A knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.
—RICHARD WRIGHT
The day after Medgar’s television speech, Mayor Thompson met with a group of his selection: fourteen prominent Black opponents of the NAACP, including Percy Greene, the status quo–supporting, Sovereignty Commission–paid editor of the Jackson Advocate. In response, a group of fifty Jackson ministers, businessmen, professionals, and workers formed a Jackson Citizens Committee and repudiated Thompson’s group of “false Black leaders” and reaffirmed their support for the Jackson NAACP’s desegregation demands.1 A week later, Thompson met with the Jackson Citizens Committee, and at first agreed to hire Black police officers and crossing guards, as he had promised President Kennedy. But he quickly reneged on the deal, claiming that Medgar and the other council members had misunderstood if they thought he would allow any changes to Jackson’s “way of life.” The demonstrations resumed.2
On May 20, 1963, the Supreme Court ruled in Lombard v. Louisiana that states enforcing segregation in restaurants were in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Eight days later, on May 28, Medgar was working with John Salter and others to arrange rides for a group of Tougaloo students to conduct a sit-in at the Woolworth’s on Capitol Street downtown. The plan was for a picket line to form outside the store to divert police attention while three Black Tougaloo students—Anne Moody, Pearlina Lewis, and Memphis Norman—sat down at the counter and asked to be served. The students arrived at 11 A.M. and entered through the rear “Colored” entrance. They were ignored at first, but once a waitress approached them and told them they could only be served in the back, to which Moody replied that they wished to be served where they were, the situation deteriorated quickly. The waitress cut the lights behind the counter and she and the other waitresses abandoned their posts as white men began to fill the store. Outside, the picketers had been swiftly arrested, eliminating the intended decoy, and news of the protest had been spread by local radio hosts, who urged all available white men to go to the store, punctuating their appeals by playing “Dixie.” The first group to respond to the call came from a local all-white high school. They immediately began hurling racial epithets and chants of “Communist!” at the students, who sat stoically at the counter. Memphis, Moody would later recall, suggested that they pray. As they bowed their heads, the violence began.
Memphis Norman was dragged off his seat and thrown to the floor, as a former police officer named Benny Oliver kicked him in the head and torso until blood trickled from his ears. The attack only ended when a policeman pushed into the store and arrested both men.3 Pearlina was knocked off her seat as well. Moody was slapped and shoved into the counter, but she managed to get back in the seat. Moody said someone grabbed a rope that had been strung across the counter area to prevent others from sitting down and tried to tie it around the women’s necks.4 As the noon lunch hour approached, the crowds grew larger, and wilder.
Joan Trumpauer, a white activist and Freedom Rider who spent two months in Parchman before becoming the first white student to attend Tougaloo, had traveled to the Woolworth’s with Lois Chafee, a Tougaloo house mother, Ed King, and John Salter, to serve as “spotters” outside the Woolworth’s. From a public telephone outside, they periodically called Medgar at the Jackson NAACP office to report what was going on. Once the picket line outside was broken up and most of the people on it arrested, they decided to go inside the Woolworth’s to join the sit-in. Salter, Chafee, and Trumpauer pushed through the crowd, as young white men clutched at their hair and tried to drag them back outside, and they sat down beside Moody and Pearlina.
A tall white man immediately approached the interracial quartet at the counter and demanded to know Salter’s name. His answer touched off a fusillade of violence. As a very public activist, and one of the few who presented as white, Salter had become both well known and, for Mississippi segregationists, a prime target. Once the tall man shouted that this was “John Salter” seated at the counter with Black and white women, the crowd’s unmitigated fury was unleashed. Salter was beaten with bare hands and with brass knuckles; his face was sliced open and the back of his head cut with a glass sugar container someone had smashed into a weapon. The blood pouring down his face and head was soon mixed with whatever food and drink and sludge that the crowd could find to pour over the activists’ heads. They were doused with ketchup, mustard, sugar, vinegar, and even the remains of the pies that had been placed on the counter for the lunchtime rush. Pepper was thrown into Salter’s eyes, and the group were burned with cigarettes. Salter later described it as “a lavish display of unbridled hatred.” 5
Medgar asked King, when he called in to report, if they should call it off. It was far too late for that.
After more than two hours, as the mob began throwing furniture and all but tearing the store apart, Tougaloo president Dr. Adam D. Beittel, arrived to plead with police, more than ninety of whom were assembled outside—some peering into the five-and-dime and watching the mayhem—to calm the crowd and to get the activists safely out of harm’s way. Once the group was finally liberated from the Woolworth’s they retreated to Medgar’s office, where Myrlie was also headed, after picking up Darrell, Reena, and two of the neighbors’ children from school. News of the protest was spreading fast among Black families and civil rights organizations. Myrlie sent the children inside to get their father, where they got a firsthand lesson in civil rights activism, as the students, some injured, others just shaking off the shock of their experience, were milling around inside. When Darrell saw them, the ten-year-old was amazed and confused.
“They had sugar, ketchup, syrup . . . whatever you can think of that would be in a cafeteria—on the top of their heads, their shoulders, their whole body,” he later recalled. “As a young kid, I couldn’t understand. My father took me aside and he said, ‘Darrell, I want to tell you that these people are standing for their rights. They want to be served where . . . only white people are allowed to eat, and they would like to have the respect . . . of any other human being.’ It was a little confusing for me at that time because I couldn’t understand why someone would submit themselves to that sort of treatment and why someone would not want to fight back. But that was one of my father’s main goals and objectives, a nonviolent action. That had more power than anything else. And he tried to explain that to me the best way possible. . . . It was a very practical lesson for me at that point.”6
Myrlie went inside the office and found Reena and Darrell excited over having met the student activists. Despite the anxiety, and with the demonstrators safely out of the Woolworth’s, Medgar quickly understood that the sit-in had given the Jackson campaign momentum and potential leverage against the recalcitrant mayor.
At a packed mass meeting that night at Pearl Street AME Church, Willie Ludden, the NAACP national youth field secretary, Gloster Current, Medgar, David Dennis from CORE, and leaders of the Youth Councils spoke to a capacity crowd, as did Salter, who still wore the clothes covered in ketchup, mustard, and blood from the protest earlier that day. There was a determined feeling in the air, and Medgar hoped that what was happening in Jackson, through its fearless young activists, would match what Dr. King and others had sparked in Montgomery and then in Birmingham. He used his time at the podium to call for a “massive offensive against segregation.”7
The story of the Woolworth’s protest rocketed through Black Jackson neighborhoods and hardened people’s resolve. It was the most violent reaction to a sit-in the country had yet seen. The local TV news in Jackson barely covered it on the night it happened. But by the following morning, an Associated Press photo of the “Mustard Man” and his two female “accomplices” were splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world.
