Chapter 10

Justice

I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.

—ROSA PARKS

Reena and Darrell were the first Black children to attend Claremont Public Schools, and they did so without Myrlie having to file an injunction or even having the overt intent. Most of their white neighbors had been welcoming, as had all but a handful of people at the local, very white, Baptist church. On their first Sunday there, one woman recoiled when Myrlie tried to shake her hand. She spat out that she didn’t want to touch Myrlie, as if her brown skin would wear off onto her hands. “I stepped toward her, giving it a second try,” Myrlie later wrote. “Oh, the devil in me! She nearly fell into the shrubbery, backing up to avoid me. I laughed at the sight of her.”¹

She and the children traveled frequently to Los Angeles, to visit friends and to participate in Black and Brown California culture. She tried to have fun with the children: dancing in the living room to Motown records and leaving them little love notes when she was out of town. She said good night to them, one by one, with a kiss on the forehead. She wanted them always to know they were loved and cherished.² She also accepted their little rebellions as part of the lingering trauma over losing their father so violently.

There were incidents. When a group of white boys drove past Darrell, shouting “Nigger!” he, every bit an Evers, dared them to say it to his face as they drove on. He played football, as his father’s son, and sometimes the Black Pomona players ridiculed him as a “Tom” for playing for a white team. After the Watts riots in August 1965, Myrlie and Reena were riding their bikes and heard a group of young boys, screaming, “Nigger, nigger, nigger, go back to Africa!” Myrlie was furious, and with Reena begging her to just go home, she stormed over and demanded that a sheepish neighbor, who had heard what was said, let her know who lived in the house where the boys were. The man insisted that the family was good and decent and wouldn’t approve of what their boys had done. Myrlie reported the incident to the NAACP anyway, and she wanted to call the police. The next Sunday, the boys’ father stood up in church and publicly apologized to her and Reena. It was a small gesture, but a big step for Claremont.³

Myrlie suffered bouts of depression, and to chase away the memories, she sometimes still needed sleeping pills to drift off at night. Still, she was determined to make California work. She put Van in daycare and started taking classes at Pomona College, fulfilling her promise to Medgar, the women who raised her, and herself, to complete her degree. She briefly considered a music major but ultimately settled on sociology. Several students and professors stared at her because they recognized her from her picture in the papers. As a student just over thirty years old and a mother of three, she felt out of place and overwhelmed some days on a campus full of twentysomethings. She settled into a routine of dropping the kids at school and daycare, going to class, back home, study, prepare dinner, spend time with the children, and then study again.

The deep and sometimes violent American resistance to change was never-ending. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was murdered in Harlem. A pair of Black Muslims connected to the Hon. Elijah Muhammad, from whom Malcolm had become estranged, were arrested, tried, and convicted (they were later exonerated). “I felt these claws of pain that just rip you apart,” ⁴ Myrlie later recalled about hearing the news of Malcolm’s murder. She was heartbroken for Betty Shabazz and watched as she composed herself for the cameras and answered reporters’ questions just as she had done. Myrlie felt almost as if she were reliving her own horror in knowing that another young wife and mother had heard the rat-tat of gunfire and seen her husband bleed and die in front of her and their children. When the gunmen charged toward the stage, Betty pushed her children to the floor and shielded them with her body. Black America now had a second nationally known freedom widow.

MYRLIE WAS HAUNTED BY MEDGAR’S KILLER. SHE AND THE CHILDREN returned to Mississippi at least three times a year, to Vicksburg during the holidays, and to Jackson, for the children to reconnect with the “Guynes Street gang.” Her other motive was to keep tabs on Beckwith.

She subscribed to Mississippi newspapers and plumbed her information network. In phone calls to Mississippi, she asked, “have you heard anything about Beckwith? Has he talked?”⁵ Beckwith was an ardent fame seeker and grew even more fanatical each year. Myrlie knew his inability to keep his mouth shut would eventually undo him. He ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor in 1967, a year after being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee alongside Klan leader Sam Bowers to testify about Klan activity. He refused to answer any substantive questions.

On April 4, 1968, the earth seemed to shift irrevocably. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis to organize a strike among Black sanitation workers who were being abused financially and racially at work; so much so that many of them were living in poverty and subjected to daily degradation. He was shot with a high-powered rifle as he stood on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel. Coretta Scott King was left with two boys and two girls, aged five to twelve. America was continuing to indulge its habit of murdering the men who strove to save the country from, as King warned, going to Hell.

King’s assassination touched off a nationwide wave of anger, grief, and rebellion in Black communities in two hundred cities from New York to California. According to the Smithsonian Institute, “around 3,500 people were injured, 43 were killed and 27,000 arrested. Local and state governments, and President Lyndon Johnson, would deploy a collective total of 58,000 National Guardsmen and Army troops to assist law enforcement officers in quelling the violence.”⁶

Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign and the March on Washington had been rooted in the battle for economic as well as racial justice. Malcolm had preached economic, as well as social, liberation for the “so-called Negro.” Medgar had fought to lift the Black masses out of poverty and rejection. Ed King recalled Medgar saying that “we can’t just focus on voting. We can’t just focus on school desegregation or employment. They’re all important . . . [and] we’ve got to focus on what the media is doing locally and nationally.” Now the whole world felt like it was in flames.

On June 5, Robert Kennedy, after winning the California primary for president, was shot dead by a Palestinian militant. The King and Kennedy assassinations left fifteen fatherless children, and Ethel Kennedy was pregnant with the couple’s eleventh child when her husband was murdered.

Charles Evers said he became close to Bobby, whom he called “his best friend in the world” after Medgar.⁷ Earlier that day, Charles had ridden with Kennedy through Black neighborhoods, and that evening he watched the returns with Kennedy and his staff, Ethel Kennedy, and NFL player Rosey Grier, before Bobby was cut down in the kitchen after his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel.⁸

Charles later wrote that Bobby’s death shook him harder in a way, because he hadn’t had to see his brother fall with his own eyes.⁹ Kennedy had had a steep learning curve on matters of race, but at the time he was murdered, Charles saw him as “the most trusted white man in Black America”¹⁰ and someone who related to the community’s anguish over Dr. King’s assassination.

Malcolm spoke to young Black America’s raging heart in ways that were matched only by his old friend, Muhammad Ali, the young militants of SNCC and CORE, and the Black Panther Party. Medgar had flirted with similar ideas of Black revolution and separatism in his early, most militant days. Yet King laid down the connective thread that wove the national civil rights movement together, sometimes as volubly as a small ship on an ocean, but he had done it. Malcolm and Martin had caused J. Edgar Hoover to fear the emergence of a Black messiah. Medgar had admired them both as his brothers in the at-home war for the soul of America. Now they were all gone.

