From the 1963 WW archives:
‘The murderers’ lament’

Medgar Evers, Mississippi’s first NAACP Field Secretary, was fatally shot outside his home in the city of Jackson on June 12, 1963, by the Ku Klux Klan, one month shy of his 38th birthday. He led the voting rights campaign throughout the state. The following editorial, written by Workers World newspaper’s first editor, Vince Copeland, originally appeared in the June 21, 1963, issue of this newspaper.

Like paid mourners at the wailing wall, the political leaders of the U.S. ruling class have joined in a loud and obscene chorus of lamentation at the martyrdom of Medgar Evers.

This performance is obscene and revolting, this last-minute lamentation, because it is put on by the real murderers of Evers.

Segregationist Senators James Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi spouted their regrets in the U.S. Senate and offered their lying consolations to Evers’ widow and his real mourners.

These veterans of innumerable filibusters against civil rights, these powerful upholders of the “Southern Way of Life,” might just as well have fired the bullet that killed Evers themselves. For they certainly educated, indoctrinated and gave the assassin’s courage to the man who did fire it.

President John F. Kennedy’s indignant protest is just about as worthless and even more hypocritical than these racist rascals. For he is the man who was supposed to have led the whole Congress in civil rights legislation over two years ago [1961], and he openly compromised it then because he wanted to win “the rest of his program,” we were told.

From Kennedy on down to the back country racist politician Mayor Thompson of Jackson, every single ruling-class mourner for Evers is a hypocrite and a murderer.

Only yesterday, the ruling class was completely calloused to the cries of the oppressed. Lynchings, shootings, beatings occurred as regularly as the rain and were less noted by the capitalist rulers.

For example, what “statesman,” what senator, what mayor, what big-shot newspaper shed a tear for Emmett Till?

Emmett Till was only 14, and he was beaten to death in the cruelest and most sadistic manner, allegedly because he tried to flirt with an adult white woman storekeeper in Money, Mississippi.

His murder was even more savage and more revolting than the murder of Medgar Evers. His murderers were freed by an all-white jury and received many thousands of dollars for telling the detailed story of their crime in Look Magazine.

But the big bosses closed their eyes and ears and acted as though nothing had happened. Only the Black masses and their closest allies mourned for Emmett Till.

But that was in 1955.

Since Emmett Till, there have been a dozen other well-publicized killings — some of unknown Black workers, others of prominent Black Civil Rights fighters. And no reaction from the racist ruling class.

But that was before Birmingham.

The ruling masters of this capitalist, white supremacist land have now seen the growing demonstrations, marches and passionate protests, which ever since Birmingham have taken on the resolute and forceful character of a social movement conscious of its revolutionary destiny.

And they are desperately anxious to head this off into safe legal channels. Their “national mourning” and their “public indignation” is a ghoulish concession to the tearless mourning of the masses who are determined to convert their sorrow to anger.

Let no honest worker accept the tears of the enemy. They are as false and as dangerous as the assassin’s bullet itself.