The first street in L.A. County to be named after a black man – Pico notwithstanding – Evers Avenue honors civil rights leader Medgar Evers (1925-1963), the Mississippi field director of the NAACP who was assassinated in front of his Jackson home on June 12th, 1963. Compton’s portion of Alabama Street was renamed Evers Avenue on March 1st, 1964; part of the same street was renamed in Watts that August. Evers’s widow Myrlie (born Myrlie Louise Beasley, 1933-) appeared at both dedications. In the meantime, she decided to leave Mississippi and purchased a home in Claremont with funds that supporters had raised for her and her three children. There she graduated from Pomona College and worked as a director for the Claremont Colleges. She later moved to Los Angeles and served as a commissioner on the Board of Public Works. She retired to Bend, OR in 1993 with second husband Walter Williams. Throughout this time, she kept fighting to bring Medgar Evers’s killer to justice – which only finally happened in 1994.
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