Correspondent photo / Sean Barron Chaney High School students Sonny Senvisky, right, and Yoad Rodriguez Lopez, reflect on slain civil rights icon Medgar Evers during a Sojourn to the Past lesson earlier this week on Evers’ driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. Senvisky and Rodriguez Lopez are among 13 students and adults who are on the weeklong traveling American history journey to civil rights sites in the South.

JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to family loyalties, Falcon Mickel’s beliefs are aligned with those of an iconic civil rights leader.

“He said he’d do anything for his family, and I took that to heart because of my past,” Mickel, 17, a Chaney High School sophomore, said. “When one family member is in danger, you’ll do anything to save them. I’ve had it hard growing up and he has too.”

Mickel was referring to Medgar Evers of Jackson, Mississippi, a civil rights leader who became that state’s first NAACP field secretary, and on whose driveway he and about 124 students, educators and parents learned in depth about the iconic figure earlier this week.

Mickel also was deeply moved when Evers’ daughter, Reena Evers of Jackson, spoke on the same day about her father, who had nicknamed her “Sunshine.”

“She was very positive about her situation. She’s determined to encourage younger people to see why all this stuff happened back in the day,” Mickel added.

He and 12 other Youngstown City Schools students and adults are on a one-week Sojourn to the Past traveling American history journey to key civil rights sits in four southern states. They returned early Thursday.

Evers, of Decatur, Mississippi, served in the U.S. Army during World War II and became steeped in the civil rights movement, perhaps beginning when he was 12 and saw that Willie Tingle, a family friend, had been lynched and whose body hung from a tree for about a year to serve as a daily source of intimidation to the area’s blacks. He also was aware that white gangs patroled the streets in Decatur on Saturday nights looking for black targets to beat up or run over with vehicles.

In addition, Evers was heavily influenced by Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a predominately black enclave in the Delta, where Howard was a wealthy civil rights leader, entrepreneur and surgeon, as well as a mentor to the young activist. Evers also worked for the Magnolia Life Insurance Co. and drove through the Delta to sell affordable policies to many black residents.

After having attended Alcorn State University, he became president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and spearheaded a boycott of gas stations that forbade blacks from using their restrooms.

Evers also investigated the killings of Emmett Till and the Rev. George Lee, who organized voter registration drives.

Evers was gunned down in his driveway early June 12, 1963, after returning from a mass rally in downtown Jackson, He was 37.

“I miss my dad every day. My father has always been with me,” Reena Evers told the Sojourn audience earlier this week.

Evers, who had a longtime career in the airline industry, studied business merchandising at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and is a Sojourn to the Past board member, urged the high school students to educate themselves on today’s issues that will affect them via being informed about proposed state and federal bills. She also advised them to use their voices to stand up for what is right and against injustices.

Mickel also was moved by Jerry W. Mitchell, a former investigative reporter with the Jackson Clarion Ledger whose reporting was instrumental in the reopening of several decades-long cold civil rights cases.

Mitchell spoke about part of his work, much of which is detailed in his 2020 book “Race Against Time,” that chronicles the long, arduous paths that led to the convictions and imprisonment of notorious Ku Klux Klansmen and White Citizens Council members such as Byron de la Beckwith, Samuel H. Bowers, Edgar Ray Killen and James Ford Seale, who was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to life in prison for the May 1964 kidnapping and killing of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, two 19-year-old black men, in the Homochitto Forest near Meadville, Mississippi. Their bodies had been hogtied and dumped in the Mississippi River. In addition, he exposes many injustices as well as instances of corruption and abuses of power during the civil rights era.

After 30 years with the Clarion Ledger, Mitchell founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. He also is the recipient of more than 30 national awards.

TRAVELS TO MEMPHIS

After their often-emotional day in Jackson, the Youngstown group and the others traveled three hours to Memphis, Tennessee, where they assembled in the courtyard of the Lorraine Motel, now a civil rights museum, and faced the balcony adorned with a large wreath that marks where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death April 4, 1968.

While in the courtyard, Jeff Steinberg, Sojourn to the Past’s founder, creator and lead instructor, played a four-minute portion of King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech that he delivered April 3, 1968, at Mason Masonic Temple in support of the city’s 1,300 striking sanitation workers who were with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1733.

On Feb. 1, 1968, two workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in a faulty garbage truck, which was the catalyst for the walkout that began 11 days later. The workers received about $1.60 per hour as well as no health care coverage, overtime or sick pay.

Compounding their plight was that new Mayor Henry Loeb refused to negotiate with their union.

Given the threats King received for standing up for the workers, Steinberg challenged the students to consider what they may be willing to stand up for against wrongs and for what is right.