This is the decisive battleground for America. Nowhere in the world is the idea of white supremacy more firmly entrenched, or more cancerous, than in Mississippi.
—MICHAEL SCHWERNER, TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST MURDERED BY MEMBERS OF THE KKK, ALONG WITH ANDREW GOODMAN AND JAMES CHANEY, BOTH TWENTY-ONE, IN MISSISSIPPI IN 1964
When you are the wife of a civil rights martyr, everyone wants to take your picture. You make the covers of Ebony and Jet—and even Life. The photographers prefer that you appear demure and serious, befitting your tragedy, but you must neither smile nor cry, nor should your children, because it would ruin the photograph. You and the children must always be neatly and tastefully dressed, and you must never yell or scream, because that would be undignified. Your face must always remain perfectly composed, with enough powder and lipstick to make you pretty but not so much that you appear gaudy.
The newspapers will print your home address, and the curious will find your street, stand in front of your house, and point. The home of the martyr is a public attraction, and people will knock on your door and pose your children on the lawn or even on the carport where their father’s blood still casts a shadow that all the scrubbing bubbles and bleach you could muster could not remove. When you speak, you must talk of grace and forgiveness, and say something profound about faith in God and his unchangeable will.
Myrlie Evers had to learn these rules because one wrong move, one errant word or flash of public anger, could ruin the legacy of the man she loved. Medgar Evers, who would have turned thirty-eight years old in less than a month on July 2—twenty years after he enlisted in the United States Army to fight the Nazis for his country in World War II, only to find himself fighting Nazism in America when he came home—had been gunned down and stolen from her and their three young children just feet from his own front door, leaving Myrlie alone to tell his story.
She had to be a quick study, without a tutor. Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King still had their husbands, Malcolm and Martin, and were not yet experiencing the torture Myrlie was enduring. Freedom Summer was still a year away and Michael Schwerner’s wife, Rita, could still hold him in her arms and pursue their dream of helping to change Mississippi and America together. He had not yet climbed into that station wagon with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman and sped away from the Neshoba County jail with a convoy of Klansmen in pursuit. Jackie and Ethel Kennedy still watched their young husbands leave their bedsides every morning to wield the awesome power of the federal government. It was Myrlie Louise Evers, just three months over thirty years old, who was the first of the national civil rights widows.
Eight years earlier, Mamie Till-Mobley had preceded her in public mourning, not as a widow but as a grieving mother. Medgar had aided Mrs. Till in Mound Bayou, but Myrlie had never thought to study her, as she had no intention of following her into love martyrdom. There was no one to call, or to send a telegram to, and ask how this should be done. She had only the fastidious social training she had received in the homes of Mama and Aunt Myrlie to prepare her for her new role.
She woke up alone at 5:00 A.M. on June 12, in the house Medgar had designed for his family’s security, in the bed where so often she had buried herself in the strong arms that hadn’t changed since her husband’s days as a halfback at Alcorn College. Medgar had always been so proud of his physique. He worked at keeping his body fit. How easily an assassin had shattered it.
She reached across the bed and was somehow surprised to find his side empty. She still felt the haze of the sedative Dr. Britton finally injected into her forearm, forcing her to get some sleep. Where were the children? Ah, right! They were across the street with Jo. Why were they there and not in their beds? Oh, yes, their father was murdered just feet from the comfort and serenity of his living room, while she and they watched him lie a pool of his own blood, gripping his house key and reaching for the door. Perhaps if she stayed in bed long enough, God would somehow find the mercy he lacked just hours before and take her to where Medgar was.
Myrlie needed to get up. She had to go through the motions. The house was full of people—friends milling around, cooking, helping. She could hear the soft, faint murmur of their voices, whispering, she supposed, because they thought she was still asleep. Or maybe she still was. Perhaps it was all just an awful nightmare, and now she could wake up.
Someone clicked on the television in the living room. She climbed out of bed and padded down the hallway. When she looked to the right, she could see that a big chunk of the wall by the kitchen had been torn away. As she looked left toward the living room, she could see there was a hole in the front window and the venetian blinds were broken and bent. That was the path the bullet had taken when it entered the house after going through Medgar.
Lena Horne and Roy Wilkins were on the Today show. She could see their mouths were moving, and they must have been talking about Medgar, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Her ears must have been clogged by grief.
Someone took her into the kitchen and showed her where the bullet smashed into the tile wall, and the dent in the refrigerator where the ricocheting projectile hit next, before shattering a coffee pot and landing on the opposite counter beneath a watermelon she had bought as a treat for the kids.
She fixated on what the white policemen must have said to each other when they saw that watermelon, and how the Clarion-Ledger and the other racist white newspapers would run wild with disdainful stereotypes because of it. She was thinking just like her media-savvy husband. And that made her angry—at the lying white media that set the table for Medgar’s assassination and at the white policemen who followed Medgar everywhere but were completely useless in his moment of need.
Back in the living room, she remembered Medgar saying to her just two days before, “Girl, if you don’t move from in front of that window, you’re gonna get your head blown off.” He was so right. Had she been standing there last night—or warming up food for Medgar in the kitchen, or washing the dishes, the same bullet that took Medgar would have taken her, too. Part of her wished it had.
“I felt that my life was gone, over, without reason or meaning,” she later wrote. “Then I remembered the children that were all I had left of Medgar, and I walked out of the house straight into the lens of a television camera.”1 Myrlie neither smiled nor frowned. She gathered herself and calmly gave the press the statement they wanted. Then she walked through the phalanx of media and onlookers across the street to collect her children.
Mrs. Young was in tears. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell the children that their father was gone, and she had kept the television off so they wouldn’t hear the news. It was down to Myrlie to say the words that would devastate them.
“I went to them,” Myrlie wrote, “took them into a room by ourselves and told them their father wouldn’t be coming home anymore. ‘Is he dead, Mommy?’ Reena, just eight years old asked. And I died a little as I told her that he was.”
The Evers children were dazed, as she took them home to pack a few things to take to another friend’s house to stay for a couple of days. Van didn’t want to go. And he didn’t understand. “He kept running to me everywhere I went, asking, ‘Daddy’s gone? Daddy’s gone?’” she wrote. “It tore me apart. When the time came for them to leave, he said, ‘Mommy’s going, too!’ I took him in my arms and said I’d be here when he got back.”2 Reena and Darrell were sullen and drained. They didn’t cry, and for a long time, Darrell couldn’t. He seemed completely lost.
