Daughter of assassinated civil rights leader sees painful echoes of political violence in America
'It's painful,' said Reena Evers-Everette. 'It's very painful.'
Evers-Everette was 8 years old when her father, a field secretary for the NAACP, was shot to death in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
A few months after Evers' killing in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down. The deaths of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy followed later that decade.
Now, experts say the level of political violence in America over the past few years is likely the highest it's been since the 1960s and 1970s. The past year alone has seen the assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers, and two assassination attempts on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
At a four-day conference celebrating Evers' life just before what would have been his 100th birthday on July 2, his daughter was joined by the daughters of slain civil rights leaders: Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, and Bettie Dahmer, the daughter of civil and voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer. The 2025 Democracy in Action Convening, 'Medgar Evers at 100: a Legacy of Justice, a Future of Change,' was held in Jackson.
'I just was feeling so much pain, and I didn't want anyone else to have to go through that,' Kennedy said, recalling that after her father died, she prayed for the man who killed him. 'I was saying, 'Please don't — please don't kill the guy that killed him.''
Two-time Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams spoke at the event, denouncing efforts by the Trump administration to strip the names of activists from Navy vessels, including possibly Evers.
'They want to take his name off a boat because they don't want us to have a reminder of how far he sailed us forward,' Abrams told the conference crowd.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has undertaken an effort to change the names of ships and military bases that were given by President Joe Biden's Democratic administration, which often honored service members who were women, people of color, or from the LGBTQ+ community.
Abrams drew parallels between acts of radical political violence and the Trump administration's use of military resources against protesters in Los Angeles who were demonstrating against immigration enforcement actions.
'Unfortunately, we cannot decry political violence and then sanction the sending of the Marines and the National Guard to stop protesters and not believe that that conflicting message doesn't communicate itself,' Abrams told The Associated Press. 'What I want us to remember is that whether it is Medgar Evers or Melissa Hortman, no one who is willing to speak for the people should have their lives cut short because of what they say.'
In addition to her father's life and legacy, Evers-Everette wants people to remember the hatred that led to his assassination.
'We have to make sure we know what our history is,' she said. 'So we don't repeat the crazy, nasty, racist mess.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Is ICE the first harbinger of a ‘secret police' in the US?
The Iceman Cometh, the 1939 drama by American writer Eugene O'Neill, has at various times been described by reviewers as set in a stark, ruthless world and a play that 'blisters with intensity'. In the eyes of some, such observations could just as easily apply to today's America, a country where, under the presidency of Donald Trump, there is an almost palpable sense of unease and potency. Today's America too is a country where that phrase 'The Iceman Cometh' has taken on an all too real and equally menacing connotation. For the ICE men of today's America – agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – have become the calling card of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. US president Donald Trump has in effect created a personal army, experts warnThough ICE now occupies a 'noble' place in Trump's hierarchy of law enforcement, its detractors view it very differently. A modern-day 'Gestapo' or 'domestic stormtroopers for the MAGA agenda', say some. 'Trump's de facto private army – his security state within the state and a threat to democracy', say others. What's certainly in no doubt is that Trump has propelled ICE into America's best-funded law enforcement agency. As the Financial Times (FT) US national editor Edward Luce, recently highlighted, Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' (BBB) signed into law by the president on July 4, lifted ICE's budget to an estimated $37.5 billion a year, a sum higher than Italy's entire defence budget and just below Canada's. Writing a message of 'THANK YOU!' to the ICE workforce over the Independence Day holiday, Trump made clear that the BBB spending commitment would give the agency 'ALL of the Funding and Resources that ICE needs to carry out the Largest Mass Deportation Operation in History'. The money set aside for ICE is eyewatering. The $37.5bn a year for operations aside, the spending bill includes a $170bn package for Trump's border-and-immigration crackdown, which includes $45bn for new detention facilities, including hiring thousands more officers and agents. READ MORE: Mhairi Black: Criticising Israel is not religious intolerance. Orange marches are In the eyes of Trump, ICE officers can do no wrong. 