A Thousand Never Evers

Because the novel situates Addie Ann’s fictitious life within historical events of the 1960s, it is important to have a strong understanding of these events and the world in which Addie Ann lives throughout the novel.

Despite the fact that Black Americans were freed from slavery nearly a century before, the South in 1963 was still rampant with racism and injustice. In particular, white members who held positions of power utilized every tool available at their disposal to continue to oppress Black people and ensure that equality was never achieved. One such example, the Jim Crow laws, remained in effect in America until 1965. They were a set of laws that allowed racial segregation of schools and public facilities, as seen in the novel when Addie Ann is forced to walk three miles to attend the only Black school in the area. As the novel opens, the broader civil rights movement throughout the South is fighting for desegregation, and Addie Ann experiences the impact of segregation on her own life. In addition to Jim Crow laws, Addie Ann also witnesses firsthand a literacy test that is given to a Black member of the community to see if they are eligible to vote. Although Black men were given the right to vote upon being freed in 1865, it was not until the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that literacy tests were outlawed. These tests allowed local communities like Kuckachoo to force Black citizens to take an impossibly difficult test and then deny their right to vote when they failed. Institutions like the government, school system, court systems, and voting were rampant with forms of legalized racism designed to hold Black people back from achieving true equality.

In addition to the systemic racism presented in the novel, A Thousand Never Evers also mentions several specific historical events and the impact they have on Addie Ann’s life. The first is the death of Medgar Evers. Evers, who died on June 12, 1963—the date of the novel’s first chapter—was a civil rights activist who was assassinated. He worked tirelessly to desegregate schools in Mississippi, and because of his work in desegregation, he was murdered by the White Citizens’ Council of Jackson, Mississippi—a group whose primary goal was to resist the integration of schools. His death is an important moment in the lives of the residents of Kuckachoo in the novel, as it causes them to have a meeting at the church with an NAACP representative. Their goal is to become updated on the movement throughout the South, see how they can become involved, and learn to apply the movement to their own town. In addition to Evers’s death, the novel also references the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, and the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was accused of offending a white woman. These instances, as they occur or are mentioned throughout the novel, exemplify the harsh and unjust world in which Addie Ann is growing up. Although she initially fails to understand how they impact her, she eventually becomes angered as more and more racist incidents occur in the larger world and as her brother and uncle are endangered by the racist system they live in.