The NAACP also scored some victories. The May 29 Clarion-Ledger reported that twenty-one-year-old Cleve McDowell, a former Jackson State student from rural Drew, Mississippi, had successfully sued for admission to the Ole Miss law school.8 It was a second victory for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Constance Baker Motley, yet with the federal troops gone, McDowell would be forced to face the angry, spitting crowds alone on his first day of class in June. He would do so with a gun concealed in his belt.9
The night of May 29 wasn’t all victorious news. Myrlie was in the bedroom drifting off when she heard one, then another car pass, followed by the sound of shattering glass, with a “whoosh of muffled explosion” that caused their dog Heidi to bark frantically. She ran into the living room and saw flames licking up outside in the carport. She ran outside to grab the garden hose and douse the flames, as Jean Wells threw open her door and joined her on the lawn to help. As the flames receded, the women could see that the source of the blaze had been a twisted rag that had been doused in kerosene, lit on fire, and tossed from one of the passing cars.
Myrlie panicked, thinking the assailant might still be out there, waiting to shoot her as she tried to put out the flames. By the time Mr. Wells and Mr. Young came running over as well, the flames were out and the police had arrived. Somehow the children never woke. The police officers, rather than taking note of the crime, began to question Myrlie. They held out a gas can they discovered next to the house and asked, “Is this yours?”—implying that perhaps Myrlie had started the fire. Growing angry, Myrlie told them the can was used to fill up the lawn mower. After more insulting questions, the officers told her it was likely just a prank.
When Medgar arrived, he leapt out of the car and scooped Myrlie up in his arms, asking if she and the children were okay. Assured that they were, he talked with the officers. The conversation grew tense. Later, when everything had calmed down and the neighbors had gone home, Medgar and Myrlie walked quietly down the hall to check on the children, gently opening and closing their bedroom doors. Medgar, who was walking in front, said, “The police told me you cursed them.”
Darned right she did, she told him, and she wanted to do more. When she turned to look at him, Medgar was grinning. “But Myrlie Mae, you don’t curse,” he said, a full smile now spread across his face. He just couldn’t resist teasing her, even at a time like this. Medgar always told her she was stronger than she thought she was. This incident proved it, but a cold dread set in once they fully processed what could have happened. That night, “Medgar took me in his arms and held me and rocked me back and forth,” Myrlie wrote. “‘I don’t know what I’d do if anything ever happened to you or the children because of what I’m doing,’ he said softly.”10
Burying her head in his chest, Myrlie reminded him that whoever tossed that Molotov cocktail wasn’t trying to kill her, they were trying to kill him. “And if anything happened to you,” she told Medgar, “I don’t think I could live.”11
The next morning, they told the older children what happened. “I will say this,” Myrlie said. “Medgar was wonderful in training those young people,” noting that Darrell and Reena were just ten and eight years old. “He had sessions with them. You hear a certain noise, what do you do? You fall to the floor. You get your three-year-old brother, you drag him along with you. Where is the safest place in the house?” The children would yell that it was the bathroom tub, with proud delight. It was low to the ground and at the back of the house. “He took them through drills.”
They learned to crawl on their stomachs the way the infantrymen had in Europe. “To me it was . . . Army and combat,” Darrell said years later. “A self-protection game.” His father would say, “Okay, we’re going to pretend . . . if someone approached you what would you do? And I said well, I guess I’d run. And he said, no.” The answer was to fight. “If you heard a loud noise or you heard a menacing sound, I think the best thing we should do is fall on the floor and get under cover, get under a table, or get under a bed . . . so that we’re not hit or hurt,” To Darrell, it was all just a game, and a way to play at combat like his father had seen overseas. Seeing it this way was less frightening, perhaps, than having to confront, at ten years old, that something violent might happen to his father, his sister, his little brother, or him.
A similar attack happened to Aaron Henry on April 12 in Clarksdale, only the Molotov cocktail had gone through a window of his house. Mississippi was in the throes of a terror campaign against anyone involved in the struggle for integration and civil rights. The NAACP had officially appealed to the Justice Department, asking for federal protection for Medgar and Henry, but according to Charles Evers, “the Justice Department hardly lifted a finger.”12
Myrlie watched as Medgar’s impatience, frustration, and exhaustion grew and his talk became more fatalistic. He told her one morning, after she’d spent the previous afternoon washing and ironing a full load of fresh shirts for him, that while he appreciated her efforts, he probably wasn’t going to need them.
Other times, he came home and collapsed on the living room sofa, and she had to shake him and get him to move to the bedroom for a proper sleep. On the nights she couldn’t get him off the couch, she sat down beside him and eased his head into her lap. “I could feel the tension and bruises of the day slip away from him as I stroked his hair and rubbed his temples,” she recalled. “In a few minutes he would drop off to sleep, and I would sit there looking down at him, so tired, so much like a little boy who had pushed himself beyond all endurance.”13 His six-day workweeks were stretching to seven days—with no time for the fishing and hunting trips that had provided such a pleasing distraction for him. He had less time to toss the football with Darrell and the other boys on the block or to balance Reena on his knees while he did his Jack LaLanne morning workouts.
Their family time together was at breakfast when Medgar talked to the children about his work. Once, Myrlie recalled, Darrell declared, “I hate white people,” and Medgar told him, “You’re wrong. You’re only hurting yourself . . . hating people is no way to live.” Another time, three-year-old Van made the whole table laugh, when he broke into a civil rights anthem, belting: “Let nobody turn you around!” Invariably Reena, whom Myrlie called the house’s mini-mom, told her father he worked too much and needed to take some time off.14 Those moments of joy were far too fleeting.15
THOMPSON AND THE CITY OF JACKSON, ALONG WITH THE WHITE Citizens’ Councils, weren’t prepared to back down. After the Woolworth’s incident, the mayor obtained an injunction, naming Medgar, Salter, Ed King, the president and trustees of Tougaloo College, Dick Gregory, Gloster Current, the NAACP, CORE, and about a dozen others, enjoining them from “engaging in, sponsoring, inciting or encouraging mass street parades or mass processions or like demonstrations without a permit.” The activists were barred from “unlawful blocking of the streets or sidewalks, trespassing on private property after being warned to leave the premises or . . . congregating on the streets or public places as mobs, and unlawfully picketing business establishments or public buildings in the City of Jackson.”16 Thompson made it clear he intended to enforce the injunction.
