U.S. Navy Honors Medgar Evers

Last month JBHE reported that the U.S. Navy was naming a supply ship after Charles Drew, the longtime chief of the department of surgery at Howard University and the man who developed the process for storing blood plasma.

Now the Navy has announced that another supply ship will be named to honor Medgar Evers, the Mississippi civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1963. The 689-foot supply ship will be built in San Diego over the next two years.

Evers was a graduate of Alcorn State University. In the early 1960s he organized students at Tougaloo College to stage the first civil rights protests in Jackson, Mississippi. He later worked on the legal team that successfully won a court order to admit James Meredith to the University of Mississippi.

In 1970 the City University of New York established Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn.

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