In a July 1968 interview with Esquire, James Baldwin summarized America’s situation bluntly. “For me, it’s been Medgar. Then Malcolm. Then Martin,” he said. “And it’s the same story. When Medgar was shot they arrested some lunatic in Mississippi, but I was in Mississippi, with Medgar, and you don’t need a lunatic in Mississippi to shoot a cat like Medgar Evers, you know, and the cat whoever he was, Byron de la Beckwith, slipped out of the back door of a nursing home and no one’s ever heard from him since. I won’t even discuss what happened to Malcolm, or all the ramifications of that. And now Martin’s dead. And every time, you know, including the time the President was murdered, everyone insisted it was the work of one lone madman; no one can face the fact that this madness has been created deliberately.”¹¹

Myrlie knew of Betty and Coretta as fellow civil rights wives, but she did not meet them before their husbands were murdered. She admired both women from a distance, particularly their dedication to their children, but there was no network of leaders’ wives. After the assassinations, the three women were thrown together in the minds of the media, the public, and the civil rights establishment—branded as a tripart sisterhood as they moved from speech to fundraiser to movement event. “It is a private club,” Myrlie wrote in a foreword to a biography of Betty Shabazz, “but open to new members—if one is willing to pay the price. It is a club, as my daughter Reena puts it, ‘that no one wishes to join.’”¹²

The three widows chose divergent paths in writing their martyred husbands’ names into American legacy. From the moment Coretta Scott King got the call she had feared for more than a decade, she was poised, methodical, and relentless. “The news media and Civil Rights establishment projected Mrs. King as the maximum Civil Rights widow after Martin’s assassination,” wrote Russell J. Rickford, author of the Betty Shabazz biography. “She rose to the station instantly and elegantly, in the nostalgic style of Jackie Kennedy.”¹³ Coretta became the voice of her husband’s grandest ideals—integration and equality—and not of the protests, marches, and boycotts. She threw herself into building the King Center in Atlanta and to securing a federal holiday for Martin to “Institutionaliz[e] the Dream.”¹⁴

This, according to Rickford, led to a quiet, early rivalry with Betty. “The two widows,” he wrote, “operated in the late 1960s and 1970s like emissaries of distant lands. Blacks and white liberals who accepted nonviolent, integrationist struggle hailed Mrs. King, while Afro-Americans who believed in militant resistance to white supremacy elevated Betty.”¹⁵ Myrlie was somewhere in between. “We were friends,” she said of the women’s relationship in those early years, “but I wouldn’t say we were close friends. But through these tragedies that we all suffered we became very close friends.”

Myrlie watched as events seemed to wash Medgar’s memory out of the national consciousness. Freedom Summer in 1964 was followed by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party disruption of the 1964 Democratic Convention. The party had been formed by activists who emerged from the COFO coalition Medgar had helped seed in Mississippi, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Rev. Ed King, and Aaron Henry (the two men were eventually seated as at-large delegates by reluctant party leaders), to challenge the whites-only Democratic Party’s right to send a segregated slate to a national party in the post–Civil Rights Act era. Then came Malcolm’s murder, the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the violence in Selma that preceded it, plus the cataclysms over the assassinations of President Kennedy, Dr. King, and Bobby Kennedy. Each new assassination brought back the shock and grief of June 12, 1963, while making justice seem more distant and unattainable. Myrlie became even more determined to see justice done, particularly after James Earl Ray was sentenced to a ninety-nine-year term in prison in March 1969 for the murder of Dr. King.

EARLY IN THEIR MARRIAGE, MEDGAR HAD ASKED, “ISN’T THERE anything you believe in strongly enough to fight for it?” For Myrlie, that was their children, who “meant everything to the two of us,” but she also wanted to fight to see that the person who killed Medgar was punished. Friends begged her to let it go, but she had a mission, and its name was Byron De La Beckwith.

Myrlie graduated from Pomona in 1968 with her bachelor’s degree and was offered an administrative position as a planning director at the Claremont Colleges. She had also cowritten For Us, the Living, about her and Medgar, and it was selling. Ladies’ Home Journal offered her a position as contributing editor, allowing her to write articles and make suggestions. She even convinced them to use Black models for the first time. Myrlie was spreading her wings and feeling truly independent. She applied for her first credit card, despite Mama’s invocations against debt, yet as Mrs. Medgar Evers, she couldn’t obtain one. A married woman was required to have her husband’s signature at that time. As Myrlie Evers, though, she could open a checking and a savings account, and savings accounts for each of the children.¹⁶

“Someone asked me, a friend of mine, ‘Do you think it was God or the Devil that kept you going?’ I said, ‘Quite frankly, I don’t know, but one of them. Or maybe both of them.’ So, with everything that God allowed me to do from that point on: rear my children, give them the best life that I could, go back to college, get my degree, run around the country lecturing . . . for the NAACP, it was important to me and I needed to do it—I always asked my God to show me the way. And I stepped out on faith. It took a long time.”

In 1970, Myrlie decided to stop observing and take action: announcing she was running for Congress in California’s Twenty-Fourth Congressional District. The seat had been vacated by the death of a Republican, Glenard P. Lipscomb, but the partisan lean of the district didn’t deter her. It was something she couldn’t have imagined herself doing even a year before. She was feeling her independence—and some fundamentals in the country had changed. The Voting Rights Act had created space for Black political power, from California to Mississippi.

Myrlie felt buoyed by the tide of events that used to overwhelm her. She posed for a UPI photo with her new dog, Honey Bun, and confidently addressed the media. “I wish we’d stop wasting time dividing ourselves into white and black camps,” she told reporters that March. “There’s so much we can do together.”¹⁷ Her campaign printed up red and white buttons with her picture in profile, reading: “MYRLIE EVERS FOR CONGRESS: In a Time of Crisis, A Voice for Peace.” Her run made the New York Times and the cover of Jet.

The campaign was a test for the family as well. The children were at formative points in their lives: Darrell was seventeen, Reena sixteen, and Van just ten. And a campaign meant pulling them into back the public spotlight, where they might not want to be. But they supported their mother’s ambitions and were helpful and proud. At least as much as a pair of teenagers and a boy more focused on football than campaigns could be.

Myrlie didn’t win the race, but she became one of the first African American women to run for Congress, two years after Shirley Chisholm made history as the first Black woman to be elected to the body, joining the only other woman of color, Patsy Takemoto Mink of Hawaii. Two years later, three more Black women were elected to Congress: Barbara Jordan of Texas, Cardiss Collins of Illinois, and Yvonne Braithwaite Burke of California, and Chisholm ran for president. Alongside her, Myrlie joined the National Women’s Political Caucus, the feminist organization formed by Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan.¹⁸ History was moving, nationally and personally, for Myrlie.

William Waller, the prosegregation prosecutor who had surprised Myrlie with his aggressive prosecutions of Byron De La Beckwith, was the Democratic nominee for governor of Mississippi in 1971, and he was elected. Facing him on the ballot, as an independent, was Charles Evers, who had been elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, in 1969 and named that year as the NAACP’s Man of the Year. Much was changing in Mississippi and across America. That March, the Congressional Black Caucus was formed, and its thirteen members secured a meeting with President Richard Nixon.

As the 1970s rolled on, Myrlie let her hair go natural. Medgar had teased, “You should wear your hair nappy,” when they were at Alcorn, knowing how horrified she was by that. Now she embraced it. She was still the NAACP’s most prodigious fundraiser. She resented that among the organization’s most valuable “commodities” were pictures of her and her children at Medgar’s funeral, but she understood that it kept Medgar’s name and legacy alive and helped to keep her children fed and clothed. She even said yes to a date or two, wading through her elder children’s disapproval. Reena would make it clear where she stood by strutting into the living room holding a framed photograph of her daddy when a gentleman would come calling.

Myrlie also solidified her sisterhood with Betty Shabazz in the 1970s. They had in common the experience of being present with their children at their husbands’ murders. Of Coretta King, Myrlie later said, “At least she was spared seeing it. We literally got our husband’s blood on us.”¹⁹

The two women truly connected over both having returned to school after losing their husbands. Betty eventually earned her doctorate in education. When she was looking for a job that befit her newly earned degree, she came upon Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York. It was created after student protests in 1968 on behalf of the Black and Puerto Rican struggle against poverty and for equal access to education brought classes at Harlem’s City College to a standstill, forcing the City University system to capitulate to student demands. They agreed in February 1968 to create a new campus in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, one of the country’s largest Black and Brown communities. Betty was drawn there because the students there were overwhelmingly Black, working-class, and largely drawn from Caribbean backgrounds, like Malcolm had been. The faculty was comprised mostly of Black women, and she had been looking for a job that befit her newly earned degree. Her admiration for Medgar sealed the deal.

