The Elraine Subdivision in northern Jackson was a deliberate act of defiance against the racial order. Developers Leroy Burnett and Winston J. Thompson built 36 single-story ranch houses specifically for African American families in the years after World War II, creating Mississippi's first planned middle-class Black neighborhood. The homes were modest -- wood-frame structures on brick pier foundations, with shallow-pitch gabled roofs, exposed rafter eaves, and a mix of brick veneer and asbestos siding. But they represented something the Jim Crow South worked hard to prevent: Black prosperity visible in brick and mortar. Medgar and Myrlie Evers moved into their home on what is now Margaret Walker Alexander Drive, settling into a community where owning a house was itself a political statement.

As the NAACP's field secretary for Mississippi, Medgar Evers organized voter registration drives and investigated racial violence in what was arguably the most dangerous state for civil rights workers. The threats followed him home. The Everses had been specific targets of racist violence for years by the time they chose their house in the Elraine Subdivision. The carport entrance, the non-corner lot -- these were survival calculations. On May 28, 1963, someone threw a Molotov cocktail onto the carport. The family kept living there. For Medgar and Myrlie Evers, retreat was not an option. Their home was both refuge and front line, the place where their children slept and the place where the movement's enemies knew to find them.

That evening, Medgar Evers attended a meeting of civil rights organizations in Jackson to coordinate a response to Governor George Wallace's stand at the University of Alabama, where Wallace had physically blocked the enrollment of Black students. Evers arrived home around midnight. As he stepped out of his car and stood in the carport, Byron De La Beckwith fired a single shot from a sniper rifle positioned in an undeveloped lot nearby. The bullet passed through the house's picture window and through the wall between the living room and kitchen before coming to rest inside. Evers staggered to the front door and collapsed. He died in the early hours of June 12, 1963. De La Beckwith was tried twice in the 1960s; both trials ended with hung juries. He was not convicted until 1994, more than thirty years later.

The bullet hole in the wall between the kitchen and living room is still there. So is the house, preserved almost exactly as it was on the night Medgar Evers was killed. After decades in private hands, the property was acquired by Tougaloo College. In 2017, the National Park Service designated it a National Historic Landmark. The John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, signed by President Donald Trump on March 12, 2019, authorized it as a national monument. On December 10, 2020, after the National Park Service acquired the property from Tougaloo College, it was formally established as the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument. The modest ranch house now stands alongside sites like the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and the Freedom Riders National Monument as part of the Park Service's effort to preserve the physical places where the civil rights movement was fought and paid for.