I guess I should have heard of Medgar Evers. To my shame, I had not, but it’s never too late to learn. The Craft by John Dickie just keeps on delivering. Medgar Evans was a NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi. NAACP was the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. He was also a Prince Hall Freemason. In a land and time of segregation, Prince Hall was the masonry for coloured people.
Medgar Evers “clocked up thousands of miles in his V-8 Oldsmobile – a car chosen because it was big enough to sleep in where all the motels were whites-only, heavy enough to resist being run off the road and fast enough to make a quick getaway. He was a Normandy veteran. He gave his last speech at a Lena Horne benefit concert at the Lynch Street Masonic Temple. “Freedom has never been free. I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart, and I would die, die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.” Prophetic words, he was shot dead in front of his family five days later by Byron De La Beckwith Jr, a white supremacist, Ku Klux Klansman, and Freemason.
Beckwith was twice acquitted by all-white juries in the 1960’s before eventually being convicted in 1994. Nina Simone’s ‘Mississippi Goddam’ was inspired by Evers, as was Bob Dylan’s ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game.’ They’re both great songs, neither of which I had heard before reading The Craft.
I had heard of Rosa Parks, but hadn’t known that she was the daughter and grand-daughter of Prince Hall Masons and was an active member of the Order of the Eastern Star – the female adjunct to Freemasonry at the time.
My latest book, Called to Account, has anti-Semitism as its theme, but that is a manifestation of racism, and hate-crime in general. It’s due for publication on 8th November.