Lou Sharpe’s copy of the souvenir book from the 1955, 46th annual convention signed by Medgar Evers, and other delegates on the rear cover, together with the official NAACP press release on the assassination of Medgar Evers and with a photograph of Evers. Sharpe was national secretary of the NAACP youth council at this time. In 1954, Evers had applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School. When his application was rejected, Evers filed a lawsuit against the university, and became the focus of an NAACP campaign to desegregate the school; a case aided by the United States Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (347 U.S. 483.) This same year, due to his involvement, the NAACP’s National Office suggested he become Mississippi’s first field secretary for the NAACP. In the early morning of June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy’s speech on national television in support of civil rights, Evers pulled into his driveway just after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go,” Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Enfield 1917 rifle that ricocheted into his Jackson, Mississippi home. He died at a local hospital 50 minutes later.