'The toughest people you'll ever meet,' he insists. His gushing reverence for ICE is also reflected in what Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, described as 'well-deserved bonuses'. Trump officials have said they'll provide $10,000 annual bonuses for ICE personnel as well as Border Patrol agents, along with $10,000 for new hires. As Nick Miroff, staff writer at The Atlantic magazine who covers immigration issues, recently pointed out, as far as Trump sees it, the '20,000 ICE employees are the unflinching men and women who will restore order. They're the Untouchables in his (Trump's) MAGA crime drama'. So just what is ICE, what exactly does it do, and perhaps more significantly, to what extent are fears over its growing power and perceived threat to democracy justified? Established in 2003, ICE is one of the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created in 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks. Initially, the DHS's focus was counterterrorism. But soon, the presence of certain foreign groups began to be framed as a national security issue. DHS encompasses two law enforcement directorates: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). ERO is charged with enforcing US immigration laws and has 6100 deportation officers. HSI has about 6500 special agents who conduct transnational criminal investigations and do not usually participate in domestic immigration operations. ICE was also created alongside Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP controls the borders, while ICE operates inside the country and it's this operation across America that has become the focus of controversy. According to the agency's own website, ICE, along with its ERO officials, are tasked with identifying, arresting, detaining, and removing immigrants without authorisation in the US. Back during his 2024 presidential campaign, when outlining his vision for deportations of undocumented migrants, Trump said he would focus on expelling those with criminal records. But since entering office, this has rapidly widened to include anyone without legal status, ICE officers, often masked and not wearing uniforms or displaying badges, have now been arresting people outside courtroom hearings, during traffic stops in workplace sweeps, and even from hospitals. The agency's aggressive tactics are striking terror throughout America's immigrant communities, especially in Democrat-run cities. Just these past weeks, Trump ordered ICE to step up its arrests and deportation efforts in Democratic strongholds, doubling down on a politicised anti-immigration drive after major protests against ICE in Los Angeles. 'We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside,' Trump said on his Truth Social platform. (Image: Win McNamee, Getty Images) 'These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Centre,' Trump claimed, citing debunked right-wing conspiracy theories that undocumented immigrants are voting in US elections in significant numbers. With every week that passes, ICE operation are gathering momentum. For its part, the administration says its moves – which include hundreds of deportation flights, the expansion of third-country removals, and Trump's invocation of the seldom-used 1798 Alien Enemies Act – are necessary to stem unauthorised immigration to the United States. The law is a wartime authority that gives the president sweeping powers to detain or deport noncitizens with little or no due process, and ICE have become its enforcers, much to the disquiet of many Democrat politicians, human rights activists and ordinary citizens. ICE is now arresting four times as many non-criminals as those with criminal convictions each week, according to David Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that was cited by the FT. The number of immigrants in detention with no criminal charges or convictions jumped 1300% from January to mid-June, he wrote in an analysis. Numbers matter here, for ICE is under tremendous pressure to make more arrests to meet quotas set by senior White House aide Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration crackdown. Miller set an aggressive quota of 3000 arrests per day in late May, and the efforts to meet that goal have pushed ICE officers into more communities and businesses. Not everyone within the ranks of ICE are happy with this and other aspects of the policy. According to The Atlantic magazine's immigration writer Nic Miroff, who has interviewed many current and former ICE agents who spoke on condition of anonymity, many described 'a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more'. READ MORE: Patrick Harvie: 'Never again' seems to not apply to Palestinians Some ICE employees according to Miroff 'believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe'. With deportations becoming a top domestic priority for the Trump administration, some Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) officers along with those from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have been put on immigration enforcement duties. It's a shift in duties many do not agree with. One veteran HSI agent complained to Miroff that his division which usually focuses on cartel drug-trafficking operations have had agents moved to immigration-enforcement arrests as part of ICE operations. 'No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,' the agent told Miroff. 'It's infuriating,' adding that he is thinking of quitting rather than having to continue 'arresting gardeners'. But complain as some ICE agents do, many Americans currently reserve their sympathies for those being targeted by the agents. Stories emerging from detention facilities where those arrested by ICE are being held are only adding to that sympathy as well as a sense of outrage. Earlier this month, Trump held a tour of one facility that's been dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz'. Its name is a reference to both the local reptile population and the former maximum-security Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, California. An aerial view of the migrant detention centre dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz' (Image: Chandan Khanna/AFP) Constructed in a little over eight days and meant to accommodate up to 3000 detainees, since then accounts and reports from the facility point to appalling conditions. They suggest too that the design of the site is flawed and will compromise the safety of people being held there. Stories relayed to the Miami Herald by the wives of detainees housed in the makeshift Florida detention centre for migrants in the Everglades made for grim reading about the conditions detainees endure. 