THE MISSISSIPPI FREE PRESS, ON JUNE 15, DESCRIBED THE MOOD among Black Jacksonians as “one of deep horror and anger. Many Negroes were reported to be carrying guns. The chief of police has made an appeal for people to leave the situation in the hands of police.” The paper also reported that the NAACP youth leaders who visited Myrlie told her “they planned to have everyone wear NAACP T-shirts like those Evers was carrying when he was killed”—the ones that read “Jim Crow Must Go!” In Harlem, Garveyite activist James R. Lawson, the president of the United African Nationalist Movement, expressed shock and sadness about Evers’s death, but in a statement said, “It points up the futility of Dr. Martin Luther King’s philosophy of non-violence.”3
By 11:25 A.M., all over Jackson, protesters were pouring into the streets. Thirteen ministers conducted a silent march toward city hall and were stopped by Jackson police and arrested. The Times reported that soon after that “approximately 200 Negro teenagers marched out of the Masonic Temple Building on Lynch Street, site of Mr. Evers’s office. Some 100 city policemen, Hinds County deputy sheriffs and state highway patrolmen, armed with riot guns and automatic rifles, halted them a block away. A total of 145 demonstrators, including 74 aged 17 and under, were then arrested. One girl was struck in the face by a club, deputies wrested a middle-aged woman spectator to the sidewalk and other Negroes were shoved back roughly.”
John Salter observed the bitter irony that “[Medgar’s] death was the resurrection of the Jackson Movement. . . . Within hours, we had organized huge demonstrations that poured out onto the streets; the national office had no alternative, under the circumstances, but to accept this. Police brutality and terror mounted steadily—it was in a much grimmer dimension than it had ever been.” 4 Protests broke out from Los Angeles to New York to Virginia, often sparking violent reactions from police in those cities, too.
Salter had driven to Ed King’s house in the middle of the night to tell him and his wife, Jeanette, that Medgar had been killed. King wondered for a long time what might have happened had he tried to go home with Medgar that night. Or had someone followed him home to provide security. King observed that the assassin had chosen to act when “the movement had been so destroyed in Jackson.” He noted, “When people are really down and out that the white racists here in Mississippi think they can get away with the most.” He added that it was widely believed the conspiracy to assassinate Medgar was bigger “than just one person.”
Aunt Myrlie arrived by late morning, and that was a relief. Together, they showed the cameramen and press people out of the house, which had become like a beehive. Myrlie was frenetic, pacing, talking about Medgar and trying to remember little things he’d said before they faded from her mind. “I talked and talked, and I don’t know what I said,” she wrote.5 Finally, she asked if a mass meeting would be held that night, and insisted, over many objections, that she wanted to go. In the early evening, Ms. Hurley and a group of friends drove her in her station wagon to Pearl Street Baptist Church.6
Rev. Bennett W. Smith, who had served in the Air Force and taught in the Chicago public schools before joining the ministry and working with Dr. King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was speaking when Myrlie walked into the sanctuary. There was an immediate hush. Myrlie was familiar with this place. She sometimes left the children with a babysitter and went with Medgar to meetings, particularly if they were held in churches. She sometimes played the organ or piano after the benediction, before the main proceedings began.
Myrlie was no stranger to public performance. She had sung on stage as a member of a Vicksburg Black girls’ singing group called the Chansonettes and played the piano at her church. As a child, playing piano to entertain the family of that white woman Big Mama worked for, she’d dreamed of someday playing for real at Carnegie Hall. She knew how to stand before this crowd, one that loved Medgar and supported her. The performance of her life was required. Medgar always said she was more than the wife of a civil rights leader. She was now the torch bearer representing everything he ever did or tried to do. As she walked down that aisle toward the stage, she remembered him telling her, “Bury the fear and do what you have to do.” That evening, her fear was buried deep in a cold rage.
“I found that I was a wall of fire,” she said. “I never saw myself that way, but I’m glad that I eventually did because I intended to survive . . . after Medgar was killed, because we had three children. I could not afford to be weak. I could not afford to give up, not only because of those children, [but] because of all the other children, regardless of the color.”
Claude Sitton of the New York Times recounted the events of that June 12 event. “Mrs. Evers spoke tonight to some 500 persons at a mass meeting at the Pearl Street church. Dressed in a pale green dress, she appeared tired but composed. Many women in the audience wept openly.”7
“I come to you tonight with a broken heart,” Myrlie said as she faced the hushed crowd. “I am left without my husband, and my children without a father, but I am left with the strong determination to try to take up where he left off. And I come to make a plea that all of you here and those who are not here will, by his death, be able to draw some of his strength, some of his courage, and some of his determination to finish this fight. Nothing can bring Medgar back, but the cause can live on. . . . We cannot let his death be in vain.”8
“Referring to her husband’s death,” the Times continued, she said, “‘it was his wish that this [Jackson] movement would be one of the most successful that this nation has ever known.’ Mrs. Evers, who had requested that she be given the opportunity to speak, said her husband had spoken of death last Sunday and said that he was ready to go.”9 In the months before his death, Medgar had told the Times, “If I die, it will be in a good cause,” and separately, he told the Times: “I’ve been fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.”10
When Myrlie finished speaking, the sanctuary erupted in applause and shouts. Then, just as quietly as she had entered, she walked down the aisle toward the door. She could see people weeping and she could hear voices singing. She didn’t know what they were singing, and she didn’t care. She got in her car to leave because if she stayed in that church one second longer, she feared the rage inside her would set her alight.11
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS AS PREDICTABLE AS SPRING RAIN. OFFICIAL white Mississippi, from the segregationist governor to the segregationist mayor to the segregationist, NAACP-hating newspaper editors issued high-minded statements decrying the dastardly murder, with some even offering rewards leading to the killer.12 Many of the editorials that ran in the days after the murder were pointed in laying the blame for Medgar’s murder on Black activists themselves, whose insistence on protesting segregation had, in their view, created the anger that ultimately and inevitably brought Medgar down. The Jackson mayor, who had so pointedly sparred with Medgar and the Jackson Movement joined in the double-speak, embellishing his feigned outrage at the assassination by offering two $5,000 rewards: one for information leading to Evers’s killer, and a matching sum for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a “sniper who shot a white youth who was in a car on Lynch Street.” That youth, unlike Medgar Evers, was alive and well.13
The assassin’s rifle was quickly found, in a thatch of honeysuckle bushes in the empty lot across the street, adjacent to the Youngs’ house. The attached scope had allowed the killer to take the fatal shot as he viewed Medgar in silhouette from 150 yards away.
