May 13th marks the 50th anniversary of the election of Charles Evers as mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, a victory which made Mr. Evers the state’s first African-American mayor of a racially diverse municipality.¹ The watershed 1969 campaign in Fayette came less than four years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark federal legislation which prohibits states from establishing local laws or practices which may "deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color".

Soon after the Civil War, the Mississippi State Legislature instituted a set of laws designed to deprive African-American citizens of their right to participate in the electoral system.  This state-sponsored framework of disenfranchisement became known as the “Mississippi Plan.”  Mississippi's laws, coupled with the free rein the state and local authorities gave to terror groups like the Klu Klux Klan, served as a model for the larger system of American apartheid called Jim Crow.  

Charles Evers, NAACP field secretary with Dr. Martin Luther King in Jackson, Miss., March 20, 1968.

((AP Photo/Jack Thornell))

Charles Evers and his younger brother Medgar grew up in the Jim Crow South and, since the early 1950s, had been activists there, advocating for the civil rights of African-American citizens, including the right to vote. Both men had held leadership roles in the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), and in the Mississippi office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  

Medgar Evers was assassinated by a Klansman in the driveway of his Mississippi home on June 12, 1963 at the age of thirty-seven.

Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Fayette, Mississippi, a town with a population of 1600 citizens —of which only 400 were white— had no registered black voters.  But Charles Evers' 1969 campaign and registration drives, backed by the protection of the new federal voting rights laws, increased the number of registered African-American voters in Fayette from 0 to 450.²   Evers told the syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson that this sea-change in the town's voting rolls would have been impossible to achieve before the passing of the Voting Rights Act.³  He explained:

I know. I've tried to register in Philadelphia [Mississippi] before the bill was passed and I personally know the runaround they give you.  First they send you to the chancery clerk, who sends you to the sheriff.  The sheriff tells you that the registration books are out, to come back in thirty days.  So you come back in thirty days and then they make you recite the constitution from memory.  Then, if by extreme persistence you manage to register, and if you do finally get to the polls, deputy sheriffs sit around, armed to the teeth, glowering at you as if daring you to walk past them and vote. 

A local Mississippi newspaper headline in the final days of Evers' 1969 campaign. 

(The Delta-Democrat-Times; 11 May 1969)

By the second week of May, 1969, it seemed likely that Evers' mayoral campaign would succeed.  And on May 13th, capturing 60% of the votes, he was declared the winner.  In his inaugural speech, Mayor Charles Evers spoke directly to the white citizens of Fayette, to his detractors, and to those who anticipated retribution from the new African-American mayor:

Have no fear... because we aren't going to allow, because we are now in charge, our power to abuse you, and to mistreat you like you've mistreated us. We're going to show you what love can do in a community.

Charles Evers was reelected Mayor of Fayette in 1973. 

The audio excerpt from Mayor Evers' inaugural speech, found in the media player at the top of this page, comes from the Cinema Sound Collection. The Cinema Sound Collection contains hundreds of hours of stock audio footage documenting the politics and culture of the twentieth century. The Cinema Sound Collection is a part of the New York Public Radio Archive's permanent collection, and is a gift of Joan and Robert Franklin.

Footnotes

¹Mound Bayou, Mississippi is an independent community that was founded in 1887 as an all-black town by formerly enslaved African-Americans.  Its first mayor was Isaiah T. Montgomery, an African-American man born into slavery.

²Editorial, "What Will Happen in Fayette's Future" McComb Enterprise-Journal, 26 May 1969

³Drew Pearson, "Inauguration At Fayette Monday Direct Result Of Voting Rights Bill" Clarion-Ledger, 07 July 1969