N.Y.S. Hispanic Court Officers Society

NY Stage Reading Of Marco Antonio Rodriguez 's New Play In English Feb 23rd!

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Free stage reading of Marco Antonio's new play in English titled: Walk-In!

As a The Movement Theatre Company and The Black List commission winner, Marco Antonio is very excited to share this new work! Shout out to SPACE on Ryder Farm and New York Stage and Film who assisted in the development of this new play!

About WALK-IN: Forced to return home after the sudden death of his estranged mother, a man’s already chaotic life attracts further upheaval when he discovers he can time travel back to moments of his childhood when wearing his mother’s vintage clothing.

RSVP link to this free event BELOW!
https://bit.ly/3Ur61sC

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WALK-IN Staged Reading Invitation We are thrilled to invite you to our Ladder Series staged reading of new play, WALK-IN by Black List Commission Awardee Marco Antonio Rodriguez, directed by Ryan Dobrin. Friday, February 23rd 3pm-5pm at The Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons (416 W 42nd St, New York, NY 10036) Please RSVP using t...

AMERICAN HISTORY for Black History Month

1994 White supremacist convicted of killing Medgar Evers

HISTORY CHANNEL

On February 5, 1994, white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith is convicted in the murder of African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers, over 30 years after the crime occurred. Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home on June 12, 1963, while his wife, Myrlie, and the couple’s three small children were inside.

Medgar Wiley Evers was born July 2, 1925, near Decatur, Mississippi, and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After fighting for his country, he returned home to experience discrimination in the racially divided South, with its separate public facilities and services for Black and white people. Evers graduated from Alcorn College in 1952 and began organizing local chapters of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). In 1954, after being rejected for admission to then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School, he became part of an NAACP campaign to desegregate the school.

Later that year, Evers was named the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi. He moved with his family to Jackson and worked to dismantle segregation, leading peaceful rallies, economic boycotts and voter registration drives around the state. In 1962, he helped James Meredith become the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, a watershed event in the civil rights movement. As a result of his work, Evers received numerous threats and several attempts were made on his life before he was murdered in 1963 at the age of 37.

Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and Ku Klux Klan member widely believed to be the killer, was prosecuted for murder in 1964. However, two all-white (and all-male) juries deadlocked and refused to convict him. A second trial held in the same year resulted in a hung jury. The matter was dropped when it appeared that a conviction would be impossible. Myrlie Evers, who later became the first woman to chair the NAACP, refused to give up, pressing authorities to re-open the case. In 1989, documents came to light showing that jurors in the case were illegally screened.

Prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter worked with Myrlie Evers to force another prosecution of Beckwith. After four years of legal maneuvering, they were finally successful. At the third trial they produced a rifle scope from the murder weapon with Beckwith’s fingerprints, as well as new witnesses who testified that Beckwith had bragged about committing the crime. Justice was finally achieved when Beckwith was convicted and given a life sentence by
racially diverse jury in 1994. He died in prison in 2001 at the age of 80.

7 Things You Should Know About Medgar Evers

1. Evers was a World War II veteran who participated in the Normandy invasion

Born in Decatur, Mississippi, on July 2, 1925, Medgar Evers was the third of five children born to farmer and sawmill worker James Evers and his wife Jesse. Evers left high school at the age of 17 to enlist in the still-segregated U.S. Army, eventually rising to the rank of sergeant. In June 1944, Evers’ unit was part of the massive, post D-Day invasion of Europe, and he served in both France and Germany until his honorable discharge in 1946. Due to his wartime service, Evers was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors following his death in 1963.

2. He was the NAACP’s first field secretary in the South.

Returning to Mississippi after the war, Evers attended Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University) on the G.I. Bill, earning honors as one of the most successful students in the nation. After moving to nearby Mound Bayou, Evers worked as an insurance agent and began attending meetings of a local civil rights organization, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL).

In 1954, the same year the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education struck down racial segregation in public schools, Evers became one of the first African Americans to apply for admission to the University of Mississippi Law School. When Evers’ application was denied on a technicality (the school claimed that he had failed to include the required letters of recommendations), Evers approached the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for help. NAACP Mississippi State Conference leader E.J. Stringer was so taken with Evers’ poise and determination that he instead offered him a position as the organization’s first field secretary in the state. Evers accepted, and by December 1954 he had opened an office in Jackson where within three years he had nearly doubled NAACP membership in Mississippi to more than 15,000.

3. One of Evers’ first assignments was investigating the murder of Emmett Till.

In August 1955, the Chicago-born Till (just 14 years old and visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi) was kidnapped by a group of white men after reportedly flirting with the wife of a local shopkeeper. Three days later, Till’s beaten and disfigured body was found in a nearby river; he had been shot in the head, and weighted down with a metal fan in an attempt to hide his body.