A Jackson police officer told the Jackson Daily News that Medgar’s killer “destroyed in one minute everything we’ve been trying to do here,” then admitted, “We’re scared to death. That’s the truth.” Rumors were spreading that Black Jacksonians were arming themselves, and that white residents were worried they might take revenge.
A northern newspaper reporting from Jackson quoted a white man in a local bar who perhaps summed up the sentiment of Mississippi segregationists: “Maybe this will slow the niggers down.”14
The New York Times reported that “the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. mourned Mr. Evers as a ‘pure patriot.’”15 He told reporters on June 12 that “the brutal murder of Medgar Evers came as shocking and tragic news to all people of good will”16 and speculated that whoever was responsible might have feared the renewed determination, righteous indignation, and urgency that President Kennedy’s June 11 televised address would arouse in Black Americans. Kennedy’s speech, King said, “was a very passionate plea for justice and freedom and it was a firm statement. And I’m sure there are many in the country, and the South in particular, who responded negatively to that statement; and it may well be that those who engaged in this tragic act were trying to retaliate for what they had heard the president say, and they could see within his statement a determination now within the federal government to do something about these conditions.”17
If King was sorrowful but diplomatic, Roy Wilkins was spitting fire. His public statement said Medgar’s death “demonstrates anew the blind and murderous hatred which obsesses too many Mississippians. In their ignorance, they believe that by killing a brave, dedicated, and resourceful leader of the civil rights struggle, they can kill the movement for human rights. . . . Every Negro citizen has lost a valiant leader in the death of Medgar Evers. The entire nation has lost a man who believed in America and died defending its principles.”18
The national NAACP offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the killer. Gloster Current, who had spent the past month trying to steer Medgar’s efforts back to what the national office wanted, and who was the last person to see Medgar alive, angrily challenged Jackson officials “to match our reward offer,” adding, “The cowardly ambush murder of Medgar W. Evers . . . should awaken all Americans to the plight of Negroes in Mississippi.” One can only speculate on the pangs of guilt he felt at having been the one to tell his friend that the organization had better things to do with its money than to protect him. And some of Medgar’s friends quietly blamed NAACP headquarters and the Kennedy administration as surely as they blamed the shooter, the Klan, and racist Mississippi for Medgar’s demise.
Clarence Mitchell Jr.’s son Michael was a seventeen-year-old high school senior when he learned of Medgar’s death. “The call came from the vice president of the branch in Jackson, Mississippi, that they had murdered Medgar,” he said. “My father was on the phone, and he just was in a rage . . . a quiet rage because he had spent so much time with Medgar. . . . after a while, we finally tried to get Myrlie on the phone and . . . we could hear that she was inconsolable. And my father then immediately called the FBI.”19
The protests continued into Thursday, when “Jackson police charged the porch of a Negro home and clubbed a group of youngsters and adults into submission after they had chanted and jeered at them” and then into Friday, June 14—Flag Day—when thirty-seven young marchers were arrested for walking two by two, “some carrying tiny American flags.”20
“We had demonstrations defying the injunction [against public demonstrations] each day, leading up to the funeral,” Ed King said. The funeral was scheduled for Saturday. And the state’s Supreme Court the day before had received an urgent appeal by leaders of the Jackson Movement, protesting the injunction and “the misuse of power by state officers to deprive Negroes of their citizenship rights.”21 Medgar had signed the petition, along with Ed King, John Salter, and Dick Gregory.
“The NAACP did not try to stop us, because obviously, the people were going to do something,” King said. There was pressure building in the community that needed to be released.
THE DAYS AFTER MEDGAR’S ASSASSINATION WERE A CONFUSING morass of distraught parents, personal fear, and deep trauma for the children of Guynes Street. The Sweet children were away with their mother at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she had gone to graduate school because she was unable to obtain such a degree in segregated Mississippi. “I remember my mama hitting the floor screaming when my dad called,” Dennis Sweet III, who was seven years old then, said. “She said, ‘They killed him!’ I remember she was on her knees crying.”
Frank Figgers was thirteen years old and attending the last week at a segregated Boy Scout camp with Terry Wells, when they heard the news. “Terry said these words that really just pierced me,” Figgers recalled. “He said [of Medgar Evers], ‘He didn’t bother nobody. He tried to help everybody.’ As we were going to our evening meal, those words just kind of lingered with me. I knew that a great man, a great person that was doing God’s will, had been assassinated.”22
“It was a traumatic experience,” Dennis Sweet III said. “I don’t think people understand what a terrorist act that was in that community. You have a community where you have kids . . . This guy comes in here and just kills the guy everybody loves . . . [that] the kids love. . . . It just traumatized everybody, all the kids.”23
Mrs. Sweet Owens recalled how much things changed. The fences between the homes on Guynes Street, when they existed at all, were low and chain-linked, so she would frequently see her mom or dad chatting with Medgar across the backyards. “They would be . . . talking about what needed to be done, voting, the boycotts . . .” Sweet said that after Medgar was gone, “Mom would never go downtown to shop. Literally . . . all my clothes came from [the] Spiegel catalog. When I would go to school, people would say, ‘Where did you get that?’ I said, “From Spiegel catalog.’ I said, ‘Mom, are we ever going to shop in a store?’ She said, ‘I promised Medgar I’d never go downtown and shop.’ After that, I always wore catalog clothes proudly.”
Hezekiah Watkins heard the news of Medgar’s murder on June 12. “I was sad,” he said. “The first thing we tried to do was to get on our bicycles and ride to his home, but we could only get so close because the police officers had it all blocked off.” Instead, he and a growing group of neighbors and onlookers gathered about a block away. “And we stayed there for quite some time, just . . . just sad.”
Carolyn Wells remembers “NAACP people” including Gloster Current coming to their house and to the Everses’ next door the day after the shooting, and the adults including her father and uncle huddling in her living room. Her uncle had seen something strange on the block adjoining Guynes Street: stacks of tin cans stacked in rows stretched across Missouri Street, which was the route Mr. Evers often used to come home. She could hear the men speculating that the cans were placed there so that Evers’s car would run into them, and he would have to exit his car so the killer could get a clear shot at him, but Medgar, for whatever reason, or perhaps because he saw them, had gone another way. She could no more forget those chilling conversations than she could get the image of Mr. Evers lying on the ground in a pool of blood out of her mind. Or the sound of Myrlie and the children screaming. Nor would her younger sister, who was soon sent off to an aunt’s house to get away from the block for the rest of the summer, while Carolyn was told to go on to band camp as planned, and to try to get back to normal. That was, of course, impossible.