'Toilets that didn't flush. Temperatures that went from freezing to sweltering. Giant bugs. And little or no access to showers or toothbrushes, much less confidential calls with attorneys,' were among some of the accounts detailed by the Miami Herald. The newspaper also told of lights being left on inside the facility 24 hours a day, with detainees saying there are no clocks and there is scant sunlight coming through the heavy-duty tents, making it difficult for them to know whether it is day or night. Currently, ICE is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest number ever, even though funding until the latest boost was available for only 41,000 detention beds. This means that processing centres are packed with people sleeping on floors in short-term holding cells. Worrying as such reports are, it's the growth of ICE, its increasingly politicised role and the fact that it appears beyond accountability that concerns many Americans. Earlier this year, ICE's in-house watchdog was scrapped and for the time being, America's lower courts are hamstrung in their efforts to rein it in. As the FT's national editor Edward Luce recently observed, given that the Supreme Court last year gave Trump sweeping immunity from 'official' acts he takes as president … 'that makes ICE Trump's de facto private army – his security state within the state'. Though ICE is ostensibly still bound by constitutional limits, the way it has been operating bears the hallmarks of a secret police force in the making, insist some experts on authoritarian regimes. Lee Morgenbesser is an associate professor with the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Brisbane, and fellow with the Australian Research Council. Having studied historical and contemporary secret police forces, Morgenbesser says they typically meet five criteria. First, they're a police force targeting political opponents and dissidents. Second, they're not controlled by other security agencies and answer directly to the dictator. Third, the identity of their members and their operations are secret. Fourth, they specialise in political intelligence and surveillance operations. And finally, they carry out arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, indefinite detentions, disappearances and torture. In a recent article in the online platform The Conversation, and using these criteria to assess how close ICE is to becoming a secret police force, Morgenbesser concludes that 'overall, the evidence shows ICE meets most of the criteria". While ICE has yet to target political opponents, which Morgenbesser defines narrowly as members of the Democratic Party, and it is not directly controlled by Trump, he maintains that ICE's 'current structure provides him with plausible deniability.' In short, he says that while ICE is 'far from resembling history's most feared secret police forces, there have so far been few constraints on how it operates'. 'When combined with a potential shift towards targeting US citizens for dissent and disobedience, ICE is fast becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism,' Morgenbesser warns. As ICE makes its presence felt in a growing number of American communities, the controversy over its role is likewise certain to escalate. While a majority of Americans support deporting violent criminals, they also back allowing migrants who came to the country as children or who arrived many years ago to stay. Americans polled by The Economist and YouGov in mid-June showed that only 42% viewed ICE favourably – an eight percentage-point drop from February and the start of Trump's term. For now, the ICE men continue to cometh and America, a nation of immigrants, faces an altogether different reckoning over its future democratic credentials.
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Ian Murray panned for ‘disgraceful' U-turns as past motions resurface
The Scottish Secretary signed Early Day Motions on a range of topics while Labour were in opposition, including demanding full compensation (and free bus passes) for the Waspi women, membership of the EU's customs union and unilateral nuclear disarmament. They have all now ditched by Labour after coming to power. A motion that Murray backed in 2019 also took aim at the record of US president Donald Trump, including his "misogynism, racism and xenophobia'. READ MORE: Octopus Energy to pay £1.5 million for prepayment meter billing errors It also called on the then UK Government to rescind the offer of a full state visit to President Trump. Now as Scottish Secretary, Murray has said he would 'meet Donald Trump off the plane'. It also comes as Trump is reportedly expected to touch down in Scotland to visit his golf courses at the end of July or the beginning of August. The SNP have now hit out at Murray, saying that the U-turns are 'disgraceful' – also taking aim at what they said was his previous 'uncharacteristically strong' support for Palestine and gender reform. (Image: NQ) The party pinpointed a motion in 2017, which Murray supported, raised concerns over the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinian children while another from 2011 called for the UK Government to officially recognise a Palestinian state – the new Labour Government has not yet done so. Murray also supported a motion in 2017 which said gender identity "includes those who do not identify as either male or female, identify as both, a third gender or are fluid in their identity". But as Scottish Secretary, he refused to rule out lifting the Tory-imposed veto on the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. "Labour's Secretary of State for Scotland's transformation from backbench idealist to Cabinet loyalist is not just disappointing, it's disgraceful,' SNP MSP Gordon MacDonald told the Sunday National. 'From Palestine to pensioners, nuclear weapons to the EU, he has abandoned almost every principle he once claimed to champion. 'His constituents, and Scotland, deserve better than a minister who has traded his principles for power - as ever, Scotland is an afterthought for Labour politicians.' Scottish Labour have been approached for comment.
