Playboy Interview Charles Evers

A candid conversation with the mayor of Fayette, the first black candidate in Mississippi history and the KKK’s latest public enemy number one

- Eric Norden

”So y’all goin’ to write a story on Evers?” asked the lady. p“My, my, that nigra sure is comin’ up in the world.” Her smile was sweet, but it didn’t reach the eyes. Her husband, a stout white-haired man in a rumpled seersucker suit with an American-flag pin on the lapel, frowned. “We never had any trouble with our niggers before all this.” The conversation could have been overheard anywhere in white Mississippi, but the fact that it took place in Fayette gave it a special relevance. For the target of their criticism, Charles Evers, is not only a black man but their own mayor, the political leader of a town in which black voters outnumber whites more than two to one, and for the first time since Reconstruction, a white minority was confronting dominant black political power.