The Nation - News from July 11, 1988
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About 1,500 people sang “We Shall Overcome” at a memorial service in Arlington, Va., for slain NAACP officer Medgar Evers, whose assassination in Mississippi 25 years ago helped launch the national civil rights movement. “Medgar Evers was as much a hero as if he had fallen in war. He was felled in the struggle for human freedom,” said NAACP Executive Director Benjamin L. Hooks, who spoke before the crowd gathered at the amphitheater in Arlington National Cemetery, where Evers, a World War II veteran, is buried. Evers, the first field secretary for the Mississippi chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, was gunned down outside his Jackson, Miss., home on June 12, 1963.
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