Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and racism, including racist violence and the Jim Crow era.

By 1954, Evers was determined to apply to the University of Mississippi Law School, drawing on the historical Brown v. Board of Education decision that banned segregation. His efforts to enroll in the university made him known to the public. However, white politicians and business owners impeded such attempts at integration. Several Black people who signed petitions for integration lost their businesses. As Reid notes, Mississippi maintained a “strict caste system” premised on “the economic facts of the slave era” and enforced by the “planter class” (66). 

Evers’s plans changed after he was appointed as a field secretary for the NAACP. The family would move to Jackson, Mississippi. Williams spent time with her mother while Evers was working. As her mother talked about the dangers of being a Black woman in the South, where Black men could not protect their families from violence, Williams increasingly understood her husband’s determination to fight the status quo.

In Jackson, Evers investigated several murders before news broke of Emmett Till’s disappearance in August 1955. Till had moved to Mississippi from Chicago and was abducted by a group of white men following a dubious accusation that he had whistled at a white woman.