When Betty invited Myrlie to come to the college and speak, they discovered how much they liked each other. Betty liked Myrlie’s independence and her irreverence. Myrlie said of herself: “I was not always the quiet, long-suffering little woman behind the great man. I was not the always hopeful, always strong single mother. I was not always nice and forgiving, compliant and ladylike.” Betty liked that about Myrlie.²⁰

They laughed about the media rushing to Coretta when the three widows were thrown together as “the trio,” sometimes with Mamie Till-Mobley or Rosa Parks added to the group. Coretta acknowledged the disparity, too, later reflecting that “when Martin died, it was almost like I was embraced by the whole world, and 240,000 people came to Atlanta for the funeral. Betty didn’t have that.” Betty was denied the media support and sympathy draped on Coretta. “The world wanted me to be perceived as being alone,” Betty later said.²¹

She and Myrlie, though, could chat about single motherhood, about lean times and making neckbones stretch by doing them as a stew with beans and rice. They talked about finding male figures to include in their children’s lives, and they cried into their phones about the nightmares they still endured about feeling the warmth of their husband’s blood in their hands. Betty encouraged Myrlie to date, rejecting the idea that movement widows were condemned to live like royal spinsters or lonely saints. “Step on out there, kid,” Betty told her. “You’re just getting older and uglier every day,” and they burst into laughter on the phone. Myrlie said, “Absolutely no envy existed between us. She could have seen me as competition. But that was not Betty.”²²

The true sisterhood with Coretta came later, as Myrlie and Betty saw through her perfect hair and makeup and the steely determination to her pain. In many ways, Coretta bore more national responsibility as a national civil rights widow and wore the cruel crown that Jackie Kennedy had worn. As they became not just the trio of “movement widows,” but a true sisterhood, Myrlie discovered she could turn to Betty and Coretta for a unique comfort.

“They were my support system, and I like to think I was a part of their support system as well,” Myrlie said. “We could call each other and cry. They probably wouldn’t like it if I said this, but I’m going to say it. We called each other and cursed. . . . We would talk about various ways of punishment [for our husband’s killers]. Who in which community was helping the other. It was like an underground network. . . . It was a sisterhood of widows.”

OVER TIME, AND WITH HER CHILDREN GETTING OLDER AND MORE focused on their own young lives, Myrlie began to accept that she needed a support system that went beyond her good girlfriends. Despite Betty’s encouragement, she remained reticent about introducing a new man into her life and the lives of her children. Besides, no man alive was Medgar.

She relented when she met Walter Williams in 1975, whom she described as “a very fine man who, interestingly enough, was a follower of Medgar’s.” Standing at six feet, four inches, Walter was an NAACP man and a union organizer who had battled discrimination against Black and women dockworkers in California since the 1940s. He introduced himself to Myrlie after watching one of her speeches in Los Angeles, and at first she was characteristically polite but dismissive. Walt, as she called him, was a cofounder of the Victory Committee, “an early effort to promote voter registration among African American citizens. When businesses balked at hiring black employees, he organized pickets and boycotts,”²³ she said.

He was also persistent. The two soon became the best of friends and constant companions. Some in her circle scoffed at the idea of Myrlie being in a relationship with a longshoreman. In their view, his was not a high enough calling to befit Myrlie’s stature. But Walt was smart and moral, and he cared about civil rights. She respected him, as she had Medgar. And he was kind to her and her children. That mattered most to her. And her true friends understood and were supportive. Better yet, her children approved of Walter and recognized that he would protect their mother and keep her from having to fight so many battles alone.

Medgar’s memory lingered, which at times seemed terribly unfair to Walt. But he knew Medgar was the love of Myrlie’s life, and was at peace with that. “I asked him at one point, ‘Why are you here?’ [And] you know what this man told me? ‘Because I admired, respected, and loved your husband. And I wanted to be sure I could do something to help his children.’ I said, ‘Oh? What about me?’ ‘Myrlie,’ he said, smiling, ‘for goodness’ sake, let me alone. You were just part of the package.’” Myrlie thought his answer would have amused Medgar, who spent so much time teasing her. She could only laugh, too, because she knew Walt really wanted to make sure that the children had all they needed, and to be there for her. The two married at a ceremony at Pomona College in 1976.

“I knew that if I were gone, [Medgar] probably would not remain single,” she said. “But he would be so careful in the woman that he would choose to be with my children. And it was the same way with me.” Her marriage to Walter was very blessed, she said, “but Medgar Evers was my life. Even with our three children, I would’ve given my life for his because I knew he would be the best father ever. I loved the man, I still do. I can’t help it.”²⁴

Life continued its relentless march for the Evers family. There would be annual commemorations of Medgar’s life in Jackson and long drives to Vicksburg to look in on Aunt Myrlie and Mama, the loving, aging roommates in their impeccable home. As they increasingly struggled to care for themselves, Myrlie hired a series of home nursing aides, each of whom rarely lasted more than a week.²⁵ She faced painful decisions, including moving Mama to Shady Grove Nursing Home. After Myrlie woke up in what used to be Aunt Myrlie’s room to see her elderly aunt standing in the doorway, brandishing a gun, and demanding to know who she was and what she was doing in her home, she moved Aunt Myrlie there, too.²⁶

These women had taken such great care of her, and now Myrlie, even from thousands of miles away, was determined to take care of them.

But there was more than family love that kept calling her back to Mississippi.

Still loving Medgar Evers meant continuously pursuing his killer, and Myrlie had never stopped asking about him. She still ordered the Jackson newspapers and kept in contact with friends, peppering them with question: Had they heard anything new about Beckwith? Had any new information emerged about who he talked to or associated with before killing Medgar?

Beckwith’s car had been pulled over on September 27, 1973, and a six-stick dynamite bomb was found inside. He was thought to be headed to the home of Adolph (A. I.) Botnick, the regional director of the Anti-defamation League of B’nai B’rith.²⁷ The FBI charged him with possession of explosives. He was acquitted in federal court, but in August 1975, he was convicted on state charges and sentenced to five years in prison. Myrlie savored her newfound happiness even more, knowing Beckwith would lose his freedom at least for now, even if not for Medgar’s murder. Even better: the state jury that convicted him included five Black women.²⁸

In 1977, with his appeals exhausted, Beckwith finally went to prison. But he would come back to haunt her again and again.

Even behind bars, Beckwith couldn’t hold his tongue. In a letter to the editor published in the white supremacist magazine Attack!, Beckwith referred to Medgar Evers as “Mississippi’s mightiest nigger,” saying, “We have had no trouble with that nigger since they buried him—none!” He was released after three years and returned to Greenwood, remarried, and moved to Signal Mountain, Tennessee. Myrlie tracked his every move.²⁹

IN MARCH 1979, MYRLIE’S REALITY CHANGED AGAIN, AS AN ERA that defined her entire life came to an end. Annie McCain Beasley, born in 1881 in rural Mississippi, had lived ninety-eight years, into a new century with its new realities and shifting possibilities for daughters of the enslaved, like her, and for their granddaughters, like the little girl she took in and called Sister. Mama had been known for her moral austerity and a kind of majesty that belied her financial circumstances: the neatness of her garden, the care she took with her home, and her insistence on educational excellence and discipline under her roof. But for Myrlie, it was the love that she remembered most from this fearsome church mother whose fiercest passions were for her son, and her two Myrlies.

Aunt Myrlie followed in 1985. Myrlie had brought her to Los Angeles to live with her after Mama’s passing. Aunt Myrlie’s husband was long dead by then, and they had no children, besides Myrlie, of course. She had lived to be eighty-one years old. Myrlie savored the knowledge of these women’s long lives, which seemed an even greater miracle for Black people in America. “I can recall now,” said Myrlie, “the number of wonderful messages sent to the family when she passed away, of people who were successful who had been her students in school and praised her for the success they had had in their lives.”

If she had gotten her grit and discipline from Mama, it was “Auntie” who gave Myrlie the gift of music. She recalled her as the organist for her childhood church: Mount Heroden Baptist. “Could she ever play that organ!” Myrlie said. It was Aunt Myrlie, the schoolteacher, choir director, and great lady of the Black Vicksburg community who funded the piano lessons after she left off teaching Myrlie herself. And it was Aunt Myrlie who took her and Mama in and cared for them until it was time for Myrlie to care for both her “mothers.”

