On Wednesday, June 12, 1963, the NAACP's Mississippi field secretary Medgar Evers (1925-1963) was assassinated outside his home in Jackson. Evers served in the US Army during the Second World War and graduated from Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, a historically black university. For almost a decade, Evers organized civil rights efforts across the state including boycotts, voter registration campaigns, and attempts to integrate public beaches, parks, the University of Mississippi and the Mississippi State Fair. The murder focused attention of the risks that civil rights activists faced on a daily basis. The assassin, a local member of the Ku Klux Klan named Byron De La Beckwith, was only convicted of Evers’ murder in 1994 (his two earlier trials had ended in hung juries). Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers, was elected chairperson of the NAACP board of directors in 1995, while Evers' brother Charles would go on to become the first Black mayor elected in Mississippi since Reconstruction.