After Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers is the black freedom fighter I most admire. Born in 1925 near Decauter. Mississippi, and reared in the most racist state in the union–the historian Lerone Bennett called it “the worst place in the world for a black boy”–Evers was one of five children in a family that included two children from his mother’s previous marriage. His father owned a small farm and worked in a sawmill to support his family.
Black children in the south learned about the deadly consequences of stepping out of line early, and the lessons were reinforced constantly. When Medgar was eleven or twelve years old, a family friend was lynched for allegedly talking back to a white man. Evers remembered that the man’s bloody clothing was left on a fence for almost a year, and everyone acted as though nothing untoward had happened. The refusal to acknowledge the event helped keep the black community safe and alive.
My students have difficulty imagining how racist America was then, and that of all the southern states, Mississippi’s racism and the violence that maintained it was magnified to the nth degree. Reid explains, “Medgar Evers with Myrlie as his partner in activism and in life, was doing civil rights work in the single most hostile and dangerous environment in America: Mississippi.” For Black Americans, they lived its virulent segregation twenty-four seven, three hundred sixty-five days a year, from cradle to grave. To be born in a segregated hospital, attend segregated schools and churches, live in segregated neighborhoods, be denied the use of public spaces, be unable to access the American dream–available even to the millions of immigrants who came to the United States–and to be buried in a segregated cemetery was the lot of every Black person in the South. Even successful, highly educated, and well-to-do blacks lived on tiptoe, never knowing when the most innocuous word or gesture from them could mean anything from a menacing retort, a lost job, a beating, or even death.
The Evers family clearly prized education; the children walked twelve miles each day to attend a segregated school. One of the Evers’ daughters finished high school, and Charles and Medgar eventually earned college degrees. But he left school before graduating and worked for a time, then enlisted in the Army, where he served in England, France and Belgium. .
Even though the Army was segregated, black soldiers had much more freedom than they did in America, especially in France. Evers dated a white woman and her family liked and accepted him. For a time, he planned to remain in France where he was able to live with dignity. Ultimately, he decided that as an American, he was entitled to live where and how he pleased. Mississippi was his home and he returned there determined to change it.
Once home, Evers enrolled at Alcorn College Laboratory School and completed his high school studies; he then followed his older brother, Charles, to Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, now Alcorn State University, an all-Black school. (Alcorn State was the first black land grant college in the U. S.) Medgar ran track, played football, sang in the glee club, edited the student paper, and joined the debate team. He also met a pretty young freshman, Myrlie Louise Beasley, on the first day of class; they immediately fell in love. After a proper courtship, which included his patient and purposeful wooing of her grandmother and aunt, they married on Christmas Eve in 1951. They eventually had three children.
Evers was soon hired by T. R. M. Howard Evers to sell insurance for his Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company, so he and his family moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Howard was a well-known civil rights activist and the president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), a civil rights and pro self-help organization. Evers joined the RCNL, helping to organize its boycott of service stations that denied blacks the use of its amenities. The boycotters distributed bumper stickers with the slogan "Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom."
After graduating from high school, Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in February 1954. Of course, his application was rejected, so Evers contacted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for assistance and joined its campaign to desegregate the school. In December 1954, the decorated World War II veteran was appointed the organization’s first field secretary in Mississippi.
Advocating and organizing for the rights of African Americans in the state was fraught with danger. Medgar’s work touched upon every facet of civil rights–public accommodations; segregated schools, colleges and universities, restaurants, public libraries; and voting rights. The latter was especially important to him; he and his brother had tried to register to vote and were violently turned away. He worked long hours and traveled statewide which included a lot of night driving on dark and dangerous Mississippi roads. His job worried and angered Myrlie; indeed, once after hearing him talk about how much he loved America, she retorted that he seemed to love it more than their marriage and children. He assured her that his love for them was a large part of why he was such a dedicated advocate. Evers knew the work was dangerous, yet he went about it with a deep conviction and preternatural calm. He often spoke of his responsibility to change Mississippi and make it a better place for his children. When Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, the couple must have known deep down that their family could pay the ultimate price to eradicate racism and build a more just America. Indeed, Evers was the first of five politically motivated assassinations in America between 1963 and 1968. Yet Myrlie, knowing how important his work was to him, eventually joined in to help by keeping their home, rearing their children, acting as his secretary and sounding board, and rubbing his aching head when her weary husband came home late at night.