But Myrlie had also been shaped by M’dear, who had been more of an elder sister than a mother to her and who, like Medgar, had died so young. For all the limited time they had together, she had come to appreciate her deeply, and treasure her childhood memories of their shared time across the street at Big Mama’s. “She was a good-looking woman and very stylish,” Myrlie recalled. “And I recall her buying cloth at Woolworth’s and bringing [it] home, particularly on a Saturday, and she would put the cloth down on the floor and cut out a pattern without a paper guide . . . hand-stitch that dress and wear it that night. I was always amazed at how she could do that because I never learned to sew!” But it was her loving understanding of why Myrlie had to defy Mama and Aunt Myrlie and pursue her love for Medgar that had truly bonded them, just as it was M’dear’s loving sacrifice that made Myrlie’s improbable life possible.

“As I grew older, her strength to be able to turn me over to my grandmother to rear me, was something marvelous [to me] because she knew that my grandmother could do a much better job in rearing me than she could. I will always be thankful to her for that,” Myrlie said. “I loved her dearly, but it wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood the loss that she felt when she turned me over to my grandmother.” She recalled M’dear once explaining her choice at sixteen years of age this way: “Baby, I did what was best for you, and I dealt with my pain of not having you in my care every day.”³⁰

And now these three women who had so shaped her were all gone. Returning with Walt and the children to California after each of Mama’s and Aunt Myrlie’s funerals created a fresh wave of grief. But it also made her determined to do something that would make all those who had loved her, and who were now her heavenly choir, proud.

IN 1987, MYRLIE DECIDED TO TRY HER HAND AT POLITICS AGAIN. She joined the primary for a council seat in Los Angeles. She would be one of thirteen candidates for the seat in the city’s majority Black Tenth District, which also included Hispanic and Jewish enclaves and an Asian American neighborhood known as Koreatown. Tom Bradley had been the councilman for the Tenth District before becoming Los Angeles’s first Black mayor. But he was supporting another candidate: a longtime political ally. Myrlie had the support of a handful of women legislators including California state senator Diane Watson and an assemblywoman named Maxine Waters (both future U.S. congresswomen), plus the sitting assembly Speaker, Willie Brown.³¹ But she was considered an underdog in the nonpartisan race.

Still, she threw herself into the campaign, taking time off from her job as the national community affairs director for Atlantic Richfield Company to walk the district and listen to the concerns of longtime renters, homeowners, and business owners. Walt was a great support and de facto campaign manager: always eager to hand out her blue campaign buttons reading: “We All Agree—Myrlie Evers for the 10th Council District” and to give great advice. Luckily for Myrlie, he was a civil rights man and therefore an organizer.

The issues in the race were mostly about decline. The Tenth had been home to Black American greats like Joe Louis and Nat King Cole, and once boasted thriving Black-owned shops in the downtown section nicknamed Sugar Hill. But the Eisenhower administration’s national highway program had done to the area what it had in so many majority Black and Latino enclaves: vivisected it with freeway on-ramps, and leaving blight and dying businesses behind. Plus the onset of the crack epidemic had mired the district in misery, poverty, and crime. And tensions between the Black and Asian communities were simmering, almost to a boil.³²

But Myrlie faced resistance from some locals who viewed her as an outsider, trading on the surname of her martyred husband to push a political bid in a town she wasn’t from and had only recently moved to—despite the fact that she moved from Pomona to Los Angeles in 1975. Some even criticized her use of “Myrlie Evers” rather than Myrlie Williams, even though it was Walt who suggested she hyphenate her surname in tribute to Medgar.³³ The criticisms stung, particularly those about her name. Myrlie had been clear in her own mind, and with Walt, that she would never let go of Medgar. Yet who in their right mind would trade on the agony of June 12, 1963? The attacks, particularly from Black people, brought disappointment and even anger, but it was a single incident that left her feeling something coldly familiar: fear.

After a forum with the twelve other candidates, a young white man walked up to her, unsmiling. She put out her hand, but he refused it and then repeated, over and over: “You have to stop this.” When she referred him to her campaign headquarters, he screamed: “You have to stop this! You keep doing it to my family! The Beckwiths are my family!”³⁴

Hearing “Beckwith” nearly drained the blood out of her. The young man had his hand near his waist, and she thought this was it. It would end for her the way it had for Medgar. Her children would lose both their parents. Then someone who overheard the commotion called out, and the man disappeared. Police later discovered he had rented a dingy single room nearby, whose walls were papered with pictures of Medgar, newspaper articles about him and about Myrlie, and sketches of the Beckwith family tree. He had been stalking Myrlie. It was sobering, and then enraging. The investigating detectives all but accused Myrlie of provoking the attack herself. Matters grew worse when other candidates, most of whom were Black, accused her of staging the incident as a publicity stunt.³⁵

The threats had slowed but never stopped. Walter worried about her and the children, particularly Van, who was then just nineteen, and Myrlie felt continually surveilled. Even this far from Mississippi, cars sometimes still rolled slowly by her house, and there were still clicking sounds on the phone. She lost the race, finishing third. In a way it was a relief. Her focus shifted back to seeing that Medgar’s killer was punished. She kept asking questions, the way Medgar had done in so many investigations in the Delta.

But she also kept busy. While she didn’t win the council seat, Mayor Bradley appointed Myrlie to the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, overseeing a $1 billion budget. She had gone from Medgar’s secretary at Magnolia Mutual and the NAACP, to executive, to leader, wielding power that she couldn’t have imagined as a young, skinny Black girl in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

“My grandmother was [known for] quoting scripture,” Myrlie said. “And she probably would have said, ‘The Lord works with those who work with Him.’” She lived in a constant balance between gratitude and seething, with each new step forward mitigated by the one thing she still lacked: justice for Medgar. With Beckwith free again, having been paroled from Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison in 1980, she could never truly rest on her victories.

“It is interesting how I found I could hate so deeply and believe so strongly,” she said. “But I kept working. I kept praying. People told me to let it go. . . . I smiled and said ‘Thank you. I talk to Medgar every night, it isn’t crazy, just a little conversation.’”

Myrlie spent two years on the commission and the work was familiar. But on a trip with Walt to visit friends in Oregon, she seized on a new idea.

MEDGAR HAD LOVED MISSISSIPPI: NOT BECAUSE IT WAS KIND TO him—far from it. He loved it for its space; space to roam, space to hunt, space to fish, and space to be. In the quiet moments in the wilderness, when no one was around: no sneering sheriffs, marauding Klansmen, or rude shopkeepers, and so no racism or cruelty to contend with, Mississippi was a beautiful place. It was why he had always vowed to stay. Walt was the opposite; born and raised in Los Angeles, and steeped in city life and city conflict, space to roam was something of a luxury. When they visited Oregon, they felt a spark of inspiration. And when they found their house: high on a hill with a mountain view, it was “love at first sight.”³⁶

The town of Bend, Oregon, had a tiny population of about twenty thousand, mainly white residents. When Walt and Myrlie bought that house and moved in, early in 1989, they were mostly welcomed, as Myrlie and her children had been in Claremont. There were the occasional fractures, but for the most part, they stayed in love with Bend. Walt found that he had a passion for fishing, just as Medgar had. Myrlie indulged her passion for peace—and the idea of a peaceful place to come home to. Her children were grown and gone and living their own lives. This was an opportunity to live her best one.

