can you create detailed Cornell notes in bullet point format on this piece of text: be very detailed and concise, and make sure it is something a pan African studies professor would love: Armed white men surrounded Medgar and Charles Evers when they
appeared at the Newton County courthouse in the logging town of Decatur,
Mississippi. It was 1946, not long after the two brothers had been discharged from the U.S. Army, and they were planning to register to vote.
The Everses knew many of the gun-toting white men around them; as
boys they had even played with some of them. The frightened circuit clerk
knew the Evers brothers, too. As Charles Evers years later recalled of him
and other white Mississippians like him, “Like almost half the whites in
Mississippi . . . [they] didn’t want murder and bloodshed, but they didn’t
dare embrace us and get branded ‘nigger lovers.’”
Despite the risk of ostracism, the clerk brought the two returned veterans inside and sat them down in a back room, where he tried to persuade
them to abandon their attempt. When they refused, he finally permitted
them to register. “Medgar and I had always wanted to vote,” wrote Charles
Evers in his autobiography. “As soldiers we’d worked like dogs, risked our
lives fighting for freedom, democracy, and all the principles this country
was founded on. But wecouldn’t vote. The law said we could, but the whites
of Mississippi made sure we couldn’t.”

That the Evers brothers had succeeded in registering to vote in a rural
Mississippi community like Decatur was unusual, but registering was only
half the battle. They wanted to actually cast ballots on Election Day. The
stridently racist Theodore Bilbo was seeking a third term in the U.S. Senate,
and Charles and Medgar intended to help defeat him.
Some fourteen years earlier—in 1932, when Medgar was nine and
Charles was eleven—the brothers were sitting on the steps of the same
courthouse amid a white crowd gathered for a Bilbo campaign speech. For
the two boys, it was entertainment in a small town that had very little. “We
ignored all the nigger baiting,” Charles remembered later. “Northerners
can’t appreciate a southern rascal. I always could.” Because Medgar and
Charles were so young, they were not likely to encounter the kind of violent
reaction that would almost certainly have met any black man daring to sit
on the courthouse steps to listen to Bilbo’s rants. But Bilbo noticed them,
and, pointing at them, he emphasized the necessity of maintaining white
supremacy. “you see these two little niggers setting down here?—these two
nigger boys right there will be asking for everything that is ours by right.
. . . If you don’t keep them in their place, then someday they’ll be in Washington trying to represent you.”
The day before the 1946 primary, the unintentionally prescient Bilbo
was back in Decatur, and in a familiar racist harangue in the town square
he appealed to his white listeners to target black registered voters, even
though they were very few in number: “The best way to keep a nigger from
the polls on election day is to visit him the night before,” Bilbo said to a
receptive crowd that understood exactly what he meant.
No one in Newton County was likely to be foolish enough to show up
at the Evers’s home attempting to frighten and intimidate anyone. The boys’
father, James, was sometimes called “Crazy Jim” Evers. Undaunted by
white-supremacist authority, he would not hesitate to shoot any attacker
regardless of race. But elsewhere in town—particularly around the locus
of white power that was the courthouse—the Evers family had to be much
more careful, although on more than one occasion James Evers had refused
to step aside to let whites walking toward him pass.
The effects of Bilbo’s encouragement were plain to see when Medgar,
Charles, and four of their friends—all of them World War II veterans—
84 THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF’LL GET yOU kILLED

went to the courthouse to vote on July 2. They found awaiting them a
crowd of “rednecks . . . holding shotguns, rifles, and pistols,” recalled
Charles Evers. But the white men standing guard at the courthouse may
not have realized that at least one of the six men before them had come
prepared for a fight.
Charles Evers would later claim that he was carrying a pistol and a
switchblade knife. The county sheriff was on the scene watching as the two
groups eyed each other, but he said nothing and did nothing, so Charles
told Medgar he intended to try to enter the Courthouse and vote. “I meant
to die fighting for Negro rights,” he later wrote. “The ‘klukkers’ [ku klux
klansmen] were cowards. They liked defending white rights but they didn’t
want to die doing it.”
Medgar, who was always less hot-tempered than his older brother,
decided that it was not worth the risk and that they should leave. “We’ll
get them next time,” he told his brother. Charles let Medgar lead him away.
“I’d stopped guarding my life,” he recalled, “but Medgar guarded it for me.”
Still, Charles’s weapon would come in handy. Some of the whites who had
been at the courthouse followed the group home and continued to threaten
them. “We pulled our guns. . . . They turned heel and ran,” Charles wrote.
Medgar told a slightly different story and the two stories help show the
differences between the two brothers. According to Medgar, the six had
walked to the courthouse and did actually enter it, but armed white men
surged around them, so they split up and returned home. They regrouped
and drove back to the courthouse with guns hidden in the car. They left
the weapons in the car and attempted to walk into the polling place but
were once again blocked by a white mob. “We decided not to pursue it,”
said Medgar later without elaborating. The group of veterans left the courthouse. They were followed by some of the whites, who waved guns from
their cars. But when the Evers group showed their own weapons, the whites
stopped following them.
Like many black men returning home after World War II, the Evers
brothers and their friends had resolved not to be intimidated or pushed
around and not to submit to the old, familiar restrictions and oppressions
ordained by white supremacy. And though Charles and Medgar did not use
their guns or their military training on primary day in 1946, many veterans
“Fighting for What We Didn’t Have” 85

