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When Medgar and Myrlie Evers bought a house in the new Elraine subdivision of Jackson, Mississippi, they gave up the security of an apartment to realize a dream of owning a home in the suburbs. Today the house is the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, and its yard, lawn and driveway are a memorial to their civil rights work, their pride in their home, their resistance to oppression and their investment in their community.
Today, a neat lawn connects the street to the front of the Evers house. NPS.
Elraine
- African American developers Winston J. Thompson and Leroy Burnett built Elraine between 1955 and 1957. It was the first complete neighborhood in Mississippi built by and for middle-class African Americans.
- In strictly segregated Jackson, racist development practices reserved new neighborhoods for white residents and pushed Black citizens into often cramped or substandard housing. On the city's edge, Elraine could tap city water, electricity and sewer service, which were sometimes more limited in Black neighborhoods.
- Its three-bedroom homes, large lots and landscaped lawns set it apart, and Jackson's Black middle class welcomed it.
Medgar Evers, a keen fisherman and outdoorsman, had said he wanted to live somewhere with open space rather than buildings, where he could hunt, fish and breathe clean air. Elraine's suburban layout offered that, much like the white suburbs near Chicago the couple had admired on visits to Illinois.
A garden as expression
The Everses' yard, like most in Elraine, was bigger than those in nearby neighborhoods, and the front lawn ran open to the street and the neighbors' yards. Medgar, raised on a farm, and Myrlie, who grew up among keen gardeners in Vicksburg, were both eager to choose plants.
Like their neighbors, they saw the garden as a way to express creativity, show prosperity and build community. Myrlie Evers-Williams has recalled that everyone on the street set out to have the best-landscaped yard. Neighbors remember the Evers yard as a welcoming place where children played and adults stopped to talk.
- Lawn: Medgar kept the thick St. Augustine grass mowed, with help from the couple's oldest son, Darrell.
- Front: like many African American gardeners, the family kept ornamental plants out front and food in back.
- Back: Medgar built a chain-link fence for the family's German shepherd, Heidi, and honeysuckle grew along it.
What they grew
| Where | Plants, from family interviews in 2023 |
|---|---|
| Front yard and a Roman brick planter under the picture window | Roses, camellias, hydrangeas, azaleas, gardenias, tulips, daffodils, junipers and arborvitae |
| Beside the driveway | A live oak Medgar planted, ringed by a small bed of perennials |
| Driveway entrance | Junipers on each side |
| Vegetable beds along the north and east fences | Mustard greens, collard greens, cucumbers, corn, tomatoes, squash and peppers |
| Around the yard | A flowering mimosa, peach and plum trees and evergreen shrubs, remembered by daughter Reena Evers-Everette, who lived there from age three to eight |
Roses in the Roman brick planter frame the picture window at the front of the house. NPS.
The yard today
None of the family's original plants remain, but the live oak Medgar planted was moved in 1996 to nearby park land on Missouri Street, and Myrlie's Roman brick planter still stands in front of the house. A continuous, neatly mowed lawn still frames the home — a green reminder of the care Medgar Evers gave it.
Sources
Based on "Medgar and Myrlie Evers' Yard and Garden," Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, National Park Service, drawing on the monument's Cultural Landscape Report (2024); a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
В изданияхMedgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument
Лицензия: CC0 1.0 (общественное достояние) · По материалам www.nps.gov
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