“They wanted things stopped and controlled,” Ed King said. “The injunction told us to stop lunch counter sit-ins, marches, demonstrations. . . . We appealed . . . and we got to the federal judge in Jackson for this district in Mississippi, who said that it was a very serious issue of the right to demonstrate and march. . . . You couldn’t even hand out literature. . . . We appealed to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, which upheld the local federal judge, as did the Supreme Court. [But] Medgar said, ‘You have to defy the court system, even if it’s been upheld by federal courts, even if we might win in the Supreme Court a year from now, the movement is destroyed.’” Medgar believed the boycotts and demonstrations needed to continue until Thompson backed down.
And they did. While the NAACP general counsel Robert Carter added to the flurry of lawsuits by filing yet another—seeking to end segregation in all public accommodations in the state, activists held a sit-in at Primo’s Restaurant downtown, while a separate group successfully, if briefly, integrated the city golf course. Another group of more than two dozen knelt in prayer in front of the downtown Post Office and were hauled away by police.17 With city jails full to bursting, the stockading of activists in the fairground detention camp continued, too.
On June 1, with more than 550 protesters—many of them children—packed into the prison camp, Medgar sent an urgent telegram to President Kennedy: “Please, mistreatment of Negro children and their parents reported behind hog wire confines of Jackson Concentration Camp. City, county, and State Law officers involved. Medical attention being denied. Injured in some cases. Urge immediate investigation by Department of Justice agents of these denials of constitutional rights to peaceful demonstrators and protests.”18
Roy Wilkins arrived in Jackson that same day and joined Medgar on the picket line in front of the downtown Woolworth’s—the same one where, less than a week before, violence and mayhem had met the small group of Tougaloo sit-in protesters. Medgar wore a handmade sign over his suit jacket and tie that read “End Brutality in Jackson.” He and Wilkins were quickly arrested by helmeted police brandishing cattle prods as press photographers captured images that would rocket around national newsrooms. Also arrested was Thelton Henderson, the first Black lawyer to serve in the U.S. Justice Department, who had merely been observing the demonstration, and Helen Wilcher, who had succeeded Aaron Henry as state NAACP president at Medgar’s urging when Henry stepped down. Henderson was quickly released. Wilkins, Wilcher, and Medgar were booked on charges of restraint of trade and released on $1,000 bonds.
Hours later, young activists staged a march downtown that attracted the now-standard response from police and led to the arrest and detention of forty additional activists.19 Even with this dismal conclusion of the march, Thompson finally relented, agreeing to hire Black police officers and crossing guards and to “upgrade Negro city employees.” He said the negotiations for other demands, including school and public facilities desegregation, were “ongoing.” He also announced that Jackson voters would be asked to approve a $500,000 to $1 million bond to add more stockades to the detention camp.20
At the mass meeting that night, Wilkins took to the stage and spoke passionately, in terms Medgar had used before. “In Birmingham,” he said, “the authorities turned the dogs and fire hoses loose on peaceable demonstrators. Jackson has added another touch to this expression of the Nazi spirit with the setting up of hog-wired concentration camps. This is pure Nazism and Hitlerism. The only thing missing is an oven.”21
Outwardly, Wilkins’s presence at the protest and his fiery speech at the Masonic Temple were a show of national NAACP support for Medgar’s headlong dive into grassroots protest. But behind the scenes, tensions were rising to a boil.
Medgar had deliberately taken Wilkins to that Woolworth’s because with the injunction in place, he knew what would happen, and he hoped the high-profile arrests of himself and the national leader of the NAACP would get Washington’s attention and force the mayor’s hand. King said he was told that Wilkins believed otherwise: that despite the injunction they wouldn’t be arrested “just for picketing.” Still, Ed King had come away from Wilkins’s willingness to march with Medgar and particularly his speech at the mass meeting impressed and hopeful that perhaps the NAACP’s attitude toward Medgar’s activism was changing.
King said he was quickly disabused of that hope during the NAACP strategy meeting upstairs at the Masonic Temple the very next night. Medgar’s allies at the meeting, including Houston Wells and his brother James, known as “J.G.,” reiterated their appeal for the national office to pay for full-time security for Medgar and for the Evers home, citing the firebombing attempt just days before, which could have injured or killed Myrlie and the children. But Gloster Current, who was in Jackson at New York’s behest, and who considered Medgar a friend, told the men the national organization had “more important things to do with its money” than to look after Medgar.22 King was stunned. But there was more to come.
After the meeting, during which the national office’s priorities—voter registration and NAACP membership sign-ups—were reiterated yet again, Wilkins asked to speak with Medgar alone. Medgar motioned to Ed King to come with him anyway, and King said he felt that Medgar wanted someone to stand witness. Wilkins consented to King coming along. The Tougaloo chaplain had become one of Medgar’s closest aides and confidants. He said Wilkins must have presumed that, as a white Southerner and a college chaplain, King understood that this student militancy and insistence on continuing the cycle of protests and arrests, and drawing violent responses from authorities, was the wrong approach.
The three men went into Medgar’s office and closed the door, at which point Wilkins unloaded on Medgar for getting himself and Wilkins arrested. As King described it, an angry Wilkins practically yelled at Medgar: “Who do you think you are? Another Martin Luther King? There’s too much Martin Luther King in this country now.’”
The Kennedy administration, which had been a reluctant player in the desegregation events unfolding across the South, didn’t want “a second Birmingham anywhere in America.” “And Wilkins told Medgar, ‘If you work with Dr. King, and if you do not stop these demonstrations, you will be fired,’” King recalled. Medgar was diplomatic in the moment, and according to King, he told Wilkins he understood.
After Wilkins left, Reverend King said Medgar told him that this was not the first time Wilkins had threatened to fire him. He said Roy Wilkins made the same threat a year before, over his support for James Meredith’s bid to enter Ole Miss. According to King, the administration wanted to quiet the violent opposition to integration until after Kennedy was reelected in 1964, and to keep the peace with the Southern, overwhelmingly Democratic, states. With the Birmingham upheavals finally cooled on May 10, Kennedy wanted a respite from the image of continual uprising in the American South. For that to happen, the civil rights movement needed to “get off the newspapers, get out of the streets,” as Ed King put it. The violent Woolworth’s sit-in had achieved the opposite result, and Wilkins was just as frustrated by Medgar’s insistence on backing the militancy of Mississippi youth as Kennedy was. Ed King, for whom militancy was the only course, even accused Wilkins of “carrying out the orders of Washington” in seeking to slow Medgar down.
Thurgood Marshall and the other lawyers at the national NAACP had nonetheless backed Meredith’s bid; a sign that Wilkins’s opinions weren’t universally shared in the national office. But national had pointedly dissuaded Medgar from applying to Ole Miss Law School himself.
