The Driveway on Delta Drive

Just after midnight on June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers stepped out of his Oldsmobile in the driveway of his home at 2332 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive in Jackson, Mississippi. He carried a stack of NAACP t-shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go." Inside the house, his wife Myrlie and their three children — Darrell, Reena, and James — were still awake, having just watched President Kennedy's televised address calling civil rights a moral issue.

Evers never made it to the door. A bullet from a high-powered Enfield rifle struck him in the back, fired by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith from a honeysuckle thicket across the street. Myrlie rushed outside to find her husband crawling toward the entrance, his keys in his hand. He was thirty-seven years old. He died at the University of Mississippi Medical Center less than an hour later.

Evers had known the cost. He had investigated the murder of Emmett Till. He had organized voter registration drives across the most dangerous counties in Mississippi. He had received constant death threats. Yet every morning he kissed his family goodbye and drove into the work that would ultimately claim his life.

Jesus told His disciples, "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." Evers did not seek martyrdom, but he refused to let the threat of death silence his calling. Some acts of love are so costly they can only be measured by what was left on the driveway — a life poured out so others might walk free.