FOR THE EVERS CHILDREN, THE TRAUMA CLEARLY RAN DEEPER. When they returned to the house and attempted to resume something like a normal life, it eluded them. “The children, after a traumatic experience like that, they were having nightmares,” Myrlie said. Particularly Darrell, who would wake up screaming in the night, or disappear into his room during the day, silent and distant.
Darrell Kenyatta Evers. His father had given him the name of an African warrior against colonialism during a time when much of the continent was in an uprising to throw off its European colonial masters, even as African descendants in America was doing the same. He had been the first to follow Myrlie to the door and to see his father dying.
“I remember . . . being in the house . . . the day after the death of my father and this overwhelming grief that was in the house,” Darrell Evers later recalled. “A number of people had come by to comfort my mother and to comfort our family, and there was just . . . a lot of grief, because so many people loved Medgar, and . . . he was so respected . . . throughout the country, and especially . . . in Mississippi. And it was a little bit too much for a ten-year-old at that time. . . . My father, I felt, was in peace and I felt that he was finally resting.”24
Whatever sense of peace Darrell felt that day didn’t last.
Myrlie recalled a day, not long after Medgar died, when Darrell was out in front of the house playing baseball with some of the boys on the block, as she watched him out of her bedroom window. “He hit the ball as it was pitched to him,” she wrote. “And a boy ran to catch it, and Darrell stood there a moment, and he broke into sobs, and he ran from the street around the house to the back yard and the plum tree. I ran to meet him, and he cried as though his heart would break standing there under the tree that Medgar had planted. It was the first time he had cried.”25
Another time, Darrell went to Myrlie saying, “Mom, I’m going to go shopping with you.”
“Okay. What do you want?” Myrlie asked.
“I want a gun,” Darrell said.
“What kind of gun?” she asked him.
His answer was straightforward and deadly serious.
“‘I want a rifle,’ he told me,” Myrlie recalled. “And I said, ‘Why do you want a rifle?’ ‘I’m going to kill whoever killed my dad,’ he said. He was fixated on that. We finally went to a department store and bought a toy gun. He went to sleep every night with that gun next to him for the longest time.”
Myrlie said Reena was a “motherly soul,” who took care of her brothers and in many ways mothered her mom as well. Myrlie felt pangs of guilt for how much she often leaned on little Reena for comfort. Reena, just nine years old, was sometimes afraid to sleep in her room—knowing that it was on her mattress that her father’s bleeding body had been carried away. On those nights she would snuggle with her mom in her parents’ room, which was a comfort to both of them.
“Little [Van] was so young, but it affected him,” Myrlie said. “Look at pictures of him then. You could see [the] strain and sadness written all over that three-year-old boy’s face.” He would ask for his father insistently, not understanding why he was gone, and follow Myrlie around the house.
The Evers home felt like a way station for family, friends, detectives, reporters, and Life magazine photographers. While Myrlie was forcing herself to plan a funeral—recalling that Medgar always said that when he died, he wanted to be buried quickly—she also had to deal with the investigation. Thompson had asked the FBI to get involved, and an endless stream of detectives, local and federal, were in and out of the house. Myrlie had been around Medgar too long to believe that any investigation, especially one by local police, would result in justice. She had to restrain herself from cursing the police who repeatedly asked her if she knew any Blacks who might want to kill her husband.
Myrlie was grateful when Medgar’s sisters arrived. They and Dr. Britton began planning a Saturday funeral, while she continued to respond to the endless requests for interviews from the police and the press. Charles arrived soon after. He felt a deep urge to take out some white Mississippians—Klan or not—as retribution for his brother’s murder, but he managed to channel his rage, for now, into a focused determination to help Myrlie. It was Charles who gently coaxed Myrlie to make the painful choice of what clothes Medgar would be buried in. And he soon took over the job of dealing with the press. The presence of Medgar’s brother in her home was both comforting and torturous. He was a physical reminder of what she had lost, but she needed someone to lean on and she knew that the children did, too.
More than anything, she wanted all of the many white faces to leave her home. “Everyone,” she wrote, “was always white—the cameramen, the interviewers, everyone—and a white skin had come to have a meaning I didn’t want to explore.”26
At one point, Charles threw a polite but persistent young television reporter, Dan Rather, out of the home. “He said he’d be happy to leave the house,” Charles wrote. “But this was a big story, and he was going to be filing reports to CBS News in New York from out on the street.” Right then, Charles understood how important Medgar had become, and after that, he allowed Rather to follow him around, even confiding to Rather his murderous thoughts toward white people, to which Rather, in his Texas twang, replied, “You can’t let yourself do the same thing they did . . . not every white man is like the men who killed Medgar.”
The reaction to Medgar’s assassination was quick and reached the highest levels of political and social power.
President Kennedy sent a typewritten condolence letter that referred to “the cause for which your husband gave his life,” and he handwrote at the bottom, “Mrs. Kennedy joins me in extending her deepest sympathy.”27 Bill Russell, the great Boston Celtics champion called Charles and offered his help. Lena Horne, who heard the news as she prepared for her Today appearance, vowed never to return to Mississippi, declaring her heart thoroughly broken. A distraught James Baldwin declared that in Medgar’s honor he would complete the play he’d begun as a tribute to Emmett Till, Blues for Mister Charlie. Fannie Lou Hamer, who was from Sunflower County, Mississippi, not far from where Till was murdered, was in jail when Medgar was assassinated, being beaten unconscious for trying to register to vote. When she emerged from jail, she cried out, “Something’s got to break!” And the paper that Medgar and Charles had tried to become paperboys for, so long ago, the Chicago Defender, made Medgar’s murder their top story for two weeks straight.28
MYRLIE TOOK DARRELL AND REENA TO COLLINS FUNERAL HOME and asked the funeral director to give her and the children a few minutes alone with the body. It was the first time they were seeing their father since they watched him bleeding and dying on their carport, and it was important to Myrlie that they be allowed to do so in peace. “The children left after a moment,” she wrote. “I stayed. The tired lines were gone from his face, and I had a terrible urge to hold his head and stroke his temples and say that everything would be all right.”29
To her dismay, though, she soon realized she wasn’t alone; the Life magazine photographer had lingered. When she glared at him, she realized his eyes were filled with tears. And in that moment, she said, the hatred that Medgar’s murder left her feeling at the sight of white skin vanished, never to return.30
The days leading to the Saturday funeral were a blur of meals cooked by loving friends and family, comfort at Aunt Myrlie’s side or lying in her lap. Myrlie bristled when Ruby Hurley insisted that they purchase a new dress for her to wear, but she put up with it all—if only to get it all over with.31
Salter recalled that “between 5,000 and 6,000 people, from all over Mississippi—from places into which no civil rights worker had set foot—came to Jackson for Medgar’s funeral. A number of nationally prominent people were there.”32 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Roy Wilkins, and his top aide and public relations director joined the mourners, along with Gloster Current, Clarence Mitchell Jr., and the other leading New York NAACP staff. Dr. Ralph Bunche was also in attendance. He had served as an advisor to FDR as part of his “Black cabinet,” later declining the position of assistant secretary of state under Harry Truman due to the segregated housing conditions in Washington, D.C.; at the time of the funeral he was the assistant secretary general of the United Nations. James Meredith and his wife were there, as were Representative Charles Diggs, who in 1954 had been elected the first Black U.S. congressman from Michigan; Dick Gregory; and Dr. T. R. M. Howard, who had come to pay tribute to his former young charge and coconspirator for the upliftment of Black sharecroppers in and around Mound Bayou. Amos Brown, who had learned of the assassination while at Morehouse, sat near Dr. King at the service. And of course, Medgar and Myrlie’s friends from Guynes Street.