Whatever Medgar and Wilkins’s past exchanges had been, this new rebuke stung Medgar, King said. He knew the NAACP was tired of bailing out protesters, whose tactics they opposed. He knew they opposed the sit-ins and marches, and that NAACP headquarters in New York had lost patience with him. The actions taken by Medgar’s Youth Councils and high school and college activists clearly defied New York and their mandate to concentrate on voter registration. But he also deeply believed that only direct action, from and by Black Mississippians, would turn the segregationist tide in the state.
Medgar left the meeting feeling defeated. Myrlie wrote that “Medgar was more despondent that night than I had ever seen him. He had aged ten years in the preceding months. As he related what happened at the meeting, tears trickled down his cheeks.”23 And then there were the ongoing security concerns. Houston Wells and other friends of Medgar had begun pressing the national office to provide Medgar with security protection, in the form of bodyguards or, at least, armed patrols at the Evers home. The requests were repeatedly declined. “I was livid that the NAACP put so little value on Medgar’s life,” Myrlie wrote. When she told Medgar as much, he replied: “It’s okay. When my time comes, I’m going to go regardless of the protections I have. Besides, I don’t want anyone to get hurt trying to save me.”24
No one who knew Medgar believed he had a martyr complex. Far from it. His friends insisted vigorously that he wanted to live, for Myrlie and for their children. Since Van was born, they had even talked about having another child, as he had always wanted four. Myrlie had recently given Medgar the blessed news that she was pregnant again, which she’d discovered not long before the firebombing. They’d barely had time or space to absorb, let alone make plans, as they each felt their daily mission was to fight for their lives.25 On the night of Wilkins’s rebuke, as they lay holding each other after much tossing and turning, Medgar for the first time expressed doubts about bringing another child into the world,26 particularly in the state considered the most violent and segregated in the nation.27
Ed King said, “Medgar went through hell the next week or so. The National Office sent people down here to really control him.” NAACP headquarters was straining under the weight of $64,000 in bond debts,28 and Medgar, Salter, King, and others were in open defiance of New York.
ON JUNE 7, LENA HORNE ARRIVED TO SUPPORT THE JACKSON Movement by appearing at an NAACP rally at the Masonic Temple that night. Medgar picked her up from the airport and brought her to their home for lunch. Myrlie was thrilled to have the actress and singer visiting them. She attended the mass meeting that night, and her heart swelled with pride as Ms. Horne talked about how blessed Mississippians were to have a leader like Medgar, who had allayed her every fear as they sped through the streets of Jackson in his Oldsmobile. The hall, jammed with more than three thousand people to see Horne and Dick Gregory, too, was captivated.
“The battle . . . being fought here in Jackson, as elsewhere in the south, is our nation’s primary crisis,” Ms. Horne said. “Let it be understood that the courage and grim determination of the Negro people in these cities of the South have challenged the moral integrity of the entire nation.”29
Myrlie recalled that police “ringed the building and patrolled the halls and doorways inside. The press was out in force, and the words of freedom songs swelled and echoed and burst through the open windows to flood the air for blocks around. It was a night of tears and laughter, of high emotions, of unity and determination and brotherhood. When the words of ‘We Shall Overcome’ rang from thousands of throats, we were overcome, and elderly Negro men wept along with high school girls.”30
“Freedom has never been free,” Medgar told the crowd that night. “I love my children,” he said to a hushed room. “And I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die and die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.”31
For all the pride and joy she felt in that moment, in her heart, Myrlie knew with an aching certainty that she would lose him. There was not even a question in her mind anymore. She felt incredibly lonely. It was unfair. She felt scandalously robbed before anything had yet been taken from her.
At a small, private party after the mass meeting for the out-of-town guests that night, a Friday, Medgar and Myrlie shared a rare evening of much-needed laughs. When a group of friends began debating the wisdom of “young marriages,” Medgar joked that even though he had “robbed the cradle,” it had worked out quite nicely. Then he set Myrlie blushing by declaring to the room, rare for him in public, how much he loved her. They left the party separately: she took some friends home in her station wagon so she could pick up the children from the babysitter, and Medgar went to drop off some NAACP workers at their homes.
Myrlie expected to be home first, but she was surprised when Medgar sped into the driveway just behind her. Once the children were in bed, he explained that he and several others had noticed three white men they didn’t recognize in the Masonic Temple that night. One of them was smoking a cigarette. His secretary saw this man had wandered upstairs to the floor where Medgar’s office was; he’d said he was just looking around and then left. One of the NAACP workers Medgar drove home said they thought they’d seen those same three men in a car, possibly following them after the party, meaning that maybe they’d followed them to the party as well.32 This news alarmed him enough that Medgar didn’t want Myrlie going into a dark house that night alone.
They already lived with safety plans—never sit or stand by a window; always exit the car on the front passenger side, to be closer to the house’s front door; and avoid the large, wooded lot adjacent to the Youngs’ home. Medgar had walked that lot area during the day and had decided it was not safe. He discouraged the children from exploring and playing there. The woods formed the point of a triangle of streets where Missouri Street, which stretched behind the Youngs’ home, and Guynes Street ran into Delta Drive, where the businesses were white-owned. There was a cleaners, a small nightclub, a small restaurant called Dog and Suds, Joe’s Drive-In Theater, where Medgar had taken the kids to see Psycho, and Pittman’s Handy Andy Grocery.
The following day, Saturday, June 8, Medgar spent all day at his office, intermittently driving down to Capitol Street to see that the boycott was holding up and how empty the streets were. He had begun periodically calling home to speak to each of the children, and on one of the calls that day, Medgar seemed shaken. He was being followed every day, by one or two police cars, but that day, he told Myrlie, as he was stepping out of his car, one of them had jammed “into reverse” and tried to back into him.
“I jumped away just in time,” he told her. “I have witnesses . . . several other people saw it. It was no mistake.” This incident seemed to genuinely rattle Medgar, who didn’t frighten easily.33
THE NEWS FROM THE NAACP NATIONAL OFFICE AT THE STRATEGY meeting that day was not good. New York had begun “to cut off the bail bond money to end all large demonstrations,” Salter later wrote. They also packed the local strategy committee with conservative clergy, he added. Medgar, already under intense pressure from national headquarters, was “functionally immobilized. Knowing Medgar,” Salter added, “we felt his heart and mind were with the struggle in the field. He made no effort to bridge the quickly deepening gap, and his involvement from that point on was minimal. The national office was choking the Jackson Movement to death. It waned into almost nothing [by] the second week in June.”34
Medgar and Myrlie were awakened Sunday morning by the phone, and Myrlie had had enough. She snatched the receiver off the hook and put it right back down, insisting that Medgar get even a bit more rest. When the phone rang again as she was serving him breakfast, Myrlie lost her composure. She grabbed the receiver and told the person on the line, who was calling from the NAACP office and asking where Medgar was, that he would get there when he got there.35
Medgar was leading groups of Black protesters that day to white churches to attempt to enter the sanctuaries. It is an idea that Ed King said had come from Martin Luther King Jr., who favored challenging clergy to live up to their faith when it came to opposing racism and segregation. Unsurprisingly, the activists were all turned away. “Medgar made himself very visible, taking some Black people to First Baptist Church where Gov. Ross Barnett was a Sunday school teacher,” Ed King said. “Medgar could understand and [even] laugh about the media angle,” he added. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Ross Barnett had let some Black people come into his church? Anyway, they were turned away, too.” Medgar was not arrested, as he had expected to be. “Maybe the white powers backed off it for a little,” King said.