Then on October 2, the phone rang. It was a Mississippi reporter named Jerry Mitchell, and he asked if he could fax her his story that had run the day before. His emergence into her life presented Myrlie with two challenges. First, he was a white Southern man (though he was originally from Missouri, not Mississippi). For Myrlie, that was reason enough to be wary. Second, he worked for the Clarion-Ledger, which for years had tormented Medgar and her. The newspaper had changed dramatically since the racist Hederman family sold it to the Gannett company for $100 million. Rea Hederman, a third-generation member of the family who left Mississippi, returned and took charge in 1982, determined to transform the paper into a home for journalism rather than hate. Mitchell joined in 1986 and quickly developed a specialty in investigating racist murders. He tracked down Klan connections to the Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney lynching as well as to Beckwith. He got and exposed the Sovereignty Commission files and confirmed Medgar’s reports to the FBI that he was being spied on and his phones were being tapped. The Sovereignty Commission might not have outwardly been the Klan, but as Grace Britton Sweet said, they were the Klan in suits, with ties to the violent white supremacist organization that were as fine as reeds.

“It’s not just that these guys got away with murder,” Mitchell said of the Mississippi Klan. “It was the fact that everybody knew these guys got away with murder. This was thumbing your nose at justice in the worst way imaginable, and that’s what happened in [the Medgar Evers] case.” When the Mississippi Legislature dissolved the Sovereignty Commission in 1977, it sealed its spy records for fifty years. Mitchell developed sources that “began to leak me the files, and what they show is [that at] the same time the State of Mississippi was prosecuting Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers, this other arm of the state, the Sovereignty Commission, was secretly assisting the defense,” vetting potential jurors, “trying to get Beckwith acquitted.”

“When Jerry asked if I thought his findings warranted reopening the case, I let out a resounding ‘Yes!’” Myrlie wrote.³⁷ Two days later, the paper ran a response column from her that called on Ed Peters, the Hinds County district attorney, to reopen the Beckwith murder case. “At the time that the story ran, odds were a million to one against the case ever being reopened and re-prosecuted,” Mitchell said. “I mean, there was no murder weapon, no evidence in the vault, no court transcript, nothing of any value in the court files. I think like ten pages maybe.”

By December, Myrlie was flying to Jackson to lobby the district attorney.³⁸ She brought with her Morris Dees, the civil rights attorney from the Southern Poverty Law Center, to meet with Peters and Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter. At first, she let Dees do most of the talking. Peters seemed skeptical about reopening the case, and the meeting got heated, as Dees threatened a lawsuit to force the DA’s office to act. Myrlie eventually stepped in and calmly informed Peters and DeLaughter, who was from Vicksburg, that she had heard what they’d said. “Now, tell me what you are going to do to carry forward the pursuit of justice. If you don’t, with my full support, Mr. Dees will,”³⁹ she said.

Myrlie had material that could help. Aaron Henry had given her the transcripts of the previous trials, which the state of Mississippi had discarded, but which she now gave to DeLaughter. “Myrlie Evers believed, and she prayed, and some amazing things happened,” Mitchell said. She also believed that the murder weapon could not have just disappeared. She was right.

In the mid- to late 1960s, according to Mitchell, trials in the murders of Black citizens carried little importance in states like Mississippi. And so after Beckwith’s second trial, “they were just getting rid of the evidence, and guns having a certain value, someone obviously asked, ‘Hey, who wants the gun that killed Medgar Evers?’” The person who took it was Judge Russell Moore, who was responsible for sending some of the Freedom Riders to Parchman Penitentiary. Judge Moore also happened to be Bobby DeLaughter’s father-in-law. “And really, thank God,” Mitchell said, “because it wasn’t lost, and it happened the family still had it . . . I mean, you can’t make it up.”

DeLaughter called his brother-in-law, Matthew Moore, who said he knew nothing about the gun. DeLaughter next visited his mother-in-law’s house—the serial number of the murder weapon in hand—and found the lost Enfield rifle in her storeroom. He took it home that night, but instead of logging it in at the Jackson Police Department the next day, he kept it, fearing that if Beckwith learned the district attorney’s office had the rifle, he would “clam up.”

Whatever the true story, Mitchell believed there was “something kind of poetic about the fact that Medgar Evers tried to find witnesses in the Emmett Till case”⁴⁰—another case in which everybody knew who the killers were—and that the weapon in his own murder was found in the home of a judge.

Beckwith was arrested in Tennessee, and his third trial for the murder of Medgar Evers was scheduled to begin on January 31, 1994. This trial would take place in an entirely different atmosphere in Mississippi. With the Sovereignty Commission gone and no longer able to bring Ku Klux Klan pressure to bear, the jury, which had been chosen from Panola County, 140 miles north of Jackson, was made up of eight Black and four white members. (“The foreman of the jury actually had cut Dr. King’s hair just days before he was assassinated,” Mitchell said.)

Beckwith could no longer count on the Citizens’ Councils for legal support, and rather than the high-powered attorneys who aided him in 1963 and 1964, he was represented by a pair of public defenders. The courtroom—the same one where Beckwith had previously put on a white supremacist show in 1964—was now filled with Black onlookers.

The Evers family had to endure the trauma of having Medgar’s body exhumed⁴¹ at the insistence of DeLaughter, who wanted to ensure they had usable forensic evidence; the originally autopsy conducted in 1963 had gone missing along with the trial transcripts and other key evidence.⁴² Van, who was then thirty-four years old, insisted on accompanying the body, later telling his mother that Medgar was almost perfectly preserved, but for some moisture on his fingertips. The forensic pathologist, Michael Baden, agreed, “It was as though Medgar had remained intact long enough for his youngest child to see and visit with him.”⁴³

When the trial began, the prosecution called the now-retired police detective Ralph Hargrove, who had saved the crime scene photos and other evidence in a box he left behind at the Jackson police station when he retired. They also called Thorn McIntyre, who testified for the third time that he traded the 1917 Eddystone Enfield rifle, designed for soldiers fighting World War I, to Beckwith in exchange for fertilizer for his farm, and that “the next time [he] heard about the gun was in June 1963 in the Jackson Daily News.”⁴⁴

The prosecution had more than the old forensic evidence this time. They now had Byron De La Beckwith’s inability to keep quiet about murdering Medgar Evers. In the end, his own braggadocio undid him.

Beckwith’s nephew, Reed Massengill, testified that Beckwith “had tried, on a number of occasions . . . to have a book written about his life.” ⁴⁵ As part of the effort, Beckwith provided Massengill “on a quite regular basis with racist propaganda, Christian Identity tapes, with copies of letters he had written and had published in newspapers; the manuscript of a book that had been written about him by an author he had worked with; and letters he had written to local townspeople in Signal Mountain about the fluoridation of their water.” ⁴⁶ Massengill provided a letter Beckwith wrote to a local newspaper in June 1957, in which he said: “. . . the NAACP, under the direction of its leaders, is doing a first-class job of getting itself in a position to be exterminated.” ⁴⁷ Beckwith vowed that “soon the cancerous growth, the NAACP, shall be cut out of the heart of our nation, and we will all live happily ever after.” ⁴⁸

In a letter Beckwith wrote to his son on November 22, 1963, he heralded the murder of President Kennedy, saying whoever shot him, “did some fancy shootin’—to be sure,” and he added, “Well, I guess when a few more of our enemies are gone then this will be a real fine world we get to live in—Wonder who will be next? I bet ole Medgar Evers told Kennedy when he got down there, I thought you’d be along pretty soon—Haw, Haw, Haw.”⁴⁹

Mark Reiley of Chicago, a thirty-six-year-old air traffic control equipment manager, testified that when he was an impressionable twenty-one-year-old guard at the Angola State Penitentiary ward at Earl K. Long hospital in Louisiana, he was assigned to guard Beckwith, who was imprisoned at Angola after being convicted of carrying explosives, allegedly to blow up Anti-Defamation League leader A. I. Botnick’s home. He said that when Beckwith was hospitalized at Earl K. Long, he and the elder man developed a close, father-son relationship, and he testified that Beckwith told him, “Black people were . . . beasts of the field,” and that white people were “chosen to rule over the earth and to be in charge of the beasts of the field.”⁵⁰