Dr. Howard drew “Amens” from the sweltering crowd as he railed at the white supremacy that ultimately took Medgar’s life. “The NAACP was feared and is feared and hated by the white people of this God-forsaken state,” he said. “And Medgar knew he was hated.” He spoke Black Mississippians’ and Black Americans’ rage and their exhaustion. “For one hundred years, we have turned one cheek and then the other,” he said. “And they hit us on both cheeks. Now the neck is getting tired.” And with that, he urged those in attendance to “keep on marching.”33
Myrlie knew how much Medgar would have hated the whole production, but he would have been pleased by Dr. King’s presence. Medgar deeply respected King, and one of his goals had been to bring Dr. King to Jackson and to work with him to replicate the movement he was building in places like Alabama. King had recently agreed to come, even though Medgar knew the national NAACP did not approve of a King-Evers collaboration.
Salter had called King and asked if he could come to Jackson for Medgar’s funeral. “King readily agreed,” Salter recalled, “and I picked up him and several of his staff at the airport.” King, it was clear, had no formal role at the funeral, but he wanted to be there.
The service was at the Masonic Temple, where more than four thousand people were packed inside the gaping auditorium and thousands more were overflowing into the hallways and onto the streets in the steaming Mississippi summer heat, which reached an unusually high 103 degrees that day. It was a fitting venue. Medgar’s office lay untouched upstairs. The typewriter where he composed his reports and letters, the desk piled high with papers related to voter registration, boycott flyers, letters, and more, were all still there, as if awaiting their owner’s return.
Mama and Big Mama came to Jackson for the funeral, too, joining Aunt Myrlie and Myrlie’s aunt Francis from Chicago, whom she’d stayed with when she and Medgar took the summer trip that preceded their engagement. Myrlie was annoyed when she later learned that the crowds made it difficult for her grandmothers to get seats. In the moment, all she could do was find hers, and settle Reena and Darrell beside her. She wasn’t sure if it was the heat or the crowd that aggravated her. Or the open casket, which she had definitively asked to have closed.
Myrlie wanted something different for Medgar’s going home. She wanted what he would have wanted. He had told her once that he preferred his funeral to be short. “When I’m gone, I’m gone, and I won’t know anything about it,”34 he said. She wished she could call off this whole affair, send everyone home and along with just her loved ones bury her husband in the quiet family plot she and Medgar had purchased in a Black cemetery ten minutes from their house. She had let other people take over the details of Medgar’s funeral to relieve her anxieties, but that assured that it quickly got away from her. Not just the open casket, and the lack of assigned seating for her family, but also the seemingly endless eulogies that went on for nearly two hours in the blazing heat.
Roy Wilkins gave the main eulogy, in which he condemned “the Southern political system” that put Medgar’s killer up to his evil task. “In faraway Washington,” Wilkins said bitterly, “the Southern system has its outpost in the Congress of the United States. They helped put the man behind the deadly rifle. The killer must have thought that he had, if not immunity, then certainly a protection for whatever he chose to do.”35
Charles, who sat beside Myrlie and the children, was too distraught to speak. After the busy week of funeral planning subsided, all he was left with was grief.
Salter wrote that at the funeral, “much less was said about Medgar the man—and much more was said about his career at the NAACP.”36 Rev. Ed King sat with Dr. King, who was not allowed to speak at the funeral. “He sat with visiting clergy from the National Council of Churches,” Ed King said.
“Several denominations sent clergy to represent them at Medgar’s funeral,”37 Ed King added. Adam D. Beittel, the president of Tougaloo, spoke, and Salter wrote that he “was the closest to a movement representative to speak. But the NAACP was in charge.”38
The Evers children seemed to be barely holding up under the pressure of sadness and exhaustion. Reena wept and wept throughout the speeches, and Darrell, who later said that when he saw his father lying on the ground that horrible night, with all the blood around him, he’d felt the spirit of God around his father’s body and a strange kind of peace, fidgeted in his suit, because he hated dressing up.39 He spent the service just staring at the open casket until in a sudden rush, all of his tears seemed to come at once.
Myrlie recalled that other than the day he cried under that plum tree, Darrell had not cried again. “He would disappear into his room and sit there alone, not speaking, not playing, and it was hard for me to imagine what was going on in his mind. Now, sitting beside me at the funeral, I saw him stare at the open casket, and I felt what he must be thinking. There would be no more telephone calls from his father. No more basketball and football with him, no riding bicycles with him in front of the house, no fishing. The promise, so often deferred, to take Darrell hunting would never be fulfilled. The nights when Medgar came home with boxes of Cracker Jack for each child—they, too, were over. Darrell sat there and stared at the casket, his head slightly bowed, and then suddenly he sobbed and sobbed until I guess no more tears would come.” 40
Myrlie knew she needed to remain composed for her children’s sake (she had left Van behind with a sitter; his little heart was spared the funeral ordeal). She succeeded throughout much of the service, buckling only as the procession began to carry Medgar’s now-closed coffin out of the building.
Charles had been her rock in the days leading up to the funeral. He turned to her at this moment and said, “Don’t break down now, sis,” 41 even as his own heart was broken, with his best friend and eternal co-conspirator gone. “Medgar’s death left me all alone,” 42 he later wrote. There would be no more hunting trips, or phone calls, or opportunities to needle his younger brother for working too much.
