The film explores Evers’ public battles at a time when segregation defined the South, while also spotlighting the private toll his assassination in 1963 had on his wife Myrlie and their children. Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson home at age 37, just hours after President John F. Kennedy delivered a televised address on civil rights.
Michael Williams, a historian featured in the film, said the story of Evers is not just a history lesson, but a call to action.
“Whenever you have an opportunity to look at the legacy and life of an individual who had sacrificed so much, who cared so much about humanity, who cared so much about justice and truth … it’s a wake-up call to what we need to be doing as individuals whenever we see injustice rear its head,” Williams said.
Williams hopes viewers will see themselves in the documentary and feel empowered by that.
“What he did, the possibility’s in all of us, and we should all be able to look at him as an example, as a means of understanding the power that we all have within us,” Williams said.
For some attendees, the most striking moments in the film were not about Evers’ activism, but how his family endured after his assassination.
Ericka Jones, a senior executive at iHeartMedia, said she was especially moved by one scene involving Reena Evers-Everette, who was only eight years old at the time of Evers’ assassination. Evers-Everette talks about being excited by taking a flight to Washington D.C. and meeting President Kennedy in The White House because she didn't connect it with her father's murder.
“It was so powerful to hear about her (Myrlie’s) children and what they had to endure, how they process things,” Jones said.
Retired educator Wovoka Sobukwe of Oxford said the film is especially important now, with political violence and extremism again on the rise in the U.S. and abroad. He thinks internalizing the story of Medgar Evers will remind people of their responsibility to confront injustice.
“People are just sleepwalking,” Sobukwe said. “I think that this documentary is going to shake that sleepiness out of existence.”
Everlasting: The Life and Legacy of Medgar Evers and its companion podcast can be streamed on MPB’s website.