Reiley related an incident in which he rang for a nurse, and a Black nurse’s aide responded. Beckwith “was very polite” but said “he would rather a nigger not wait on him or take care of him.” A screaming match ensued, Reiley told the court, at the end of which Beckwith told the nurse’s aide: “If I could get rid of an uppity nigger like Nigger Evers, I would have no problem with a no-account nigger like you.” ⁵¹ On another occasion, according to Reiley, Beckwith said that if he hadn’t had the “power and connections,” “he would be serving time in jail in Mississippi for getting rid of that nigger, Medgar Evers.”⁵²

Reiley was followed by numerous other witnesses who described Beckwith proclaiming that not only had he shot and killed Medgar Evers, but that he’d been able to get away with it in the state of Mississippi. Also featured was the testimony of Delmar Dennis, who joined the Klan in March 1963 but soured on the idea when he realized it was a violent organization and not just devoted to the interests of white people. He became an FBI informant and infiltrated the Klan. Dennis testified that he met Beckwith in 1965 when Beckwith spoke at a meeting. He recalled Beckwith “admonishing Klan members to become more involved, to become violent, to kill the enemy . . . to kill from the top down.” Dennis repeated the line that “killing that nigger Evers didn’t cause me any more physical harm than your wives have to have a baby for you.”⁵³ Dennis got Beckwith’s autograph at the meeting, and that was introduced as evidence of the men’s acquaintance.⁵⁴

DeLaughter in his closing asked jurors “what Evers had done to deserve assassination,” answering: “What he did was have the gall, the uppitiness, to want for his people—what? To be called by his name instead of ‘Boy’? . . . To go into a restaurant? To go into a department store, to vote, and for your children to get a decent education in a decent school?” When it was Ed Peters’s turn, he said Evers’s calls for equality for Black Mississippians “so offended this defendant that he couldn’t take it.”⁵⁵

The mood was tense when the jury went into deliberations. Mitchell believed the state had “put on a good case,” but he knew the jury would still have to consider that the police officers “lied and claimed Beckwith was up in Greenwood” at the time of the murder. Mitchell recalled that “there was even a press pool on when the jury was going to come back, and everybody was saying, ‘Oh, two hours, three hours . . .’ So, a little over three hours . . . maybe a little more than that, the jury comes back in. We still haven’t had a decision yet, but what you could see is some of the jurors were just red-faced like they had been arguing. Like they were angry. I was like, ‘Oh, no. Beckwith is going to walk,’ And . . . from a selfish perspective I thought everybody’s going to blame me. . . . He’s going to walk away and everybody’s going to [say], ‘Jerry, what’d you do this for?’ I shouldn’t have thought in those terms, but I did.”

Myrlie wasn’t worried. When she and Mitchell spoke that evening, “[she just repeated,] ‘We’ve won,’” Mitchell said. “She believed they’d won just by having the trial. I didn’t see it that way at all. I made some reference about her getting beyond hate and all that stuff, and she said, ‘I don’t know that I’ve gotten beyond it.’” She shared with Mitchell her truth about wishing she had a machine gun on the night Medgar was murdered to mow down all the policemen milling around on her lawn.

“And in that moment,” Mitchell said, “I realized I had no idea what she and her family had gone through. None. Zero. How dare I think that I know? I think if there were a lesson to this, it would be that all of us in America could understand the pain these families went through and begin to understand our history for what it is, and not for what we may try to want it to be.”

On Saturday, February 5, 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Medgar Evers, and immediately sentenced to life in prison. The seventy-three-year-old, who wore a Confederate flag pin throughout the trial, smiled slightly when the verdict was read.

“The verdict sent up a cheer among the mostly Black crowd attending the trial,” the Associated Press reported. It “brought to a close one of the longest and most painful sagas of the civil rights movement.” ⁵⁶ After decades of carefully honed public self-control, after Medgar’s homegoing and his burial, after speeches and fundraisers and board meetings and on the campaign trail, Myrlie finally let go. “Mrs. Evers, usually a rock of composure, broke into tears after the verdict was read,” the report said. “She clasped the hand of her daughter, Reena Evers-Everette, while her son, Darrell Kenyatta Evers, clapped in jubilation.”⁵⁷

Myrlie went outside the courthouse, which had been the focus of so much pain, disappointment, and injustice for so many Black families, and celebrated. “It’s been a long journey,” the Associated Press reported that Myrlie said, arms locked with her children’s and tears streaming down her face. “‘Medgar,’ she added, eyes heavenward, ‘I’ve gone the last mile.’”⁵⁸ Reena’s thoughts were also for the heavens. “‘Hi Daddy,’ she said in a voice choked with emotion. ‘We did it.’ She said the pain of her father’s death ‘cannot be erased . . . but now it can be soothed. And I got a whole lot of medicine soothed on me today.’” ⁵⁹

Darrell had attended the trial with a goal as singular and furtive as his childhood determination to kill his father’s murderer with the toy gun Myrlie bought him. He wanted to force the coward De La Beckwith to look at his face and to see Medgar Evers staring back at him. “He never saw my father’s face” when he shot him, Darrell told reporters after the verdict. “All he saw was his back. I wanted him to see the face . . . to see the ghost of my father come back to haunt him.” Darrell Kenyatta Evers was forty-one years old; three years older than his father had been when he died. He had chosen to become an artist, not an activist. But in his manner and demeaner, and, yes, in the face that so resembled Medgar’s, the sad little boy from the cover of Life magazine had grown up to be every bit his father’s son.

With the thanks of the court, the jurors were released and taken home by bus to Panola County. The verdict would be their only comment. “They were exhausted. They were just drained,” Panola County sheriff David Bryan said of the jurors.⁶⁰

From Jackson to Greenwood, no Klan crosses were burned in outrage or in honor after Beckwith’s belated conviction. He had emerged from this very courthouse in 1964 as a white nationalist folk hero. Now, he was just an old man—an opportunity he had stolen from Medgar. He was going to spend the rest of his unhappy life behind bars.

For the prosecutors, the triumph, thirty years after this notorious crime, brought notoriety, books, movies, and, for DeLaughter, an elevation to a judgeship (which years later would end in scandal). In noting the criticism some leveled for his decision to bring the case after so long, DA Peters said, “I feel like it should have been done a long time ago. But by waiting we were able to get some new witnesses, so maybe it’s a blessing it took so long.”⁶¹

MYRLIE FELT THAT AT LAST SHE HAD FINALLY AWAKENED FROM the shock of Medgar’s murder, and the rage and sorrow that consumed her afterward. She could finally revel in the triumphs and accolades his sacrifice had earned, without that extra pang of bitterness that remembering him entailed.

In 1992, Delta Drive, near the Evers home in Jackson, had been renamed Medgar Evers Boulevard, and a statue to Medgar was erected downtown. (Guynes Street would be renamed for Margaret Walker Alexander.) Betty Shabazz helped secure a street named for Medgar in Brooklyn, New York, one year later. There were several movie portrayals of their family, including a Hollywood production: Ghosts of Mississippi in 1996, which brought director Rob Reiner, Whoopi Goldberg (as Myrlie), Alec Baldwin (as Bobby DeLaughter), and James Woods (as Beckwith) to Guynes Street and saw Darrell playing himself on-screen. And there was a 1997 Mississippi Supreme Court denial of Beckwith’s appeal.

Medgar and Myrlie’s children were thriving in adulthood. While Darrell focused on his artistic pursuits, Reena worked in the travel industry and eventually became head of the foundation Myrlie created to honor Medgar. Van excelled as a photographer—one of Medgar’s favorite hobbies besides fishing and hunting. Myrlie served on corporate boards and had stints as an advertising executive and a corporate consumer affairs officer, and she wrote a second book. Life was busy, but it finally had become fulfilling.

