Wednesday, May 30, 2001

By Teri Weaver

- Jackson, Miss.

They had painted the house a bright, almost luminescent, sea green. For all of Medgar Evers's careful planning - leaving the porch light off unless everyone was home, exiting the car on the passenger's side so the house could provide protection, telling his three children to hide in the bathtub at the slightest unexpected noise - the house was impossible to miss.

Evers, who led the NAACP in Mississippi in the early 1960s, was fatally shot in the driveway of that house at 2332 Guynes St. in Jackson 37 years ago. His family heard the shot after midnight that summer evening. When his wife, Myrlie, got out to the carport, he lay face down near death.

"When she flipped him over she just knew that he was dead because all of his chest was blown away," said Minnie Watson, who stood Monday morning in the Evers' dining area and talked about the murder with 16 high school students from Central New York.

Evers wasn't dead, but he would die about an hour later at a whites-only Jackson hospital, where doctors spent time discussing whether to accept the black man as a patient before treating him. They gave in after deciding his own doctor, also black, could only watch their rescue efforts from a distance.

Most of the teens have seen "Ghosts of Mississippi," a 1996 movie that tells how a Hinds County prosecutor chased the case in 1989. Monday afternoon, the kids met with that prosecutor, Bobby DeLaughter, who finally won the 1994 conviction of Byron De La Beckwith.

"Through the story of that night, of June 11, you could feel the hate present in Byron De La Beckwith and the sorrow (Evers's) family felt when they opened their door to see their father and husband lying down in a bloody mess. Hearing that story from the actual man portrayed by Alec Baldwin in "Ghosts of Mississippi" was an experience I will never forget. I would also like to add that the history kept me on the edge of my seat." - Ryan Oot, 16, junior, Chittenango, writing in his journal.

As Ryan Oot prepared for this week-long civil rights tour with Sen. Nancy Larraine Hoffmann, R-Fabius, he said the only drawback would be missing schoolwork. Oot has grown up in Kirkville, where his family owns a recreational-vehicle business.

"Most of the life is in Chittenango," he said last week, "and that's not much."

Oot wants to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. He built a Web site for the Erie Canal Museum in Chittenango as his Eagle Scout project. He spent part of Monday debating abortion with Nicole Austin, a self-proclaimed human-rights activist and junior at Fayetteville-Manlius. Last summer, he spent four days sailing from Pensacola to New Orleans. On that trip, he canoed for a day on a Mississippi River.

"From what I saw," he said of last summer, "Mississippi doesn't seem much different than any of the rural areas around here. Just the accent is different."

"It made me feel very still inside, thinking of the tragedy that happened in that exact spot. As I walked through the house and listened to Mrs. Watson describe with such detail the murder and family life of Medgar, I began to see in my mind a more vivid scene of that horrifying night." - Adrienne Wilson, 16, junior, Stockbridge Valley.

The students saw where Beckwith crouched behind a cover of bushes across the street and pulled the trigger. The bullet crossed Guynes Street (now Margaret Walker Alexander Drive), shattered the Evers' living room window, went through the kitchen wall, ricocheted off the sea-green refrigerator and sunk into a piece of watermelon that was sitting out on the countertop.

Soon after, Myrlie Evers and her children moved to California, and the house lay empty and decaying for years. She gave the house to Tougaloo College, a private, historically black school in Jackson that couldn't afford to fix it up. Finally, in the mid-1990s, Castle Rock productions and Whoopi Goldberg poured money into it, restoring the bright paint, installing matching, sea-green kitchen appliances and filling it with 1950s furnishings.

Minnie Watson opened the house Monday especially for the New York teens. They saw the Evers' mattresses and box springs made neatly on the floor; a bed frame would have elevated the family to window-height, a danger since the house had been shot into twice and fire-bombed once before Evers was killed. The teens saw Myrlie and Medgar's wedding picture on a chest of drawers in what was their bedroom. Myrlie looks shy; Medgar looks like he can't stop smiling.

"I spent a great deal of time at the house periodically to re-center myself," DeLaughter told the kids. "Maybe you even felt some of the things while you were there that I felt. I always left re-fortified and determined."

The teens were as curious about Watson and DeLaughter as they were about Evers and Tougaloo College. The kids are staying for two nights at the college, the same campus where Martin Luther King Jr. stayed when he came to Jackson.

Nine Tougaloo students - five men and four women - led the first sit-in movement in Jackson, the state's capital. They went to the downtown library March 27, 1961, to use the Jackson Municipal Library. Police in steel helmets took them to jail.

On Monday, Watson told the teens about growing up as an African-American in Mississippi. DeLaughter talked about the recent referendum in which Mississippians voted 2 to 1 to keep their state flag, a banner that includes the "stars and bars" emblem of the old Confederacy.

Monday night, the teens sat in the lobby of a dorm at Tougaloo and talked about the race problems they see in schools, businesses and neighborhoods. They shared stories about how white sales people treat black shoppers. They talked about politics in school cafeterias, where some students of the same race sit together and seldom mix.

"Just look at this trip," Charla Harlow had said that morning in front of Evers' house. "At breakfast. Everybody does it."

At breakfast, lunch and dinner at Shoney's, the five African-American girls on the trip sat together. There was one all-white table, and the two other tables held a mixed group.

"We also talked about stereotypes. Since way back when blacks tried to learn to read and write, they were said to be acting white. Similar stuff happens to me very often. Discussing this with the group made me feel better about myself. I feel like I'm not the only one going through it." - Shanetkwa Little, 17, junior, Fowler High School.