Evers Indicted

"They tried everything else. Tried shooting me, starving me and breaking me, and they missed. Now they're trying this." Thus Charles Evers, 51, mayor of tiny (pop. 1,725) Fayette, Miss., attempted to explain his indictment last week by a federal grand jury in Jackson on charges of evading more than $53,000 in federal income taxes over a three-year period. According to the indictment, Evers and his second wife Nannie Laura, from whom he was divorced last June, claimed a taxable income of only $20,219 for 1968-70 and paid federal taxes of only $2,642. The indictment charges that the Everses, in fact, had an income for those years of $179,550, on which they should have paid $56,236.

Not on Welfare. Shedding no light on the mysterious "they," Evers charged people who are out to get him with a "long process of harassment and intimidation" dating back to 1963. That was the year his brother Medgar was slain by a sniper's bullet and Charles returned to Mississippi from Chicago to succeed him as field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Charles spearheaded a drive that registered 250,000 black voters, and in 1969 became the first black mayor of a biracial Mississippi town since Reconstruction. In 1971 he ran for Governor but lost.

Evers does not even accept his meager $75-a-month salary as mayor of impoverished Fayette, but he owns a restaurant, liquor store and motel in town. The indictment "should prove all niggers aren't on welfare," said Evers last week, after proclaiming his innocence. He added that he had repeatedly told the Internal Revenue Service that he would pay whatever they said he owed, "but they told me very frankly, 'No, we want you.' " That was a distortion, said an IRS official: "We just told him that we weren't there to collect money, that we were involved in a criminal investigation." No date has been set for the trial.

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