Myrlie had one more mission, and it would bring her full circle.

EVERY YEAR ON JUNE 12, MYRLIE EVERS-WILLIAMS, OFTEN WITH her family, or friends, and sometimes in solitude, alone, would visit Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. It was her chance to remember Medgar, to sit with him, and to honor him. It was the day she set aside to reconvene with the grief that she had received blessed respite from since she succeeded in seeing his killer dispatched to prison.

On her 1994 visit, she was accompanied by Walt and by a friend: Joe Madison, a former General Motors PR man who in 1973 had been named executive director of the NAACP branch in Detroit at age twenty-four. Now a popular radio host whose latest show aired on Washington, D.C.’s WWRC-AM, he remained involved in the civil rights organization as a member of the NAACP’s national board of directors, which Myrlie had also been sitting on since the early 1990s.

The visit came during a turbulent time for the NAACP, which had become mired in financial and sexual scandal. The organization was $4.7 million in debt. Its executive director, Benjamin Chavis Jr., had recently been fired over accusations he covered up sexual harassment allegations and paid off the woman who made them using organization funds without the knowledge of or permission from the board. This was followed by a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against the organization alleging not just a culture of harassment, but also of denying advancement opportunities to women. The term of the current chairman of the national board, Dr. William F. Gibson, was set to end in 1995 unless he was reelected, which seemed unlikely as he, too, faced financial scrutiny over the alleged abuse of his NAACP expense account.⁶² Myrlie had been publicly critical of the organization being unable to “get its house in order.” She punctuated her public statements by charging that the NAACP did not generally treat women, who made up two-thirds of its membership, fairly.⁶³

Chavis had succeeded Roy Wilkins, who retired in 1977 following a string of victories including the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Fair Housing Acts, but also seasons of tragedy in the assassinations of Medgar, Malcolm, Dr. King, the Kennedy brothers, and so many more; and Benjamin Hooks, who presided over some of the organization’s most turbulent years, marked by internal and financial struggles, and who endured a series of targeted bombings aimed at civil rights leaders. By the 1990s, the organization seemed rudderless. It no longer commanded the attention of much of Black America, as many questioned the organization’s relevance⁶⁴ and turned instead toward younger, brasher civil rights leaders like Rev. Jesse Jackson (whom Chavis defeated for the executive director’s role) and Rev. Al Sharpton of Harlem, both heirs to the work of Dr. King. Even the word “Colored” in the name spoke of the past.

Madison picked Myrlie and Walt up from their hotel to drive with them to Arlington. Before getting into the car, though, he took Walt aside. He had a question he wanted desperately to ask Myrlie, but he didn’t dare until he knew whether he would have an ally in Walt. Madison wanted Myrlie to run for executive director, to succeed Chavis. Madison thought Myrlie was the only person who could right what was wrong at the NAACP: both its financial standing and its standing with its female members. He was convinced that Myrlie was the only choice for an organization that needed to prove its relevance again. She had been its most prodigious fundraiser. She had worked side by side with its bravest field secretary, Medgar. Her story, and her moral voice, Madison believed, could rescue the NAACP. But he needed Walt to agree to help him lobby Myrlie. “Do you think she’ll do it?” Madison asked. To his surprise and relief, Walt was all in.

During the twenty-minute ride to Arlington, the question was poised on his lips, but Madison was afraid to ask it. Myrlie was sixteen years his senior, and he had deep respect for not just her legacy, but also her well-earned peace. He was also aware of how turbulent Medgar’s relationship had been with Roy Wilkins, Gloster Current, and the other NAACP leaders, who had all but ordered him to cut his ties to the direct-action efforts of groups like SNCC. Indeed, Myrlie had mixed feelings about the organization that she believed chose not to protect Medgar when it counted but also put a financial floor under his wife and children once he was gone. Despite Medgar’s struggles with the leadership, she and he had developed long and enduring friendships inside the organization. It was a complicated picture.

Madison put out a feeler. He brought up the Chavis resignation, Gibson’s troubles, and the general state of the NAACP, to which Myrlie chimed in that he should run for chairman of the board. Madison and Walt exchanged knowing looks. He told her she should run. Walt agreed.

When they arrived at Arlington, they were escorted on a personal tour by Arlington officials, who walked them through the gravesites to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a memorial with a sarcophagus perched on a hill, with catacombs underneath. They then arrived at Medgar’s grave, where they stood alone for a long time, surrounded by reverent silence and markers of the sacrifice of thousands of men like Medgar, who had fought America’s wars abroad while some like Medgar had been forced to fight anew at home. Myrlie always wept at Medgar’s gravesite. Just being there, amid all that silent grandeur, reminded her of what a great man she’d married and how much she missed him.

She began to talk about their life together, and to recall the pain of having to send his body on its journey from Jackson to here, and the agony of having to exhume him as a necessary step for achieving justice. Her reverie emboldened Madison, who reiterated that she simply had to run for NAACP chair. “Medgar would want you to do this,” he told her. “We need you. We need you.” ⁶⁵ Medgar had died for the NAACP, Madison told her. Only she could prevent the nation’s oldest civil rights organization from dying.⁶⁶

Myrlie promised to give it serious consideration.

When she and Walt returned to Bend, they had a heart to heart. Walt had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and just the idea of throwing herself into another campaign when she had him to take care of seemed absurd. But he summoned her to think about what her mission ought to be. She had toiled as a typist in the Jackson NAACP office not just because Medgar needed her, but because Jackson did, and Mississippi did. And all she had accomplished since that time spoke to her unique abilities, to speak, to cajole, to fundraise, to manage enormous financial resources, and to inspire. In short, Walt finished what Madison had started and talked Myrlie into it. As always, he would be there to help manage her campaign.

The campaign to lead the NAACP waded into the internecine rivalries at the highest echelons of the NAACP. During the meeting in New York to decide Gibson’s fate, and Myrlie’s, Julian Bond and Hazel Dukes, two activists who had previously been ousted over disputes with Gibson, were returned to their seats on the board. Following a spirited meeting that included a vote of “no confidence” in Gibson by the rank-and-file membership, Myrlie was elected chair by a single vote—30 to 29 among those who cast a ballot—as her supporters among the seven hundred assembled members chanted “Clean House Now!”⁶⁷ Twenty members of the sixty-four-member board were women.⁶⁸

This was her third campaign, and this time she was victorious. “It is time to heal our wounds,” an emotional Evers-Williams told the NAACP membership after the vote. “We will move forward because we are family.”⁶⁹

She then addressed the assembled media, echoing Joe Madison’s words a year earlier at Arlington: “Medgar died for the NAACP. I will live for the NAACP.”⁷⁰ In the end, she stepped into the role out of a sense of duty, becoming just the third woman board chair of the civil rights organization since its founding in 1909.

Walt had insisted that she press forward, telling her, “This is the last thing I’ll ever ask you to do. Run and win!”⁷¹ But they both understood that his situation was dire. He died of prostate cancer just two days after her election, at seventy-six years old.

MYRLIE WAS ON HER OWN AGAIN AND FACING MANY OF THE CHALLENGES Medgar had confronted with an organization whose mission—equality for African Americans—they both supported, even though its execution of that mission sometimes left folks wanting. For Myrlie, it was as if everything Medgar Evers lived and died for was coming to fruition in her hands. She received congratulatory calls from seemingly every NAACP branch in America, and from President Bill Clinton. But she had no doubt about the difficulty of the task ahead of her.

The first step was to get the organization’s fiscal house in order. She began to make the rounds to the organization’s traditional donors and found many doors closed. “All of the foundations and organizations that I personally went to, to raise funds, I was told that the NAACP was dead. And I received no contributions,” Myrlie later said. “Only Ford Foundation stepped up and said: ‘We will provide you with the funds.’ It was not healthy.”⁷² Gibson’s alleged profligacy was part of the challenge with donors. Chavis’s relationship with Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam was another. Both scared major donors away. It was left to Myrlie to convince potential funders that she could bring the NAACP back on mission.

