Brooklyn Ceremony To Officially Name Stations After Medgar Evers

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — A pair of Brooklyn subway stations will officially be named after civil rights leader Medgar Evers this week, months after local officials first pushed for the renaming.

Assembly Member Diana Richardson and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie will gather with Brooklynites on Thursday to unveil the new names for the President Street and Franklin Avenue stations.

The ceremony comes nearly four months after Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill allowing the stations, like Medgar Evers College, to don the late activist's name.

"This was done to reflect the highly regarded Medgar Evers College, a respected educational institution, recognized as a cultural imprint in Central Brooklyn," Richardson said Monday.

Richardson, an alumna of the CUNY Medgar Evers College, introduced legislation calling for the MTA to rename the stations and, along with Myrie, lined up a $250,000 grant for the project.

Evers worked as a Black NAACP activist in Mississippi during the civil rights era who, among other actions, organized protests against segregation. A Klansman and white supremacist named Byron Beckwith gunned Evers down in 1963.

Beckwith eluded justice for decades before he was finally convicted of murder in 1994. When Beckwith died behind bars, Evers' legacy lived on in the collapse of Jim Crow laws and segregation, landmark civil rights legislation and, in Brooklyn, a college bearing his name.

The ceremony will be held at 3:30 p.m. at the intersection of President Street and Nostrand Avenue, where the new signs will be found.

President Street subway station will become "President Street - Medgar Evers College" station and to rename the Franklin Avenue subway station will be "Franklin Avenue - Medgar Evers College" station.

The MTA has been working to update maps, signs and other subway materials over the summer.