“Where Is the Voice Coming From?” is a 1963 short story by Eudora Welty, written in the first person from the point of view of a white racist murderer who has just killed a Black civil‑rights leader modeled on Medgar Evers.

What the title means

In this story, the “voice” is the bitter, angry inner monologue of the killer himself, not of the victim or an outside narrator.

Welty lets him speak directly to the reader so we hear exactly how he justifies the murder, his resentment, and his confusion about racial change in the South.

  • The voice is coming from:
    • A poor, white, Southern man who feels humiliated and left behind.
* A mind saturated with racism, envy, and a craving for power over someone he thinks should be “beneath” him.

* Inside his own head, as a stream‑of‑consciousness confession that never admits guilt but exposes his hatred.

Story background in a nutshell

  • The story’s Black civil-rights leader, Roland Summers, is a fictional version of Medgar Evers, assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963.
  • Welty wrote the story almost immediately after hearing of Evers’s murder and originally from the killer’s perspective, which was controversial because it seemed to get so close to the actual assassin’s mentality.

Why Welty chose that voice

Welty chose to write from the murderer’s voice to show:

  1. How ordinary, small-minded prejudice can escalate into murder when it is mixed with fear and envy.
  1. How the killer sees himself as a victim of social change, even as he commits a racist atrocity.
  1. How hatred “speaks” through him — the title hints that this is not just one man’s voice, but the voice of a wider culture of racism in that time and place.

A key idea many critics stress: the “voice” is the voice of hatred and fear in the white South during the civil-rights era, speaking through this one man.

Quick forum-style takeaway

If you’re reading or discussing this online and see people asking “where is the voice coming from Eudora Welty,” they’re usually trying to pin down two things:

  • Literally: It’s the first-person voice of the white assassin narrating his own crime.
  • Symbolically: It’s the voice of systemic racism and violent backlash to civil-rights progress in 1960s Mississippi.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.