Medgar returned home before dinnertime and collapsed on the sofa, Myrlie remembered. She asked if she could do anything for him. “‘No,’ he said. ‘Just love me.’” Myrlie laughed and told him that wasn’t a hard thing to do. And then she took the phone off the hook for the rest of the evening.36 He was still asleep on the sofa when Myrlie and the children returned from evening church services, where she often played the piano for the choir.
When he finally stirred, after the children had already gone to bed, Myrlie was sitting opposite him, just watching him sleep. It felt like a blessing seeing him rest. She told him that several church members had told her they were praying for him, and with his eyes still closed, he responded that he would surely need it. When he opened them and saw where she was sitting, on a chair facing the sofa and the front window, he gave a hard look. “Girl, if you don’t get up from there. You’re gonna get your head blown off,” he said to her, sitting up.
Myrlie, who always had a comeback, quoted one of the things he would say to her. “My philosophy,” she told him, “is that I’m not going until my time comes.”
He still insisted that she move out of sight of the window. “There’s no use courting it,” he said.37
She asked him where he expected her to sit, with his big self sprawled across the sofa, then squeezed in beside him, his head in her lap. He seemed relaxed, but he wouldn’t stop talking about their life insurance policy, vowing to find the money to pay the premium. For the first time, he expressed genuine fear that something might happen to him, and he made her promise that if anything did, she would take good care of their children.38
“I told him I couldn’t live without him,” Myrlie said. “Medgar was shedding tears at the same time. And he told me, ‘Myrlie, you are stronger than you think you are. You take care of my children.’ I’ll never forget that, never forget that. He trusted me. He felt that I had a strength that I knew I didn’t have. But he knew that I was a fierce protector, not only of him, but of our children as well. I’ll never forget that.”
They lay on the sofa together that night and wept in each other’s arms.
The following day, Monday, June 10, the family had breakfast, and Medgar spent much of the morning in the backyard with Van, tossing a tiny football while Myrlie took the older kids to school. When she returned, he asked Myrlie to take Van inside, so he could spend time on his own admiring the plum tree he’d planted there. Myrlie felt that something had shifted in Medgar. He was settled, and no longer afraid, but also palpably despondent.
“Myrlie, I think we’re going to have our best year ever for plums,”39 he said, with a kind of empty optimism that made her feel more sad than hopeful.
MEDGAR RELEASED A DEFIANT STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO THE city’s latest injunction against demonstrations. In it, he slammed Jackson officials’ “unique capacity for speaking from two sides of their mouths . . . why spank a tottering infant? Why enjoin a ‘faltering’ movement, as they describe it? White leaders in Jackson gave the world the answer today. Their injunction proceedings have proven that our movement is sharp, vital, and inclusive. They are hurting inside. This is their outcry.” 40 Despite his bravado, Medgar was discouraged, and with the relentless obstruction of Black conservative clergy, paid operatives of the Sovereign Commission including press outlets like the Jackson Advocate, community resolve was indeed buckling.
Medgar got home that night and read to the children before they went to bed. Once they were asleep, he and Myrlie talked in a way that left her more afraid than ever. “If I go tonight, if I go next week, if I go next year, I feel I’m ready to go,” he said, in a voice as calm as could be.
Myrlie told him not to talk that way, and he told her she shouldn’t be afraid of death. “I know it’s hard not to be,” he said. “But it’s something that comes to everyone someday.” 41
He hadn’t told Myrlie that earlier that day, he’d been called by Felix Dunn, who headed the NAACP branch in Gulfport, Mississippi. Dunn said a local white attorney who was privately sympathetic to the movement had told him to warn Medgar that he should “be careful to have someone see him home each night and to arrange for guards around the house.” The attorney had it on good authority that “an attempt was going to be made on Medgar’s life.”42
On Tuesday, June 11, Medgar was up early, and after breakfast, Myrlie noticed he kissed each child on the forehead repeatedly. He held her close and lingered in the hug. He called home several times that afternoon. “What’s the matter, haven’t you got anything to do?” she remembered chiding him after the third call.
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” he told her. “My love to you and the kids. I’ll see you tonight.”43
At his office, Medgar met with Aaron Henry to discuss their plan to travel to Washington, D.C., the following day to testify on behalf of the Mississippi NAACP before the House Judiciary Committee in support of civil rights legislation, and to coordinate their testimony.44 Salter recalled that he “saw Medgar late . . . [that] afternoon. He was dead tired and really discouraged—sick at what was happening to the Jackson Movement, but still too much an organizational staff man to openly challenge it. Back in January . . . he had openly pushed the national office, telling New York to speed up the Jackson school desegregation suit—in which two of his own children were plaintiffs—and hinted if they didn’t, he might resign his job. The national office had speeded it up—a little. But in this situation, he didn’t buck the national office. We had a long talk and, despite the internal divisions, an extremely cordial one, much like old times. He was more disheartened than I had ever known him to be.” 45
The situation for the Jackson Movement was bleak indeed. After 650 arrests, and with so many still being held in the hell of the fairground stockades, there was still no biracial commission, and few concrete gains, other than Thompson’s vague promise to add a couple of Negro police officers. Voter registration remained anemic in the Mississippi Delta, and the Voter Education Project had growing doubts about the efficacy of the COFO coalition in the state. There were the persistent threats and police harassment. Medgar mused to a friend, “I’m looking to be shot, any time I step out of a car.” 46
In Alabama that afternoon, Gov. George Wallace, channeling Governor Barnett, made himself a hero to white nationalists by defying a federal court order that allowed Vivian Malone and James Hood admittance to the University of Alabama. Wallace made his stand in front of Foster Auditorium before Alabama National Guard troops, federalized by the Kennedy administration, ensured that Malone and Hood would integrate the university as Meredith had done in Mississippi.