In Chicago, Mamie Till Bradley’s insistence on a well-publicized, open-casket funeral for her son brought the plight of African Americans in the South to newspapers across the country. In Mississippi, the NAACP, fearful that the highly segregated sheriff’s office wouldn’t mount much of an effort to catch Till’s white murderers, launched their own investigation. Medgar Evers and two other field workers, Ruby Hurley and Amzie Moore, tracked down potential witnesses to the events leading up to and including Till’s abduction. They convinced several people to come forward, keeping them in protective custody when they testified at the 1955 trial of two men accused of killing Till, and then shepherding them out of town in secrecy when the all-white jury returned a verdict of “not guilty” after deliberating for just an hour.

4. Evers helped integrate Ole Miss.

Seven years after Medgar Evers own failed attempt at gaining admittance to the University of Mississippi, he was instrumental in finally desegregating the school through his work with James Meredith. Meredith, who like Evers had approached the NAACP for help after being denied admission, had taken his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in 1962.

That September, Meredith, accompanied by Evers, other NAACP members and a protective phalanx of U.S. marshals and federal troops, tried to register for classes, setting off a riot among the mob gathered to prevent him from matriculating. In response, President John F. Kennedy sent in more than 30,000 National Guardsmen, and two people were killed in the melee, but Meredith was successfully admitted and graduated the following year (having previously earned credits at another school). Evers’ involvement in the integration of Ole Miss gained nationwide attention, and garnered him the enmity of local white segregationists.

5. Evers was shot just hours after President Kennedy had delivered a landmark speech on civil rights.

By the summer of 1963, Evers had spent nearly nine years organizing voter registration drives and leading boycotts of segregated Mississippi businesses. His efforts had been met with more than hostility: Weeks before his death a Molotov cocktail had been thrown through a window in his home, and he’d been injured when a car tried to run him down outside his NAACP office.

But Jackson, Mississippi, wasn’t the only American city caught up in the civil rights struggle. The violent response to protests in Birmingham, Alabama, which included the turning of fire hoses on thousands of schoolchildren, followed by the refusal of Alabama Governor George Wallace to admit African American students to the University of Alabama, put increased pressure on President Kennedy to act.

On June 11, Kennedy took to the airwaves, delivering an address from the Oval Office calling for Congressional action in the area of civil rights, defining the cause—for the first time—as a moral, and not purely legal, issue. Millions of Americans were glued to their sets, including Medgar Evers wife Myrlie and two of his three children. Evers was at an organizational meeting at a local church and returned home shortly after midnight, less than four hours after Kennedy’s address. As he walked to his door he was shot once in the back, dying less than an hour later. Kennedy himself would be killed just five months later, but the reforms he had laid out his speech that night would become the most sweeping social justice legislation in American history as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

6. It took 31 years to bring Evers’ assassin to justice.

Following Evers’ death, demonstrations broke out in Jackson, followed by a larger riot during his funeral procession, when police violently clashed with a crowd of more than 5,000 mourners. Just two weeks after the assassination, Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the local White Citizen’s Council, was arrested for Evers’ murder. The following year, all-white juries twice failed to convict De La Beckwith, stating they were deadlocked. De La Beckwith, who reportedly bragged about his role in the murder and even unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor of Mississippi, remained free until the 1990s when, based on new evidence gathered by Myrlie Evers-Williams and others, the case was reopened. In February 1994, De La Beckwith was finally convicted, this time by a racially mixed jury, and sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2001 at the age of 90. The decades-long effort to bring De La Beckwith to justice was dramatized in the 1996 film “Ghosts of Mississippi.”

Medgar Evers’ Widow Fought 30 Years for His Killer’s Conviction
Long after the Mississippi justice system gave up on the murder prosecution, Myrlie Evers kept the case alive.

7. Medgar Evers’ widow has carried on his legacy.

Myrlie Evers-Williams (she remarried after Medgar’s death) had worked alongside her husband at the NAACP and has continued her civil rights work to the present day. After two unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. Congress, the California-based Evers-Williams was elected chairperson of the NACCP shortly after Byron De La Beckwith’s conviction, successfully overhauling the century old organization’s finances. Once named Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year, Evers-Williams is the founder of the Medgar Evers Institute in Jackson, Mississippi, and in January 2013, nearly 50 years after her husband’s murder, she delivered the invocation at the second inauguration of President Barack Obama.

NYS Hispanic Society Court Officers Celebrates Black History Month by Honoring our Friends & Colleagues of The Guardians.

We Salute their Pioneers, their History and All their Achievements.

Our Own Achievements owe a debt to their Struggles & Accomplishments.