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos speaks out on Gaza genocide
During our interview, he is calm. As he recounts his life story, full of drama and danger, the 88-year-old Holocaust survivor is softly and carefully spoken. A note of anger enters his voice on only two occasions. First, when discussing the ways in which the Holocaust has been used by the Israeli government and its allies to justify their treatment of the Palestinians. 'I'm completely sickened by that. Because all these horrors are committed by Israel with some kind of assumed impunity.' He recalls, bitterly, Israel's UN ambassador Gilad Erdan wearing a yellow star in the opening phases of the assault on Gaza: 'I thought that was an awful misuse, invoking an event that was painful and humiliating … For that to be used as some kind of cover … against the Palestinian people, I thought was sickening. 'The Holocaust was a European affair … nothing to do with the Palestinians. And, somehow, they have to pay the price of it?' Israeli United Nations ambassador Gilad Erdan speaking in October 2023 (Image: Michael) But the sometime Hungarian refugee reserves his gravest tone for the suffering of the people of Gaza, in solidarity with whom he has marched through central London many times, often with other Holocaust survivors. I ask if he sees his own childhood experience reflected in that suffering: 'I have a visceral understanding because in small ways, we did go through similar things. The uncertainty, the repeated escapes, the lack of reliable information.' Why in small ways? Because, he explains with signature empathy, he survived: 'Our experience, even with the fighting thrown in, and the war moving through us, was not as bad as what I can see the Gazans going through.' Kapos survived through luck, and by the brave acts of Christian protectors and aid workers, who trafficked Jewish children through Hungary as the frontlines of war swept westward in the closing acts of the Second World War. On various occasions, he was terrifyingly close to being caught. READ MORE: Mhairi Black: Criticising Israel is not religious intolerance. Orange marches are In Christmas 1944, local German army units invited his group of refugees to their holiday celebration. They did not know the children were Jewish. 'Of course, you couldn't refuse it,' for fear of being caught, he reasons. So little Stephen Kapos spent that holiday under an enormous swastika banner, with demoralised Wehrmacht soldiers who had no idea that they shared the last Christmas of the war with those they were supposed to be waging racial war against. On another occasion, he witnessed the wreckage of the fiercest fighting: 'The total destruction is very similar to what I can see on the screen in Gaza.' Kapos has endured many of the worst tyrants of the 20th century. First the Hungarian strongman Admiral Horthy, a pioneer of fascistic methods. The regime's antisemitic laws meant that his father had to complete part of his education abroad. After the German invasion of his country in 1944, when Kapos was 'four months short of seven years old', he survived Hitler and his demonic lieutenant Adolf Eichmann, who scoured the countryside rounding up hundreds of thousands of Jews for extermination. After the war, he witnessed the Stalinisation of Hungary. After participating as a student in the uprising of 1956, he fled the Soviet crackdown for Britain. Now, at 88, Kapos faces new persecutors – the Metropolitan Police. Called in for questioning for peacefully protesting the UK Government's policy in Gaza earlier in the year, he remains defiant. He is touring cities across the country to continue building the mass movement of solidarity with Gaza and to oppose attacks on speech and protest. He will be arriving to speak in Glasgow on July 22, where the group Kneecap had their billing at the TRNSMT festival cancelled, at the urging of Police Scotland and First Minister John Swinney. He views his own persecution as only part of a widening trend. In recent months, proscriptions and arrests have rolled out across the movement, in a clear attempt at decapitation. Kapos himself was presumably targeted for being a vocal and visible critic of British foreign policy. His moral example too much for the authorities to bear, especially when they appear so lacking by comparison. 'It's very worrying,' he says of the repression of recent months. 'The arc of the various measures tends to be oppressive. More and more, an attack on free speech and free demonstrations.' READ MORE: Police Scotland issue terror charge for man 'wearing pro-Palestine Action T-shirt' It is even more severe abroad, he says, such as on US campuses where 'McCarthyism has been brought back'. We must stop this direction of travel, he urges, to avoid even more authoritarian outcomes, and he'd know about them. Despite the escalating horrors of war and these anti-democratic measures, he has not lost hope: 'I'm not pessimistic in the long-term, but we have to watch the short term, very much,' he cautions. It would be easy to think of Kapos, with his eloquence, sweep of history and belief in a universal human future beyond racism and authoritarianism, as a romantic figure. Yet he is extremely practical in his cast of mind. Asked how he can still believe in that better world, with all he has witnessed, he answers: 'I just think there's no alternative to that.' It's easier still to think him a hero, given the trials he has endured. But he disagrees: 'Heroes are the people who put their lives on the line. Like the doctors of Gaza, for example.' Stephen Kapos is speaking at the Stop the War Scotland rally at the Renfield Centre on July 22, at 7pm