Myrlie realized this was the last time Medgar would be inside this building. Tom Dent, who also flew down for the funeral, had the same feeling: the Masonic Temple was the location just five months earlier of the triumphant press conference for James Meredith. There were so many ironies to Medgar’s final hour of life. “He had been taken to the emergency room of the same hospital where he had been made to wait hours for Clyde Kennard’s pills,” Dent wrote. “But it was too late, they could not make him wait any longer.” 43
Student organizer Diane Nash, who was married to James Bevel (the child she was carrying while locked up in Parchman was theirs), had asked Myrlie if the young Jackson activists Medgar had supported could march after the funeral. Myrlie had agreed, as long as it was done with a dignity that would make Medgar proud.44 Rev. Allen Johnson, Rev. Robert Stevens, and Rev. L. L. Wilkins had even obtained a permit from the city, bypassing the injunction on the grounds that the march would be a “silent, mournful procession.”45
“We had a mass march—but didn’t call it that—of . . . several thousand people walking behind the casket as we left the building,” Rev. Ed King said. Sitting in the lead car, as the marchers followed on foot, Myrlie had all but forgotten Nash’s request. She was surprised at the expanse of the crowds appearing as they rolled down Lynch Street toward Collins Funeral Home, where Medgar’s body would be placed on a train bound for Washington, D.C.
The Kennedy administration offered to have Medgar interned in Arlington National Cemetery, a nod to his service in Europe and in Mississippi. The decision by the president to honor a fellow World War II veteran who had died in the cause of liberty at home drew an onslaught of hateful letters to the White House from segregationists objecting to the burial of a Black man with such honors.
Myrlie objected for other reasons. She wanted him buried in the little family plot they had purchased close to home, where she and the children could go and sit with him from time to time. But she reluctantly agreed to the Washington plan because she understood that Medgar’s burial needed to play a part in his legacy.
As the car cruised slowly down the seventeen blocks from the Masonic Temple, Myrlie began to confront the distance growing, with every second, between her and the body of the man she loved.
Aaron Henry, who considered Medgar to have been one of his best friends, sat beside Myrlie in the back of the limousine. He and Medgar had fought together since they were opening NAACP offices in the Delta region and bonded further at that inaugural SCLC organizational meeting. Now, as the car turned onto Farish Street, he said to Myrlie: “Look behind you.”
The massive procession was a human ocean, filling every inch of space. Many of the mourners carried American flags. Most were young, but many were old, and bore the visible signs and drawn looks of a life lived under segregation. A handful, maybe a dozen, were white: mostly clergy and Tougaloo professors like Ed King. And some of the white (and partly white, in the case of John Salter) men and women had been Medgar’s allies and endured beatings and death threats for championing desegregation.
Helmeted white police officers lined the side of the road, and mounted police escorted the parade of mourners, which stretched for nine full blocks. As the hearse drove by, with Medgar’s flag-draped coffin, some of the officers removed their headgear and stood at attention. Myrlie didn’t know if the gesture was genuine or required, but she knew Medgar would have marveled at it.46 Black men, women, and children stood on porches and hung out of doors, and as the procession passed a white restaurant where a jukebox was blaring, a group of young Black men stormed in and unplugged it. The white patrons and workers didn’t do or say a thing.47
Despite his angry rejection of his Mississippi field secretary’s tactics, Roy Wilkins was “destroyed” by his assassination, Charles wrote. “Roy had no kids of his own and knew few young folks well. He didn’t know how to treat the younger generation. . . . If Roy Wilkins ever hated whites, it was the day a white man murdered Medgar in cold blood.” 48
Dr. King made his presence known as the funeral spilled out onto the main street. He walked at the front of the procession with Ralph Abernathy, Wilkins, and the other national civil rights leaders. “Medgar’s killing shocked Martin Luther King and his family,” Charles later wrote. And Coretta Scott King believed the assassination was a grim premonition of her own husband’s fate.49 Jackie Robinson wrote a lengthy telegram to the White House denouncing the assassination and imploring the Kennedy administration to use all available means to protect King during the funeral, lest another assassination lead to a national uprising.
“Should harm come to Dr. King to add to the misery which decent Americans of both races experienced with the murder of Mr. Evers,” Robinson’s telegram read, “the restraint of many people all over this nation might burst its bonds and bring about a bloody holocaust the likes of which this country has not seen . . . for to millions, Martin King symbolizes the bearing forward of the torch for freedom so savagely wrested from the dying grip of Medgar Evers. American needs and the world cannot afford to lose him to the whims of murderous maniacs.”50
As the car pulled up to the Collins Funeral Home, Myrlie asked Aaron to arrange a ride home for her and her children, and they were safely at home by the time things went from mournful to calamitous. As the mourners pressed toward the funeral home, a photographer captured Dr. King’s look of perturbance as he and other civil rights leaders were physically moved back. Local residents who had not been able to get inside the Masonic Temple were lined up outside the small funeral home to view the body before it left for Washington in six or eight hours.
Ed King said that part of the city’s agreement to the funeral procession was that there would be “no singing of freedom songs or hymns or anything.”
At the mass meetings, “Medgar had led us every night in singing . . . ‘this little light. I’m going to let it shine!’ Where? All over Jackson,” King said. “And he would point to Jackson’s City Hall because that’s where we wanted to march. And we would say, ‘All over the City Hall, all over Capitol Street, all over the Capitol Building!’ And then we would sing, ‘All over America, all over Washington!’”
As they approached the funeral home, the crowd began mimicking Medgar’s version of “This Little Light” and pointing toward Capitol Street. The three to four hundred police officers lining the streets reacted to the outstretched fingers of the overwhelmingly Black crowd by presuming they were pointing at them. And they reacted.
Before long, they set upon the crowd with nightsticks flying. The crowd reacted by breaking into a run, and shouting: “Let’s go to Capitol Street!” which was two blocks away. Police were cutting TV camera wires and clubbing and beating marchers, in a scene of increasing mayhem. Though not a planned demonstration, the postfuneral march was now an illegal one.
As King and the other prominent civil rights leaders were hurried away, the police presence swelled to some two thousand officers. Dozens of people were arrested and hauled off to the fairgrounds outdoor prison, including Salter and Ed King. Police were firing over the heads of the swelling crowds.51
President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy each placed multiple calls to the Jackson mayor. Medgar’s assassination had opened a fresh wound in one of the key racial battlegrounds in the United States, and the protest at his funeral was salting it.52
The June 16 Clarion-Ledger played up the mayhem with the headline “White-Led Agitation” over an article that said, “A small minority of the marchers led by white Tougaloo staff members turned on police with brickbats Saturday afternoon in a sudden, brisk melee . . . the violent group erupted in a flurry, attacking the police officers at the rear of the process. Dogs, fire trucks and armed men were called but on display only and not used. Dogs on leash patrolled the crowds as they dispersed. Soft drinks bottles had been hurled from the roofs of Farish Street stores.”
