In Jackson, the unburied corpse of Medgar Evers already was a shrine to the altered state of American race relations. His murder was eerie and providential, so flushed with history as to seem perversely proper—shot in the back on the very night President Kennedy embraced racial democracy as a moral cause. This was a mythical event of race, the first national one since Emmett Till’s death trip into the Tallahatchie River. In a subtle but important turn of perception, people referred to the killing as a political assassination instead of a lynching, adding both personal and historical
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