On the backroads that stretch between Indianola and Jackson, the weight of what Mississippi once was — the long rows of cotton, the silence of fields that once demanded everything from the people who worked them — still hangs in the languid air.
Out of those fields came the blues, and out of that music came one of the state’s greatest sons, Riley “Blues Boy” King, known to the world as B.B. And the same Mississippi soil that gave him a voice also gave rise to an equally revered man of courage and conscience, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, both of whom would have turned 100 this year.
“B.B King was very supportive of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi,” says William Ferris, a historian and scholar who featured King in his 1975 film “Give My Poor Heart Ease” and a 2009 book that shares its title.
Although King and Evers never marched together, both grew up in the shadow of the sharecropping system, where white landowners ruled like kings and the rules of segregation dictated where a person could stand, sit or even exist. One found his way to freedom through music and the other through activism, but both carried the same quiet conviction that dignity, not anger, was the truest form of resistance.
“The blues, to all or most of us Blacks, is a feeling,” said Charles Evers, Medgar’s brother, in a 2006 interview with Jim Dollarhide and Charles Sawyer, later quoted by author Daniel de Visé in his 2021 biography, “King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King. “It comes out of suffering, being denied, refused, abused, misused. That’s what the blues is.” Charles could just as easily have been describing the life his brother lived, or the one King sang about on stages from Beale Street to the Fillmore.
By the early 1960s, King was a star who played to integrated crowds up North but still slept in segregated hotels when he toured the South. At home in Mississippi, change came slowly, and Medgar Evers was one of the young men and women who forced the issue. Evers served as the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, driving the Delta’s backroads to register sharecroppers, leading boycotts of segregated businesses, and challenging the state’s violent caste system. He met hatred with reason, sometimes taking phone calls from men who threatened to kill him, believing he might talk them out of their hate.
King saw in him a different kind of heroism. “Medgar Evers showed me more courage than a thousand pistol-wielding militants,” King said in his 1996 autobiography, “Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King,” co-authored by David Ritz. “To come on a plantation, to walk right into the lion’s den and openly say, ‘Here I am. I’m an organizer. I’m here to change the way things have been done for hundreds of years,’ man, that took guts.”
Like Medgar, King knew that world well. He’d lived under the thumb of the same men who ran those plantations “like absolute dictators,” according to his autobiography. Evers was challenging them to their faces, and King understood how much that defiance could cost.
On June 12, 1963, hours after President John F. Kennedy delivered a televised address calling civil rights a moral issue, a white supremacist named Byron de la Beckwith waited for Medgar Evers in the dark. When Evers stepped from his car, a bullet struck him in the back. Doctors and staff at the University of Mississippi Medical Center worked to save his life, but by 1:30 a.m., Evers had died.
The news hit King hard. And five years later, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he felt that same blow again.
“I felt I was doing all I could by bringing people together through music,” said King in his autobiography. “I had a clear picture of courage, and it had nothing to do with style or muscle or hip political slogans. You didn’t have to be a genius to realize brute force wouldn’t work.” His parents had taught him that respect and work were bound together, that decency and perseverance were the real measure of a person. “Respect requires work,” he said. “Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King worked fearlessly so our people could realize respect. That’s why they died. And why they live on.”
While King’s guitar spoke across color lines, it was Charles Evers, the brother left to carry Medgar’s torch, who brought that work back home. Before his brother’s death, Charles had lived in Chicago, hustling on the edges of the law and spinning records as a deejay. Grief changed him. “I wasn’t the kind of guy Medgar was,” he once told Rolling Stone. “I came here to Mississippi and wanted to kill every white person I saw.” But when he buried his brother, the rage gave way to resolve. “There must be a better way of getting even with them.”
Charles reinvented himself as a politician and civil rights organizer, fiery where Medgar had been steady. In 1969, he became mayor of Fayette, Mississippi — the first Black mayor in the state since Reconstruction. Around that time, King called on him with an idea. As the tenth anniversary of Medgar’s death approached, King wanted to come home to honor his friend’s memory not with speeches, but with music. “I’ll come every year,” Charles said King told him, “and bring who I can bring, if you’ll run it for me and set it up. All you’ve got to do is manage it for me and make sure it comes off.”
The first Mississippi Homecoming took place in 1973, with King at the center and an all-star cast that included James Earl Jones, Dick Gregory and the Staple Singers, while Governor Bill Waller declared June 12 “Medgar Evers Memorial Festival Day.” In a state still struggling to reconcile its past, the gathering was a chance to see whether music could do what politics could not.
The Homecoming concerts moved between Fayette and Jackson, and later Indianola in the years that followed, growing into something larger than memorial. Under Charles’s direction, they became an annual homecoming where people of all races stood shoulder to shoulder, drawn by the same songs that had once divided them. In the Delta heat, under wide skies, King’s guitar became the sound of Mississippi forgiving itself.
When the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center opened in Indianola in 2008, seven years before his passing, it was built on the idea that the story of one man’s rise could also be the story of a people finding their voice. Inside, visitors walk through the arc of his life: from a tractor driver in the Delta to an ambassador of the blues, from the Jim Crow South to stages around the world. But in every corner of that story, you can still hear the echo of Medgar, the man who showed him what courage looked like offstage.
The weight of Medgar’s death stayed with King, his longtime friend Lora Walker told de Visé in 2020, recalling King’s own words after Medgar passed: “because this man gave his life, and he was from Mississippi, and I am from Mississippi, and people think nothing good comes from Mississippi.”