Medgar and his team watched this unfold on television from the office. It was a welcome uplift. And then at 8:00 P.M. Eastern time, President Kennedy’s television and radio address began. The notes he sounded were not unlike those in Medgar’s televised speech.
“Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free,” Kennedy said. “And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops. It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal. It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case.” 47
No president had ever put into words meant for a national audience such expressions of racial equanimity. Kennedy, who had not begun as a civil rights man, was speaking as much to the humanity of Black lives as Medgar did every day. He spoke from the same source of moral authority—the role of international moral warrior America had inherited in World War II. He presented to Americans the fundamental moral crisis that had plagued the nation from its very founding.
And he was making an announcement.
“Next week,” he said. “I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.” Kennedy touted the forward advances the Supreme Court had authorized and the executive branch’s modern commitments to hiring without regard to race. He also said there were things only the legislative branch could do. “I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments.”
Kennedy went on to announce that with the pace of integration moving anemically, despite progress in “seventy-five cities” over the prior two weeks, the legislation he planned to send to Congress would “authorize the Federal Government to participate more fully in lawsuits designed to end segregation in public education,” and seek greater protection for the right to vote. It was a full-scale war on the Southern way of life, and an embrace, from the White House, of the “first-class citizenship” Medgar had been touting.
“This is one country,” Kennedy said. “It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to 10 percent of the population that you can’t have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go into the streets and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.”
Kennedy spoke for just fourteen minutes, but his words echoed into history. The speech was thrilling for Medgar and his fellow activists. It was the culmination of all their cajoling and demands of the White House. It was also a triumph for the NAACP, which the summer before had gathered at the White House to meet with Kennedy. For white Southerners, including the Klan and White Citizens’ Councils in Mississippi, it was a declaration of war. Kennedy’s bill called for the federally sanctioned desegregation not just of schools and colleges, but hotels, restaurants, shops, beaches, and other public accommodations—the very things activists were conducting sit-ins and marches to achieve.
MYRLIE HAD ALLOWED THE KIDS TO STAY UP AND WATCH KENNEDY’S speech. She and Van had curled up on the bed in her and Medgar’s room, while Darrell and Reena sat on the floor to watch. It felt like a singular triumph: the president of the United States echoing Medgar’s call for dignity, decency, and first-class citizenship for the millions of Black Americans whose grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ hands built this country and more than one million of whom had, like Medgar, gone to war for its ideals. Kennedy was a fellow World War II veteran, and it was striking that it fell to these veterans to take up the fight against racial tyranny at home that they had abroad. Myrlie felt prouder than ever that her husband had played a part in Kennedy’s transformation from reluctance to eloquence and action on the matter of segregation. She thought of her own father, whose bitter disappointment after serving his country had been so unshakable. Perhaps other Black men, sometime soon, would not have to carry that burden around. She drifted off, thinking how thrilled she would be to congratulate Medgar when he got home, and how she and the children would pepper him with questions until he begged them to let him get some sleep. After all, tomorrow was a workday.
A MASS MEETING WAS HELD AFTER KENNEDY’S ADDRESS, AT NEW Jerusalem church—a venue the Jackson Movement hadn’t used before. It was quite a comedown from the inspiration of the president’s speech, and a far cry from the packed auditorium that had gathered at the Masonic Temple for Lena Horne and Dick Gregory less than a week before. “The mass meetings had [quickly] collapsed to just token pretty participation,” Ed King said. The Jackson Movement, King said, “had been destroyed because of the interventions of Washington putting pressure on the National NAACP.”
The meeting lacked some of the basics of logistics and security that had become standard at the Masonic Temple. Instead, organizers tapped a group of teenagers, including then fifteen-year-old Hezekiah Watkins, whom they’d used in the past to pass out literature and leaflets outside prior mass meetings, to patrol the church grounds and watch for anyone who seemed out of place. After his nightmarish stint in Parchman, Watkins been drawn into the movement by Medgar and participated in the Jackson protests. He had gone from being an angry teenager whose little gang was spoiling for a fight with white Mississippi, to an activist who had spent time in the fairgrounds gulag the governor had built. He was enthusiastic about his assignment that night.
“We were given guns because it had been stated that there was a plot . . . on [Medgar Evers’s] life.” The teens rode up and down the block on their bicycles before and during the meeting. “We were told if you see anything suspicious to come back and let us know, but if anybody tries to jump on you, you defend yourself. And we were all for it, to be honest with you,” he said. His only regret was that he wouldn’t be able to hear Medgar’s speech.
He wouldn’t have missed much if he had been searching for inspiration.
Salter recalled the meeting as tense. National NAACP staffers used the event to formally announce that the focus of the Jackson Movement would now officially be voter registration and that while the boycott could continue, there would be no more demonstrations of any kind. “NAACP T-Shirts were being sold by Medgar who had no enthusiasm at all,” Salter said. “He said virtually nothing at the meeting [and] looked, indeed, as though he was ready to die.” 48
Ed King recalled a time when James Meredith and Medgar had tried to explain to him the constant tension between activists on the ground and the national NAACP. Medgar, he said, asked: “Ed, do you think the NAACP exists by having fish fries and donations out of the poverty of Black people in America?” He reminded King that “there’s no Black middle class big enough” to fund a massive national organization. “The NAACP exists because of foundation money and rich whites and money from Wall Street. And the NAACP is controlled by the white House, the Justice Department, and no donations will go, that Washington does not approve of. And Washington does not want Dr. King and Medgar Evers working together.”
Ed King had been schooled in the multiracial collaborative haven at Tougaloo, and it didn’t make sense to him that factionalism could exist in a movement that supposedly shared a single goal. Besides, he said, it was already too late.
King believed that by June 11, 1963, Medgar had decided to shake off that sense of defeat and to trust his own instincts about how best to force a change in Mississippi. “Medgar called me aside and to a small room right at the entrance to the church,” King said, “and we talked. And it was like a religious experience. He had made up his mind. He was a liberated person. He said, ‘I am going to invite Martin Luther King to come to Jackson, to work with SNCC and CORE.’ And I said, ‘There have been these threats.’ And he said, ‘Yes, I will be fired from my job with the NAACP tomorrow or Thursday.’” Medgar said he expected his firing to make the news, maybe even nationally, not that it mattered. “I’ve made up my mind. And I think I’m doing what I have to do.” King said the conversation lasted ten or fifteen minutes, “and in a religious context that I don’t talk to many people about. . . .
“I wasn’t his pastor, but I was close to him,” King said. “He knew I would understand everything he was talking about. . . . He was no longer the indecisive person who might be crying at his desk. He had mentioned to me at one point that he had trouble paying his life insurance and did not have enough . . . that was very heavy” on his mind. He knew what he wanted to do, and he intended to see it done.
