Medgar and Myrlie

 

Joy-Ann Reid, “Medgar & Myrlie,” Mariner Books, 2024, 299 pp.

“Medgar Evers deserves a place alongside Malcolm X and Dr. King in our historical memory. 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.”—from Medgar and Myrlie

By MSNBC's Joy-Ann Reid, a triumphant work of biography that repositions slain Civil Rights pioneer Medgar Evers at the heart of America's struggle for freedom, and celebrates Myrlie Evers's extraordinary activism after her husband's assassination in the driveway of their Mississippi home.

"I love this book. The empathic, brilliant, and wise Joy Reid has brought us the poignant, fascinating inside story of Medgar and Myrlie Evers, transformational leaders who confronted pure evil and risked their lives to ensure that all American children might grow up in a United States that was more just. As Reid shows us, that painful task is now more urgent than ever.” — Michael Beschloss

Myrlie Louise Beasley met Medgar Evers on her first day of college. They fell in love at first sight, married just one year later, and Myrlie left school to focus on their growing family.

Medgar became the field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, charged with beating back the most intractable and violent resistance to black voting rights in the country. Myrlie served as Medgar’s secretary and confidant, working hand in hand with him as they struggled against public accommodations and school segregation, lynching, violence, and sheer despair within their state’s “black belt.” They fought to desegregate the intractable University of Mississippi, organized picket lines and boycotts, despite repeated terroristic threats, including the 1962 firebombing of their home, where they lived with their three young children.

On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers became the highest profile victim of Klan-related assassination of a black civil rights leader at that time; gunned down in the couple’s driveway in Jackson. In the wake of his tragic death, Myrlie carried on their civil rights legacy; writing a book about Medgar’s fight, trying to win a congressional seat, and becoming a leader of the NAACP in her own right.

In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie’s relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today. 

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Reid centers her engrossing history on the bond between Medgar Evers and his wife, now Myrlie Evers-Williams. The couple met in college and married on Christmas Eve in 1951. “He talked about how much he loved his country,” Evers-Williams recalls. “And he questioned how much his country loved and respected him.”

After Evers returned from France, a nation where Black G.I.s got better treatment than they did at home, Medgar saw with fresh eyes why justice in America could not be achieved through the election booth alone. Working with the N.A.A.C.P., he began investigating white supremacist murders, like that of Lamar “Ditney” Smith, a World War II veteran who was shot and killed by three white men on the steps of a courthouse where he was delivering absentee ballots from other Black voters.

Smith’s killing came just weeks before the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a case that haunted Evers for the remainder of his too short life. Reid writes that Medgar did the “painstaking work of convincing terrorized Blacks in the Delta” to appear as witnesses. His name started appearing on a Ku Klux Klan “kill list.” Many days at work, he wept at his desk.

Till’s murder also shook Lewis, who was just a year older than Till at the time. “That could have been me, beaten, tortured, dead at the bottom of a river,” he later wrote. He began to question the American principles of democracy and equality he had read about as a child. He felt like a “fool” for being excited by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision outlawing school segregation.

In Mississippi, Evers worked to recruit disillusioned young people like Lewis. He traveled relentlessly, reviving field offices across the state and establishing youth councils among Black students. Evers’s story is less familiar than those of Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks, but Reid persuasively argues that Evers was the architect of a “civil rights underground network” that provided the foundations for other civil rights organizations in his state.

The risks of his activism weighed heavily on Myrlie. “When he left the house every day, I never knew whether I’d see him again,” she tells Reid. The terrible moment she had long feared came just after midnight on June 12, 1963, when a Klansman assassinated Medgar in the driveway of the couple’s Jackson home.

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When news of Evers’s murder broke, “something died in all of us,” Lewis later said. That month, Lewis became the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and spent the summer crisscrossing the South leading nonviolence workshops.

The gulf between younger and older activists widened as the August date approached for the March on Washington, an event that Lewis and his SNCC colleagues “feared would be a pro-administration showcase” designed “to curry favor with the government,” Arsenault writes. “I didn’t want to be part of a parade,” Lewis later explained.

Lewis drafted a fiery speech, only for the elder civil rights leaders of the march — Wilkins, Whitney Young, M.L.K. — to pressure him to soften the tone. A. Phillip Randolph, who had first envisioned the march two decades earlier, was near tears when he pleaded with him: “I’ve waited all of my life for this opportunity. Please don’t ruin it.”

While some fellow activists criticized Lewis for scaling back the more radical language in his speech, the March on Washington in many ways epitomized what he hoped America might become. Lewis made his peace with the compromise and joined the broader coalition for social justice, his “Beloved Community.”

Over the next six decades, he organized with and against a wide range of political figures. In 1986, he squared off against his friend and fellow SNCC veteran, the charismatic and cerebral Julian Bond, in a tough primary campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives. In one debate, Lewis challenged Bond to take a drug test.

Lewis won and served 17 terms in Congress, where he wrangled with everyone from Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House, to President Bill Clinton, whose political pragmatism left Lewis cold.

And then there was President Donald Trump. “His earlier hope that the Republicans — and all Americans — would eventually come to embrace his belief in liberty and justice for all seemed naïve,” Arsenault writes. His aspirations got smaller. Civility seemed more achievable than civil rights.

But Lewis continued to support young agitators. Weakened by pancreatic cancer, he went to Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., on June 7, 2020. (“You cannot stop the call of history,” Lewis said ahead of the visit.) He died 10 days later.

Arsenault’s book, a substantial entry in Yale’s Black Lives series, focuses primarily on the activist-turned-politician’s public life and is successful on this score. Still, I wanted to learn more about the people who knew Lewis the longest and what these relationships meant to him. “My family,” Lewis recalls in one tantalizing quote, “had never really been connected to or understood my involvement in the movement. To them, it was as if I was living in a foreign country.”

Reid conducted extensive interviews with Evers-Williams and offers a much more intimate account. After Medgar’s assassination, one of his young sons slept with a toy gun near his pillow. Myrlie considered taking her own life. Ultimately, she channeled her fear into public speaking and became a major fund-raiser for the N.A.A.C.P.

Myrlie never gave up on bringing Medgar’s killer to justice. The F.B.I. identified Byron De La Beckwith shortly after the murder, but he was not convicted until 1994. When the verdict was read, Myrlie broke into tears. Outside the courthouse, she locked arms with her children and looked toward the sky. “It’s been a long journey,” she said. “Medgar, I’ve gone the last mile.”