Eisenhower and Evers: Leaders in War, Leaders for Change

Medgar Evers during his Army service in the Second World War. U.S. Army photograph.

The Second World War produced leaders at every rank, and many went on to shape the United States and the world afterward. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Medgar Evers were two of them. In the summer of 1944, separated by rank, race and status, they shared one goal: the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Two views of the same invasion

Eisenhower, given his new command at the end of 1943, was charged with planning and carrying out Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Normandy. For nearly six months he gave every waking moment to analysing, adjusting and worrying over the logistics of an invasion without precedent. One of his greatest concerns was whether his soldiers were ready.

Evers saw the task very differently. A young Black man from rural Mississippi, he joined the U.S. Army in 1943, at 17, not meaning to make a career of it. He followed his older brother Charles, whom he admired, and enlistment offered an escape from the segregation and racism around him and his family. It was a way to serve his country, even if that service did not bring him equality.

More than a million African Americans served in the U.S. armed forces during the war. Some saw combat; many served in support roles behind the lines. Their work, often overlooked, was essential — without it, victory was impossible.

In June 1944, after months of planning and agonising over the largest amphibious invasion in history, Eisenhower gave the order to go, and watched a vast armada of soldiers, sailors and airmen from dozens of nations set out on what he called the "Great Crusade".

The Red Ball Express

Among the hundreds of thousands who went was Medgar Evers. He was not in the front line of combat, but he and other African American soldiers played an invaluable part in the invasion and in the liberation of Normandy, France and Europe.

Evers served in the segregated 325th Port Company, part of the Red Ball Express truck convoy system. Named after the red dots that marked priority express trains in the United States, it was famous for fast, essential supply delivery: Army trucks ran a nonstop loop to make sure gasoline, ammunition and food reached the front.

The months that followed were pivotal for both men. Eisenhower led a vast Allied coalition through new challenges and pressures every day. Evers learned that life outside the United States was not always an escape from segregation: like many African Americans in the war, he still met racism and discrimination overseas, mostly from white officers. Years later he wrote of getting to know a French family whose kindness stayed with him for years, in stark contrast to how some of his own countrymen had treated him.

After the war

Both men carried their wartime experience into the postwar world.

• Eisenhower's command of the Allied coalition prepared him for further leadership: Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, president of Columbia University, Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe, and finally President of the United States.
• Evers, who had fought for democracy abroad, came home to a country that still denied him the rights other citizens enjoyed. Shaped by the war, he could not stand by silently while injustice and racial inequality scarred the nation.

From 1954 to 1963 Evers was Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His team investigated violent crimes against African Americans, including the murder of Emmett Till. The work was dangerous: segregationists and members of white supremacist groups threatened his life.

In 1963, after attacks on him and his family — including a Molotov cocktail thrown at his home — Evers said that if he died, it would be for a good cause. On June 12, 1963, he was murdered in the carport of his family's home in Jackson, Mississippi, now part of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument.

His wife, Myrlie Evers, chose to have him buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Although most of his civil rights work was in Mississippi, she believed his sacrifice and legacy belonged to everyone. He had answered his nation's call to serve in war, and came home to call on his country to become the champion of democracy it claimed to be.

Two kinds of leadership

Eisenhower never knew the hardship and persecution Evers knew so well. But both were shaped by their service in the war, and both drew on it to lead afterward in the country they had fought for. In some ways their postwar roles echoed their wartime ones: while Eisenhower held the presidency and civil rights moved slowly, Evers again did the hard, vital work of advancing freedom and equality, and again faced danger for it — this time from his own countrymen.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Eisenhower and Evers: Leaders in War, Leaders for Change." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/eisenhower-and-evers.htm
• The original names the monument "Medgar and Merlie Evers Home"; its name is the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument (https://www.nps.gov/memy/index.htm), as the original's own list of parks gives it. The year of the murder, 1963, is the year the original gives for the attacks just before it.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.