The “unruly Negroes,” as the Clarion-Ledger labeled them, were far from a gang of young thugs and white instigators. The songs that rose up from that crowd included “We Shall Overcome” and they were sung not just by college students and impatient young organizers but also by teachers, who had resisted Medgar’s pleas to support the cause and who had avoided any association with the NAACP for fear of losing their jobs when Medgar was alive. They were sung by elderly Black men and women who had strained for a lifetime under the yoke of inequality, and who had shied away from Medgar’s entreaties to register to vote.
Now that Medgar had sacrificed his own life, people poured out of shops and ran toward Capitol Street in an eruption of song and support. “And before I’d be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave,” the crowd sang. As the police chief screamed into a bullhorn, the songs became shouts. “We want freedom!” “We want equality!” “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Around fifty members of the press were forced back by police as their vans converged on the crowd and began hauling people away.
Claude Sitton wrote in the New York Times that the police then “went to work in earnest to clear the area. A television cameraman caught in a doorway said a Negro man who did not move fast enough was struck in the face with a shot gun butt by a deputy sheriff. . . . The cameraman said a Negro woman was clubbed by a policeman. She fled to a car but was dragged out and clubbed again. . . . By this time, most of the Negroes had been sealed off in a one-block area. They began throwing bricks, bottles and other missiles at the police. Most fell short of the mark. One group taunted the officers with cries of ‘Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!’” 53
A. L. Ray, the deputy chief of the Jackson Police, screamed into a bullhorn, “You came here to honor a dead man, and you have brought dishonor.” The crowd screamed back in a frenzy of shouts, barking police dogs, and the crashing of bottles. John Doar, the Kennedy administration’s man in Mississippi, finally stepped out, put his hands up and yelled to the crowd: “You’re not going to win anything with bottles and bricks! . . . Is there someone here who can speak for you people?” A young Black man stood beside him, shouting, “This man is right!” Then Doar faced the crowd and yelled, “My name is John Doar—D-O-A-R. I’m from the Justice Department, and anyone around here knows I stand for what is right. Let’s disperse now. Go on home. Let’s not have a riot here.” Black members of the crowd who were known movement leaders began to chime in, and before long, the crowd dispersed. Myrlie later wrote that without Doar, a full-on riot would likely have overtaken Jackson that day.54
During the funeral march that turned into an uprising, Medgar’s body was quietly taken to the train station in Meridian where it would begin its final journey. Large crowds were waiting for the body, and a large group of Black mourners held a prayer service as the body was loaded onto the train. Thousands would greet the train as it passed through Atlanta as well.55
ON SUNDAY, THE DAY AFTER THE FUNERAL, CBS RAN A PREVIOUSLY recorded interview with Medgar, as a kind of obituary. The interview had first aired on June 12, the day he died. But Myrlie hadn’t watched. She had shut off the television after the Today show and spent the full day wandering in a haze. In the interview, correspondent William Peters asked Medgar about the threats he faced, and Medgar said, “I’ve had a number of threatening calls—people calling me saying they were going to kill me, saying they were going to blow my home up and saying that I only had a few hours to live.”56
Peters closed by asking Medgar about the importance of the vote. “I think it’s often said that a voteless people are a hopeless people,” Medgar replied. “And I think it’s true with us or true with anybody or any group of people. So it’s necessary that we try to get our hands on the ballot and use it effectively. We’re just not interested in voting so that conditions will be improved for Negroes. We want conditions improved for everybody. We feel that in this country that all persons should have an opportunity to register and vote and do the things that the Constitution guarantees them. That’s all we’re interested in.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Evers,” Peters said. This perfectly encapsulated everything Medgar had fought for: the ballot and the betterment of the country, and Peters’s use of “Mr. Evers” was the honorific Blacks were denied when they shopped or worked in Mississippi. The interview was evidence that Medgar was on the verge of the kind of national prominence in death that he had not quite achieved in life.
One week after Medgar’s murder, Myrlie packed up Darrell and Reena for the trip to Washington, D.C. Medgar had long promised to take them on an airplane one day, and he now kept that promise in death. Charles and Ruby Hurley traveled with them, while Aunt Myrlie and Aunt Francis remained home with Van. Myrlie wrote that the women were afraid to stay in the house, even though she “assured them that no [assailant] would dare return.” Still, arrangements were made for twenty-four-hour security guards outside.57 The NAACP was now providing the security detail they had denied Medgar when he needed it most.
The Evers family was met at the airport by reporters, photographers, and camera crews, along with a delegation from the Washington chapter of the NAACP. Rev. E. Franklin Jackson, the chapter’s president and the pastor of John Wesley AME Zion Church, had held a rally the evening before, drawing six hundred people and raising $2,000 for Myrlie and the children.58 Myrlie was presented with a large bouquet of flowers, and she and the children were ushered into a chauffeured car that Interior Secretary Stewart Udall made available to them during their stay. They were driven to the Mayflower Hotel, where her suite was filled with more flowers “and fruit and nuts, a gift from the manager.” 59 They could never have stayed in such a hotel in their segregated home state.
At the Mayflower, silent plainclothes officers lined the hallways to protect Myrlie and her children. Seeing them, Myrlie wrote, “My perverse mind flew back to the nights that Medgar had sped down the dark highways of the delta with a car behind him, ‘shaking the car’s tail’ at pursuers, with only the protection of his wits and his driving skill between him and death. Now he was dead, and we were all protected.” 60
Medgar’s body arrived at Union Station on Tuesday and was met by a throng of supporters from CORE, SNCC, and the NAACP. They followed the coffin to a Washington funeral home, and from there to John Wesley AME for a viewing that evening and the next morning.
On Wednesday morning, Myrlie, Charles, Ruby, and the children drove to the church for a procession from there to Arlington National Cemetery. More than twenty-five thousand people gathered on the streets to observe the procession,61 and Myrlie observed that “block after block, there were people standing, many with heads bowed, many making the sign of the cross as we passed by. Most of them were white.”62 Myrlie felt an immense pride as the car passed the Lincoln Memorial. She knew then that she had made the right decision to have Medgar buried with the full honors his country owed him—not just for serving his country, but for the stated creed of his country, and for trying to force even Mississippi to live up to it.