Charles Evers later recalled that “until ’63, Medgar mostly did what Roy Wilkins asked, but in ’63 Medgar began stepping out on his own. If Wilkins had fired Medgar that year, I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.” 49
AFTER THE MEETING, FOLLOWED BY DINNER AT A FRIEND’S HOME, Medgar dropped Gloster Current off at attorney Jack Young’s home, where he was staying in Jackson. It was nearly midnight, and Medgar seemed weary. He told Current, “Everywhere I go lately, somebody has been following me,” and so Current invited him to come inside. He felt certain Young would let Medgar stay until morning, so he could drive home at sunup.
Medgar declined. “I’m tired,” he said. “I want to go home to my family.” They briefly revisited Medgar getting a bodyguard, which Current had rejected days before on the organization’s behalf. Medgar could never have afforded protection without the NAACP’s help, but regardless, he was too exhausted to discuss it further. Current recalled that as they parted, Medgar “just held my hand and held it and held it.”50
He got into his car, backed out of the driveway, and started for home. It was now just after midnight, June 12.
Darrell and Reena had begged to stay up after the president’s speech and the news to watch The Untouchables, and Myrlie consented. It was summertime, so there was no school the following day, a Wednesday. She cuddled a sleeping Van on the bed and drifted off herself as Reena and Darrell sprawled out on the floor, elbows down, heads in hands, staring into the TV screen. They were lost in their escape to 1930s Chicago, where Elliot Ness and his band of FBI do-gooders battled organized crime, when they heard their father’s car pull into the driveway, at nearly half past midnight.
For the two elder Evers children, that sound meant precious “dad time” and little gifts or sweets and time to play or cuddle before finally giving in and going to sleep. They sat up with a bolt of excitement. “Daddy’s home!” However, their joy quickly turned to shock, as the low hum of Robert Stack and Walter Winchell was shattered by a single loud bang. It sounded almost like an explosion.
The sound startled Myrlie and Van out of their sleep and she sat straight up on the bed, knowing instinctively what that awful sound was. The children reacted quickly, too, out of instinct and the instruction that Medgar had provided. Darrell grabbed little Van in his arms and cradled him. They went flat on the floor. Everyone was terrified. The bang was followed by a crash that made it clear something had come through the living room window.
Myrlie told the children to stay down as she walked gingerly down the hallway toward the front door. Standing in the dark, she pulled the door open, to find her worst nightmare had finally become real.
She screamed. It was loud and guttural and deep. She screamed and screamed, and she dropped to her knees.
Medgar was lying facedown in a pool of blood, his torso on the low steps just outside the door. There was a long, semicircular pool of gore stretching from the porch, around the front of Myrlie’s station wagon, and toward the carpark where Medgar had parked behind Myrlie’s car. He was moving just a little, and his hand was outstretched, clutching his keys in his right hand.
Myrlie was screaming so loudly and with so much shock and agony that Darrell and Reena forgot their training. They leapt up from the bedroom floor and sprinted down the hallway, Van tottering behind them. Soon, all three were beside their mother on the stoop, and everyone was crying.
“Daddy, get up. Get up, Daddy. Get up!” Now the children were screaming, too.
Myrlie was clutching at Medgar and trying to somehow pull him inside. She was yelling his name, and desperately praying. Scattered on the ground in front of him were the T-shirts and posters he was carrying from the meeting earlier that night. They read “Jim Crow Must Go.” Medgar had been shot in the back, with the bullet exploding out of his chest and crashing through the living room window. The bullet had knocked Medgar down, but he had used all his strength to drag himself halfway up the driveway and around the front of Myrlie’s station wagon toward the door. He clearly tried desperately to drag himself into the house, where his family, but also his guns, were. He seemed to be trying to talk, but no sound was coming out.
A second shot rang out. This one was even closer. Myrlie thought for certain the whole house was about to be under siege. The children were in a complete panic, begging their father to please get up. This was the strong man who could do anything. He had to be able to do this, too.
Across the street, Johnnie Pearl Young, who had been up, unable to sleep, heard the gunshots clear as day. “I was sitting up in my kitchen, sewing,” she said. “And all of a sudden, I heard those shots: boom, boom.”
The second shot had been fired by Houston Wells, Jean’s husband, who when he heard the gunfire ran out from next door and fired into the air to try to frighten the assassin (or assassins) away. He was still in his underwear and T-shirt; after firing, he ran back inside to get dressed. He quickly ran back outside and across the gory carpark while Jean stood on her front porch in shock and tears, aching for her friend.
“All of us were on the patio then,” Myrlie said. “Too late. That was it. My life, my love, was gone. There were three little children standing there.”
“He must have been awfully tired,” Myrlie later recalled. “Because he got out on the driver’s side, and we had determined that that was not the thing to do. You get out on the other side, which was closest to the door, and there was less of a chance of being a target. But he got out on the driver’s side that night, and he was the perfect target.”51
FOR MRS. YOUNG, THE NIGHT WAS FULL OF SHOCKS. HEARING Myrlie’s screams was just so unusual—not something you’d expect from the couple—and her first thought was to walk over and admonish Myrlie for hollering so loudly. “I got across the street,” she said, “And there was Medgar down on the [ground] just pumping blood like water. It scared me so bad I forgot what I even went over there to tell her. I turned around and ran straight back to my house.”
Young’s husband had managed to remain asleep through the gunshots and screams, but she shook him awake, yelling, “Get up, get up. Something has happened to Medgar! When I said that, he [pulled] a pair of pants on and forgot his shirt, and he passed me and ran back over there across to Myrlie’s house.”
By the time the Youngs got to the Evers house, Houston Wells and another neighbor had already pulled the twin mattress off Reena’s bed and carried it outside to use as a gurney. Two police officers had arrived, responding to multiple calls. One of them later said there was so much blood, it looked like someone had butchered a hog.52
It was the summer before her tenth-grade year, and Carolyn Wells (later Carolyn Wells Gee) was taking advantage of the chance to stay up late. Her younger sister was close friends with Reena, and Carolyn had once spent a nervous night in the Evers home babysitting the Evers kids. Her parents didn’t allow their children—including Carolyn’s younger brother Terry, who was best friends with Frank Figgers—to participate in marches or protests, but the children knew that their parents were NAACP members, and their phone sometimes rang with death threats from white racists. When she heard the gunshot and screams, Carolyn and her younger sister peered out their bedroom window, which was standing height and directly faced the Evers carport.
