith walked free. For three decades, Myrlie Evers carried the weight of unanswered justice. She collected new evidence, pressured authorities, and refused to let her husband's blood be forgotten. Finally, in February 1994 — thirty-one years after that night — a jury convicted Beckwith of murder.

In Revelation 6:10, the martyred saints beneath God's altar cry out, "How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until You judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?" It is the same anguished cry Myrlie carried for three decades — the cry of everyone who has watched injustice go unanswered.

Yet the passage assures us that God hears every cry. His justice moves on a timeline we cannot always see, but it moves. When we grieve wrongs that seem forgotten, we stand with the martyrs in that holy "How long?" — and we trust the One who promises that no injustice will remain unanswered forever.