“My pride in Medgar had never been so great,” she wrote. “For somehow this whole experience was the final evidence that the man I had loved and married, the man whose children I had borne, was truly a great American being put to rest in a place with many other American heroes.” 63
That sense of pride couldn’t relieve the pain. When they arrived at Fort Myer Chapel for the pre-internment service, Charles was unable to get out of the car for a long time. His strength had finally gone, and he dissolved, immobilized by tears. The Sunday before Medgar died, the brothers had spoken on the phone and talked about a piece of land they’d bought cheap a year before in Brazil, and their dreams of making it their own hunting and fishing paradise. They had been dreamers all their lives. Though Medgar had insisted to the end that he would never call anywhere but Mississippi home.
“A man’s state is like his house,” he’d said. In that final call the two brothers seemed to talk about everything, from the new Cadillac Charles had bought to the escalating threats against Medgar, and the danger Myrlie and the children were in, as a result. “We both felt the premonition of danger,” Charles wrote. “When you have no time to be afraid, what you get are premonitions.”64 The call lasted a long time because neither man wanted to hang up. Now, Medgar had left Mississippi for good.
THE SERVICE AT ARLINGTON WAS BRIEF BUT SOLEMN. AS IT TURNS out, it was the one Medgar had always wanted.
Some two thousand mourners gathered for the burial,65 yet it felt somehow intimate. The family passed the throng and then walked between a two-line honor guard before sitting down at the gravesite. They were seated among a throng of dignitaries, including Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary Udall, and Senators Jacob Javits and Paul Douglas, along with Major Albert Turner of the Military District of Washington, who was there to represent President Kennedy.
“He is not dead, the soldier fallen here,” said Bishop Spottswood. “His spirit walks through the world today.” He added: “I hope Medgar Evers will be the last Black American to give his life in the struggle to make the Constitution come alive.”66 It was a prayer that would in just a few years prove rich with irony. Roy Wilkins said Medgar had well shown that he believed in this country, but it remained to be seen if the country believed in him.67
After six young white soldiers removed the American flag from the coffin, the sound of three rifle cracks made Myrlie startle instinctively, bringing back the awful memory of the gunshot that took Medgar’s life. That was followed by the sound of bugles playing “Taps.” Afterward, the cadets handed the flag to Myrlie, who was standing between her elder children. Then Medgar Evers, the love of her life, was lowered into the earth.
Myrlie willed herself to self-control throughout the service, as the cameras continued to examine her every move. But as the casket disappeared belowground, she burst into tears.68 Beside her, Reena began to sob, and “Darrell sat there, hands together in his lap, the saddest little boy in the world.”69
Charles could barely stand it. Growing up, Medgar so hated the cold. The thought of his little brother being lowered into the cold ground, with no way for Charles to warm his feet, like he did when they were kids and they shared a bed in Decatur—as close as if they were twins—undid him. His best friend in the world was truly gone.
The last words that day came from Mickey Levine, of the American Veterans Committee, who said “no soldier in this field has fought more courageously, more heroically than Medgar Evers.” He pledged that the fight had not ended, that it would go to the Congress and to the people, so that Medgar would not have died in vain. The service ended with “We Shall Overcome,” the song that had prompted the Jackson police to batter young protesters during Medgar’s funeral procession.
The next morning, June 20, Myrlie, Charles, and the children were taken to the White House to meet President Kennedy. Myrlie noted that Kennedy seemed older and with fairer hair than she’d expected. He was gracious and gave each of the children a small gift—a White House pin for Reena and a PT-boat tie clip for Darrell. They were given a tour of the White House living quarters, and Reena got to sit on the bed Queen Elizabeth had slept on.
President Kennedy had a gift for Myrlie, too: a draft copy of the civil rights bill he had promised the nation on the night before Medgar was murdered. The bill called for an end to segregation in public accommodations and sought to speed up implementation of school desegregation under Brown. Medgar and Aaron Henry had been preparing their testimony before the House Judiciary Committee calling for a bill like this on the day of Kennedy’s speech, not knowing that one was going to be promised. He had pressed Kennedy personally to take legislative action to protect the rights of Black Mississippians, yet he wouldn’t live to see Kennedy try to do it. Kennedy handed Myrlie the draft, which he had signed for her. The bill had been sent to Congress the day before, as Medgar was being laid to rest with full military honors at Arlington.
When they left the White House, Myrlie nearly broke down, as the President’s young son ran out onto the lawn to wave goodbye to his father as he departed in a Marine helicopter.70 The entire situation was surreal. She had come from Vicksburg, a proud but segregated community where on some days, all they had was their faith and their dignified spirits, and Medgar Evers had taken her on a twelve-year journey that had so many ups and downs and so much peril, but an even greater love, and now he had brought her to the ultimate seat of American power. Yet he was no longer there to experience any of it with her. She was walking these grand steps alone because he had been murdered trying to save America from itself.
Throughout the trip, the Life photojournalist had followed Myrlie for a “picture and text story.” Just a few years earlier, the “picture and text” story in Ebony had introduced Medgar to a national audience. Myrlie had been a character in Medgar’s civil rights story—pretty and smiling as she cuddled her daughter or stood in silhouette at the Civil War memorial in Vicksburg with her husband and their children. This lengthy cover piece had her byline and her words, and the pictures showed a tear streaming down her cheek during the funeral as she comforted a sobbing Darrell. Other pictures showed mourners beside Medgar’s open casket, the mass of people marching behind Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, and Roy Wilkins after the funeral, and Medgar’s burial as a hero at Arlington.
Vigils and memorial services were held across the country: in Philadelphia and Atlanta, at the Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago, and in Emmett Till’s neighborhood of Bronzeville.
When Myrlie, Charles, and the children arrived home on Friday, the new Jackson airport building was no longer segregated. Built with federal funds, it had to bow to federal law.71 Medgar had fought for this, and it was another victory he had not lived to enjoy. “I didn’t know how I would survive without him,” she said. The hospital returned his personal items, and each one flooded her with memories—good ones, like Medgar’s favorite photograph of her from their Alcorn days, and ones that were horrific, like the bloodstained five-dollar bill and the blood-encrusted keys Medgar had in his hand when he died.72
It was all too much. She had three distraught children to see to, and the endless stream of tragedy tourists pouring onto the block, bothering the children and snapping photos at all hours, thanks to the Clarion-Ledger having printed their address on its rancid pages.
TWO NIGHTS AFTER THEY GOT BACK FROM WASHINGTON, ON June 23, the phone rang. It was R. Jess Brown, and the news he had was stunning. The FBI had found Medgar’s killer, and he was under arrest. Myrlie dropped the phone on the floor and ran to switch on the television, hunting through the channels for confirmation.73 She now had a name to affix to her grief and her rage: Byron De La Beckwith.