Daughter of assassinated civil rights leader sees painful echoes of political violence in America

More than 60 years after a white supremacist assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers, his daughter still sees the same strain of political violence at work in American society.

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“It’s painful,” said Reena Evers-Everette. “It’s very painful.”

Evers-Everette was 8 years old when her father, a field secretary for the NAACP, was shot to death in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

A few months after Evers’ killing in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down. The deaths of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy followed later that decade.

Now, experts say the level of political violence in America over the past few years is likely the highest it’s been since the 1960s and 1970s. The past year alone has seen the assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers, and two assassination attempts on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.