“I went to my window because I heard crying and screaming,” she said. “I saw [Mr. Evers]. He was laying halfway across the steps on the porch, and Myrlie and the children were standing over him crying and screaming. Police came out but the ambulance never came.53
Mrs. Young and Jean Wells were soon guiding Myrlie and her sobbing children back inside the house. Mrs. Young recalled saying, “Let the men take care of it, Myrlie. I don’t want you out there listening. And I don’t want you looking at your husband. You know he’s been shot. . . . And I don’t want you to keep on hollering and screaming. You are going to upset these children [even more].”
Medgar’s friends rolled him onto his back and placed him on the mattress. With the officers’ help, they placed the makeshift gurney into the back of Wells’s station wagon. Medgar had been shot through his back. The bullet had cracked his ribs and tore through a lung.54 His eyes were open, and he was breathing rapidly. The men covered him with a blanket, and as Jean and Johnnie Pearl kept Myrlie from going back outside and climbing into that station wagon with Medgar, the car sped off to University Hospital.
Medgar was still trying to speak but managed to get out just two short sentences that he half whispered as the car barreled down the road and blood gurgled from his lips: “Sit me up,” he said, and then, “Turn me loose.”55
Two doors down from the Everses, Dr. Britton took a frantic call from Myrlie and dashed out his front door. He hopped into his car and followed Wells’s car to the hospital. Britton was the Everses’ personal physician, and he had delivered Van and often treated the family free of charge. He hoped that as a member of the Federal Civil Rights Commission, he could get the segregated hospital to take urgent action to save Medgar’s life.
When they arrived there, Medgar had been wheeled into the Negro wing. Britton yelled to the all-too-passive white physicians, “Do you know who this man is? This is Medgar Evers, field secretary of the NAACP.” That caused them to take action,56 but there was no saving him.
BACK INSIDE HER HOME WITH HER CHILDREN, MYRLIE COLLAPSED in prayer and tears. She sobbed and sobbed that she could accept God’s will. She knew in her heart that Medgar was gone. She snatched up the telephone again and called Jack Young’s home, and he handed Gloster Current the phone in time to hear Myrlie scream: “They’ve killed my husband! They’ve killed my husband!”57
Mrs. Young took the children across the street to her house for the night, while Jean Wells tried to comfort Myrlie as she furiously began packing Medgar’s toothbrush and pajamas for a hospital stay her heart knew would never happen. She became obsessed with figuring out how many pajama pants he might need.
Jean answered a call from Dr. Britton, who said Medgar had regained consciousness. Then another friend, Harriet Tate, came into her bedroom, and Myrlie could tell by the look on her face that it was over. Medgar was pronounced dead at 1:14 A.M. on June 12, 1963.58
Myrlie needed to see her children, to hold them and comfort them. She staggered across the street to Johnnie Pearl’s house, past a smattering of neighbors and white bystanders from the neighboring street who had begun to gather in front of the house. “My mission now was to protect them,” she said of her three young children. It was what she promised Medgar. She just didn’t know where to begin, because she had never had any intention of living without him.
When she got to the children, they were silent. They seemed stunned. She held them and told them everything was going to be all right. Neither she nor they seemed to actually believe that, though. She told them they’d be spending the night at Auntie Jo’s house and that she would come back for them in the morning. Then she somehow managed to get back across the street to her house, which the police, who had now grown in number, were now scouring.
“They were standing in my yard, stooping over the blood in the carport, everywhere,” she recalled. “And I saw them and recognized them as the men who had followed Medgar everywhere for months; the men who had tried to run him down a few days before, the men who had asked me if I had used the gasoline can recently, and they looked at me and I screamed at them, ‘Get off my property!’”
Myrlie’s shock and grief now turned into a cold rage. “I clenched my fists and wanted a machine gun to mow them down, knowing and not caring that I, too, would be cut down as Medgar had been. For the first time in my life, I felt a hatred so deep and malignant I could have killed every one of them.”59
She screamed at these empty white faces, demanding to know if a Negro’s blood looked any different to them, or if they thought that by killing Medgar, they could kill the movement he was leading. One of her friends calmed her enough to answer whatever questions she could. Myrlie reached down at one point and touched Medgar’s blood, then looked at the blood on her hand. It was warm, and she just looked at it and looked at it.
That blood, she believed, was on the hands of every police officer there and every police officer in Jackson. It was smeared all over Mayor Allen Thompson, who would soon express “shock” on behalf his bloodstained city. Medgar’s blood rained like a monsoon over Gov. Ross Barnett and Ole Miss and over the White Citizens’ Council and the Klan and the Sovereign Commission. Medgar’s blood stained every segregated part of Mississippi.
At some point in those painful, and still dark, early hours, Myrlie made what would be the hardest calls. She called Aunt Myrlie in Vicksburg, to tell her the awful news. She could barely summon the words: “Medgar is gone.” Aunt Myrlie immediately offered to come to Jackson, and she was relieved. Her final call was to Charles’s wife, Nan. She had been reluctant to call her. She and Nan were close in age and in temperament, and that gave them a bond.
Myrlie knew it would be easier telling Nan than telling Charles directly. He and Medgar were so tight; the proverbial “two peas.” She knew Charles was going to take this hard, and that he would be bent on revenge. She would let Nan tell him. When the two women hung up, sobbing and spent, she padded into her room and sank onto her bed. The house was empty, and there was no one left to call. She buried her head in her hands, and let the tears fall.
“And then,” she said, “everything became a blur.”60
CHARLES GOT THE BAD NEWS FROM NAN WHEN HE CAME HOME from the club he ran in Chicago, a few hours before sunrise. “They shot Medgar tonight,” she told him. Charles first thought his brother had been injured, and being a solutions man, he started talking through what he needed to do: to pack a bag and head to Jackson to help Myrlie take care of Medgar at the hospital and navigate the issues around his being a Black patient in a white hospital. He was hearing what he wanted to hear. After all, it wasn’t easy to kill an Evers. Crazy Jim had taught his boys that. Nan took his hands and held him still.
“No Charles,” she said. “He’s dead.”
With that, Charles’s world seemed to collapse, all at once. Every emotion from grief to rage to guilt surged through him at the same time. And disbelief, even as Nan explained the few details she knew from her heartbreaking call with Myrlie. Medgar had just come home from an NAACP mass meeting . . . Someone shot him as he got out of his car . . . He never made it inside. It really couldn’t be, could it?
Charles couldn’t help but think that had he been there, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Had he been with Medgar, they surely would have been together at that meeting and driven home together, and Charles would have been well armed and able to protect his brother from harm. None of this made sense. He stormed into his room and snatched a suitcase out of the closet and began to throw clothes and shoes inside. Before he snapped it closed, he added three more items: a rapid-fire carbine shotgun and two .38-caliber pistols.61 His heart was drowning in grief, but his mind was full of vengeful rage.