As the freedom movement expanded, Medgar became a well-known and despised figure to whites all over the state. In the weeks leading up to his death, he found himself the target of a number of threats. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the carport of his home; five days before his death, he barely escaped being run over by a car when he was leaving the NAACP office in Jackson. Yet under Evers’ brave and determined leadership, civil rights demonstrations accelerated in Jackson during the first week of June 1963. Inexplicably, Evers was given airtime by a local television station; he delivered a short speech, his first in Mississippi, where he outlined the goals of the Jackson movement. Following the speech, the threatening phone calls, hate mail, and strangers who watched their house from parked cars increased exponentially.
On the night he was murdered, he had dinner with his friend, Gloster Current, and mentioned he was being followed virtually everywhere he went. Current tried to get Evers to spend the night so he would not be a target on the dark Mississippi roads. Evers turned him down. He said, “I want to go home to my family.” He pulled into the driveway of his home but had barely exited the car when he was shot in the back from across the street. Upon hearing the shot, his children hit the floor as they had been taught to do; his wife ran to the door where she saw him lying in a pool of blood and barely conscious. Her frenzied screaming brought out several neighbors and seeing him, they took the mattress from his daughter’s bed, laid him on it, placed him in the car, and raced to the nearest hospital. Of course, he was wheeled into the dilapidated Negro wing. When his friends told the white doctors who he was, they started to attend to him, but it was too late. He died at the local hospital about an hour later. Evers was murdered shortly after President John F. Kennedy's nationally televised speech in support of civil rights. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
According to Myrlie, she had to “learn to become a civil rights widow.” She was poised and composed enough to give several interviews; she graced the covers of Ebony, Jet, and Life magazines. At the funeral, she was stately and solemn in pure black as she focused on her children. There were few public tears. The papers had printed her address, and for weeks after the funeral, her yard was full of strangers, reporters, and the morbidly curious. The lily white police department turned a blind eye to the harassment and death threats aimed at Evers, but after his death they, too, were among the onlookers. Mrs. Evers recalled wishing she had a machine gun so that she could mow them all down.
Her husband was gone and Mrs. Evers knew she had two very duties: ensure her husband’s legacy and take care of their children, the youngest whom was still a toddler. The day after Medgar’s murder, she spoke to a mass meeting of about five hundred people gathered at the church on Pearl Street. “Nothing can bring Medgar back, but the cause can live on . . .We cannot let his death be in vain.” After that speech, she became a powerful civil rights advocate herself, writing and speaking about her husband’s life and work and her role in it. In 1990 she joined the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and in 1995, she was elected chairwoman of the organization. It was then in dire financial straits and appeared to have lost its influence; with her leadership, the organization was able to regain its financial footing and maintain its relevance. She left the Board in 1998 having accomplished her goals. At ninety years old, she lives with her daughter in California.
Joy-Ann Reid is a seasoned journalist and host of MSNBC’s The Reid Out, a prime time show on which she interviews politicians, writers, and other news makers. It is the only prime time show on cable TV that is hosted by a black woman. She earned her degree from Harvard University in 1991.
Medgar and Myrlie is Joy-Ann Reid’s third book. She tells us the Evers’ marriage is not just their own personal love story, but the story of the unrequited love that black Americans have for a country that has seldom loved them back. Reid is adamant that the activism of Medgar and Myrlie Evers laid the cornerstone for heightened Black activism in the state. Medgar and Myrlie rescues the memory of Medgar, places him in the pantheon of civil rights leaders of that era and reclaimed their partnership’s rightful place in the history of the modern freedom movement.
Reid has done quite an admirable job of highlighting the role Myrlie Evers played in Medgar’s work. Mrs. Evers is crystal clear about how important their love was to them, their children, and the ability of Medgar Evers to engage in his work to free Mississippi–and America–from the stranglehold of its dangerous and destructive racism. Medgar knew that at the end of the day, his family was always there for him. Reid said, “In talking with Myrlie about Medgar Evers, what comes through most is how in love with him she still is, and how he was truly the love of her life.”
Medgar and Myrlie Evers. A love supreme.