With a Republican-led Congress poised to attack many of the programs the NAACP had fought for—and Medgar, King, and others had died for—Myrlie felt passionately that the NAACP was still needed. “We may be a dinosaur, as some people say, but we’re not going to be extinct,” Myrlie told the Associated Press. “As long as there is racism and unfair treatment, not just for African Americans, but for all people, there is going to be this organization.”⁷³

Myrlie was sworn into her new role on May 14, 1995, Mother’s Day, at Washington’s Metropolitan AME Church. This was the church where Frederick Douglass prayed. And it seemed fitting to be near Baltimore, where the NAACP had moved its headquarters from New York in 1986, and where Clarence Mitchell Jr., the architect of the NAACP’s legislative strategy and the man who had so gently counseled Medgar and Myrlie during some of the toughest times in their marriage, lived. More than a thousand people packed into the church to cheer her on, and seven federal judges, six current and one retired, swore Myrlie in. Coretta Scott King came to support Myrlie. “Over the years, I have witnessed the remarkable dignity, integrity and courage of Myrlie Evers-Williams,” she said. “No one is better prepared to lead this great ship of hope into the next century.”⁷⁴ And Myrlie vowed to restore the moral course of the organization for which her husband had given his life, and in a nod to Medgar’s life mission, she also vowed to reach out to young activists and include their voices in the mission.

Money flowed in along with joy and enthusiasm for Myrlie, as Black sororities—including her own, Delta Sigma Theta—fraternities, and professional organizations joined banks, businesses, and individuals in pledging hundreds of thousands of dollars to the revived NAACP. It felt like a revival for the organization and its nearly seven hundred thousand members.⁷⁵

Within a year, the NAACP had a new president and CEO: Maryland congressman Kweisi Mfume (who many years later would himself resign in scandal), and with Myrlie’s steadying hand in place, its finances were revived. By the organization’s October 1996 board meeting, the NAACP had retired its $4 million–plus debt.⁷⁶

Medgar would have been so proud. He would challenge Myrlie sometimes about her fiscal prudence, and she would stand strong in her confidence that she knew how to manage their small income and still support his work, the dinners with James Baldwin and Lena Horne at the house, and feed and care for their children. Their life together had taught her how to manage the business of their lives. He would push her to be stronger and more self-confident, and she had become both almost instinctively. Now, at sixty-three years old, Myrlie had taken the activist mission that they shared to its pinnacle.

IN MAY 1997, MYRLIE, BETTY, AND CORETTA EMBARKED ON A TRIP to Florida; one of the “girls’ weekends” they would occasionally treat themselves to, “on the pretext of losing weight and eating healthy,” Scott King wrote in her memoir, noting that they rarely achieved their fitness goals, but “oh what fun we had.”⁷⁷ One of the Kings’ daughters, Dr. Bernice King, recalled that “whenever my mother had time with people like them” and other Black women friends who lived their lives in public view, like Maya Angelou or Oprah Winfrey, she was like “a giddy little girl, because it afforded her an opportunity to . . . let [her hair] down and really relax.”⁷⁸ According to King, the idea for this trip came from Ingrid Saunders Jones, a Black woman executive at the Coca-Cola Company’s headquarters in Atlanta, who even secured a grant to pay for it. The plan was to meet at the Doral Country Club and Spa near Miami Beach for a “ritual of connection, girl talk and rare self-indulgence,”⁷⁹ as Myrlie described it. There, they could be something other than civil rights widows. Hidden from the cameras, reporters, and onlookers, “We were not Mrs. King, Mrs. Shabazz, or Mrs. Evers,” Scott King wrote, “just Coretta, Betty, and Myrlie.”⁸⁰

“Myrlie arrived first,” wrote Russell J. Rickford, author of Betty Shabazz: Surviving Malcolm X—A Journey of Strength from Wife to Widow to Heroine. And as she could swim, she headed straight to the pool. “By the time the other two showed up, she had already had a powerful massage. They discovered her on the spa’s exercise and sauna wing, droopy-eyed and weaving.”⁸¹ Betty knew Myrlie didn’t drink, so she knew for sure that her friend wasn’t inebriated. “Honey, what happened to you?” she asked. “The same thing that’s about to happen to the two of you,” Myrlie answered.

At their first day lunch, Betty jokingly needled the waiter over the too-small “gourmet” portions, and the women abandoned the five-mile walk with the other guests for a quiet saunter for three. They signed up for an aerobics class, and Myrlie and Betty giggled in their baseball caps, as Coretta arrived in full makeup. Betty soon turned the class into an impromptu “Achy Brakey” dance, to her friends’ absolute delight.

That first night, they curled up in Coretta’s suite, watching a Chicago Bulls NBA game on TV. “We screamed, we hollered; it didn’t matter who won,” Coretta wrote. “That wasn’t what we’d come for. We came to enjoy not being in charge of anything. We came because we loved one another unconditionally, despite negative news reports about how we’d tried to upstage or jealously compete with one another over the limelight. Imagine that anyone would actually want to rise to prominence on the basis of losing the man she’d loved! . . . When you can relax, let your hair down, and share your secrets—that’s real friendship.”⁸²

As the weekend went on, they broke their pact not to talk about the men they had lost. They talked about the pain of sharing their brilliant, visionary husbands with the world, and the ache of knowing from the start that they would never really have them to themselves. They talked about the fleeting, agonizing nature of spectacular love and loss. They shared stories about their late husbands as men and not as heroes.⁸³ And they talked about their children—thirteen between them—who had been “united by accidents of birth and the misfortunes of death,” and thus had “grown up plagued by visibility and violence.”⁸⁴ They laughed together, and they cried together. And for those few glorious days, they were as free as can be.

They had so much fun that when the weekend was over, they immediately began planning another trip.⁸⁵ It was not to be. A week after returning to their homes, Myrlie and Coretta learned that Betty Shabazz had been hospitalized for severe injuries she suffered in a fire at her home. The fire had been set by her twelve-year-old only grandson, whom his mother, Qubilah, had named Malcolm.⁸⁶

Myrlie called Coretta. “What does God have in mind?” she asked her friend. “What lesson are we supposed to take from this?” The women had no answers. Instead, they were soon gathering for a funeral. Each had visited Betty in the hospital, and Myrlie got there a week before Betty died on June 23, 1997. At her bedside, Myrlie had teased her heavily bandaged and deeply sedated friend, saying “Okay, girl, let’s get it on,” which had been their cue to keep going when they were weary.⁸⁷

“I remember having the urge to put my arms around her and say, as I did, ‘I love you, Betty,’” she wrote in the foreword to Mrs. Shabazz’s biography.⁸⁸ These women’s lives had been punctuated by great love and great loss, and for the moment, loss was victorious again.

A YEAR LATER, IN 1998, MYRLIE STEPPED DOWN AS NAACP BOARD chair, with one year left in her tenure. She felt that her job was done, and she was ready to spread her wings yet again.

“When first elected chairman, I promised to work with the board and our members to restore credibility, financial integrity and focus to the NAACP,” she said. “Together, we have accomplished this mission. I’ve worked 18-hour days, year in and year out. I’ve traveled around this country countless times in this volunteer, non-salaried position. I’ve been able to bring us through the darkest moments of this organization’s history. Now it’s time to move on.”⁸⁹

At sixty-four years old, she had accomplished so much, but still had a hunger in her. She planned to write a second memoir, and to work with Reena at the family foundation in Jackson, to preserve Medgar’s legacy and her own. She was awarded the Spingarn Medal—the NAACP’s highest award, which Medgar had received posthumously in 1963. Myrlie thus joined not just Medgar, but also Roy Wilkins, Rosa Parks, and Walter F. White. It was heady company. But there were still more honors to come.