Medgar Evers was 37. The NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi was grasping a handful of shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go” when he was shot in the back in 1963.

Maceo Snipes was also 37. When the World War II veteran cast his vote in the Georgia Democratic primary on July 17, 1946, he was the only Black man in Taylor County to do so.

One day later, he was shot in the back .

Why We Wrote This

The context of why civil rights activists like Medgar Evers and Maceo Snipes were murdered has been lost in the current conversation about the Voting Rights Act at the Supreme Court.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a Louisiana redistricting case asking whether using race as a factor in congressional voting maps is unconstitutional. The Trump administration and t

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