Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, attends the funeral for blues legend B.B. King at Bell Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Indianola, Miss., Saturday, May 30, 2015. Rogelio V. Solis AP. Featured Image
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] just choose to look at it as a possible mistake and chalk it up to that,” said John Mosley Jr., an African American Republican who ran for mayor of Moss Point, Mississippi, in 2017. “And I haven’t given it much thought afterward.” [mc4wp_form id=”6042″]
In nearly a dozen interviews, African American Republicans said they are taking Hyde-Smith at her word when she said she meant “no ill will, no intent whatsoever” when she said at a Nov. 2 campaign stop that if a supporter invited her to a public hanging “I’d be on the front row.”
“I’m a Republican. I support Cindy Hyde-Smith,” said Charles Evers. “She didn’t say anything about black folks, she didn’t say anything about white folks. She just said ‘If there’s a hanging I’ll be in the front row’ or something like that. She didn’t mean nothing like that. She was just saying something. I don’t give a damn what other people think.
Evers is the 96-year-old brother of the late Medgar Evers, a NAACP leader who was assassinated on June 12, 1963 outside his home in Jackson by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens Council. Two trials in 1964 resulted in hung juries. Beckwith was convicted of Evers’ murder on Feb. 5, 1994.