by Jonny Meister, Host/Producer of The Blues Show on WXPN

July 1965

In the summer of 1965 I was a camp aid at a camp on Cape Cod, That summer one of the campers was Darrell Evers, a shy and quiet kid– the eldest child of one of the fallen heroes of the civil rights movement. Medgar Evers was an NAACP Field Secretary, shot dead right in front of his home by a man who managed to avoid justice for decades thereafter. I think it was someone in the NAACP who helped arrange for Darrell to go to this camp.

We often sang “We Shall Overcome” at the camp, and I was certainly aware that the singing of this song at camps and schools and rallies in New England was a far cry from singing it outside a courthouse in Mississippi while demanding the right to vote. I taught several students guitar that summer, and Darrell was one of them. He knew the song “We Shall Overcome,” of course, so I used it as a starter. The magnitude and significance of this was not lost on me at the age of fifteen. I was teaching the guitar chords for the anthem of the civil rights movement to the eldest child of one of its greatest leaders.

Darrell, like many other students, didn’t really stick with the guitar, but he did get a little bit of a handle on the song. In later years, I wondered about Darrell and what became of him. The advent of the internet and search engines with their vast informational reach provided the answer, and the news was not good. Darrell Evers died of cancer in 2001.