Medgar Evers’ family fights efforts to strip his name from Navy vessel
A week after Pentagon leaders announced their intention to possibly rename the USNS Medgar Evers, christened for the World War II veteran and civil rights leader, his family urged the Department of Defense and the Navy to reverse their position.
The ship is one of eight vessels named after activists – among them Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Harriet Tubman – that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants to rebrand in a large offensive against “wokeness” and diversity, equity and inclusion in the military to reestablish the “warrior ethos.”
This could be the second time Evers’ name is erased. Although President Donald Trump called Medgar Evers a “great American hero” at the 2017 opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, his name was removed last March from a site on the Arlington National Cemetery Website, which featured a section honoring Black Americans who fought in the nation’s wars.
“Renaming the USNS Medgar Evers is not only malicious — it is despicable,” said Evers’ daughter, Reena Evers-Everette. “As my mother said, ‘This is an injustice to a man who fought for his country both at home and abroad.’”
Evers was among the continuing wave of U.S. soldiers who arrived on the beaches of Normandy after the D-Day invasion in 1944. He enlisted in the U.S. Army at 17 and served in the Red Ball Express, a convoy run largely by African-American soldiers that transported equipment from Normandy beaches to Allied forces in inland France. He earned several military medals for his service.
After fighting the Nazis in World War II, he returned home to fight racism again in the form of Jim Crow, which barred Black Mississippians from restaurants, restrooms and voting booths.
In 1954, he became the Mississippi NAACP’s first field secretary and played a major part in the development of the organization. He led protests and boycotts for voting rights and desegregation of public schools, parks and Mississippi beaches. A target of white supremacists in Mississippi, he was murdered in 1963 by a member of the segregationist White Citizen’s Council and Ku Klux Klan.
In 2009, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus – a former Mississippi governor – announced the naming of a dry cargo ship after Evers. On Nov. 12, 2011, the USNS Medgar Evers was christened by Evers’ widow, Myrlie Evers.
“I will not have to go to bed again wondering whether anyone will remember who Medgar Evers is,” she said at the ceremony.
Mabus said he named the ship after Evers because the Lewis and Clark ships are named for pioneers and explorers, “those who have pushed past boundaries, and Medgar Evers was just such a civil rights pioneer.”
Since its launch, the ship has traveled around the world and has taken part in NATO exercises.
By attempting to remove the names of activists who fought with courage and honor for the citizens of their country, the secretary of Defense sacrifices military values to a revisionist definition of patriotism, Evers-Everette said.
“The USNS Medgar Evers was not named to make a political statement,” she said. “It was named to reflect a deeper truth: that freedom is not free — and some Americans have paid dearly for it.”
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This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.