were willing to do so when they felt it necessary and practical. “Fighting
World War II woke up a lot of us,” says Charles Evers. “We had to ask ourselves . . . Why were we second class citizens?”
Men like the Evers brothers would prove vitally important to the Freedom Movement in the 1960s. And while black–white shootouts were by
no means common in the postwar South, the threat that they might occur
increased markedly with the return of black veterans. Indeed, it became
apparent almost immediately at the end of the war that the region was on
the cusp of change largely because, more than any other group within the
black community, veterans were the least accepting of white supremacy.
They were dangerous. White power recognized that they were dangerous.
And this is where the modern civil rights movement truly begins.
Mississippi native Amzie Moore exemplifies the link between World
War II veterans and the modern movement. More than any single person,
Moore would be responsible for SNCC’s presence in Mississippi and its
movement into grassroots organizing for voting rights. He was drafted in
1942, and despite the discrimination and segregation he encountered at
every posting, his army service changed him. As he entered a new world
far removed from the Mississippi he had grown up in, his experiences
began opening his mind, and he found himself thinking in ways he never
had before. “For a long time I had the idea that a man with white skin was
superior because it appeared to me that he had everything,” he recalled.
“And I figured if God would justify the white man having everything, that
God had put him in a position to be the best.” His military service and the
travel it entailed radically changed this outlook. “you can leave Calcutta,
you can leave Egypt; you can go down the Red Sea through the Suez Canal;
you can hit the Indian Ocean, you can go up the Gulf of Said [Port Said,
Egypt]. . . . you going to find black people all the way over,” Moore
observed. “you go for miles and miles and that’s what you’re going to see.”
Amzie Moore’s wartime travels led him to conclude that European civilization had been lifted from barbarism largely by the achievements of
much earlier and superior civilizations, such as that of Egypt. He was
stunned: “All civilization was black. . . . And I was so surprised. And since
then, I have not had [an inferiority] complex.” Before being discharged,
Moore joined the NAACP.
86 THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF’LL GET yOU kILLED

Back home in Cleveland, Mississippi, after the war, Moore saw that conditions for black people had not improved. The city’s white residents had
even organized a home guard to protect white women from the black veterans supposedly lusting for them, and there was an upsurge in murderous
antiblack terrorism. Despite his newly expanded black consciousness, however, Moore did not organize protest or resistance. Instead, he planned to
get rich. He got a job at the post office where he had worked before the
war, built a brick house, and—with a loan from Standard Life Insurance
Company—opened a service station with a small café attached. His wife
operated a beauty salon on the premises.
Then one day Moore visited a black family living on a cotton plantation
not far from his home. He found fourteen “half-naked children” without
beds, and the family was burning cotton stalks in an old metal barrel to
keep warm. They had, Moore recalled, “no food.” Moore too had grown
up on a Mississippi plantation. “I’d been hungry in my life. . . . And I could
tell how a hungry child felt, because I knew how I felt. Just looking at that
I think really changed my whole outlook on life. I kinda figured it was a
sin to think in terms of trying to get rich in view of what I’d seen.”
After that visit, Moore redoubled his commitment to the NAACP. In
1955 he was elected president of the organization’s Cleveland branch. His
selection surprised him; he had not even been present at the meeting when
the vote was held. Later, he became vice president of the State Conference
of NAACP branches. He was, in 1960, the first black Mississippian adult
civil rights leader to embrace SNCC, a student-led organization founded
that year with the assistance of Reverend Martin Luther king Jr.’s SCLC.
The convergence of older activists—many of them veterans, like Moore—
with the generation of Afro-Americans who came of age following World
War II would spark a critical new phase in the Freedom Movement struggle.
In Moore’s case, a significant connection occurred during the late summer
of 1960, when a Harlem-born, Harvard-educated teacher named Bob Moses
was traveling the South recruiting students to participate in a SNCC conference being planned for October. Ella Baker—SCLC’s acting executive
director and a highly respected adult adviser to SNCC—sent Moses to
Moore. Although Moore admired the sit-ins that had become SNCC’s main
mode of action, he was not interested in having them in Cleveland; instead,
“Fighting for What We Didn’t Have” 87

he encouraged Moses to consider a voter-registration campaign. “Amzie
was the only one I met on that trip giving the student sit-in movement careful attention, aware of all that student energy and trying to figure out how
to use it,” remembers Bob Moses. “He opened up his home to me, had conversations with me and that was really an education for me.” Mississippi and
the Black-Belt South in general had been largely invisible to Moses, and
although news like that of Emmett Till’s lynching and of school desegregation issues reached him in New york City, he had no idea that southern
blacks were still being denied the right to vote. During the previous decade,
says Moses, “I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the
Iron Curtain in Europe; I never knew that there was denial of the right to
vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.”
Amzie Moore attended the October SNCC conference that Moses had
been promoting, although it cannot be said that Moore’s voter-registration
proposal was met with great enthusiasm. A larger, more intense discussion
about filling up the jails with nonviolent protesters dominated participants’
thinking—“jail without bail.” The invitation to the October conference had
stated, “Only mass action is strong enough to force all of America to
assume responsibility and . . . nonviolent direct action alone [emphasis
added] is strong enough to e