“The Negroes are getting too independent,” they say. “We must teach them a lesson.” What lesson? The lesson of subordination: “Kill the leaders and it will cow the Negro who dares to shoot a white man, even in self-defense.”
—IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT
Nearly everything about how Medgar’s murder was handled by the authorities came as a surprise to Myrlie. She was amazed the Jackson police bothered to investigate at all, that the officers who had swarmed her home that night and into the next day lifted a finger to find her husband’s killer, that the FBI got involved, that the rifle was found, along with a telescopic scope and a fingerprint, and that anyone bothered to trace it. She had become accustomed to law enforcement doing nothing to bring justice after the murderers of Black men, women, and children. Yet federal law enforcement had done just that.
Byron De La Beckwith was a World War II veteran like Medgar, but five years older and an ardent racist and fascist. He was born in Colusa, California, before his Mississippi-born and reared mother returned with him to her home state, after his father died when he was five years old—a detail that allowed the Clarion-Ledger to mockingly describe him as a “Californian.”1 The arrest was considered enough of a matter of national importance that J. Edgar Hoover announced the arrest himself.
Jackson police detectives John Chamblee and Fred Sanders, who had arrived at the Evers home soon after the first two responding officers, had taken charge of the investigation. A June 29 report described a visit they made to Greenwood, where Beckwith, who sold fertilizer door-to-door to local farmers—because, according to his fellow workers, it required less contact with “niggers in the field”—was widely known as a vocal segregationist, Citizens’ Council member, and Klansman. Chamblee and Sanders’s typewritten report stated, “It is the general consensus of the people that [the Evers shooting] was carefully planned and not a quick venture.” The report also said, “Most seemed glad to talk to us but could not or would not give us any information concerning De. La. [sic]”2
Finding Beckwith was a needle-in-a-haystack operation. After the high-powered rifle was found, Chief Detective M. B. Pierce announced that “all evidence in the case had been sent to the FBI in Washington, including the rifle with a new telescopic sight, a fingerprint from the sight, and the bullet,”3 which had been damaged as it passed through Medgar’s body and ricocheted through the living room and kitchen of the house. It was reported that “there were no substantial leads, but that [Pierce’s] men were checking on a few out-of-state people who had been in the area.” 4
The Kennedy administration was inundated by letters and telegrams from Black citizens and interracial and religious organizations expressing outrage and disgust at Evers’s assassination. Fearing an outbreak of fresh racial conflict as they faced their first high-profile assassination of a civil rights leader, they made the investigation a priority. Attorney General Robert Kennedy didn’t intend to fail, and even Hoover, who viewed the civil rights movement as a hotbed of Communist sympathizers and dangerous would-be “Black Messiahs,” put the agency’s back into the investigation.
The fingerprint on the rifle scope led agents to Beckwith,5 and when they visited him at his “deteriorating old house on Greenwood’s George Street,” to ask if he still had his Enfield rifle, he refused to talk to them. But his military service record included his fingerprints, which matched the one on the scope.
On June 23, a Sunday, President Kennedy was in West Germany being received by huge crowds as he gave a Cold War address. Dr. King was in Detroit leading what was, at the time, the largest civil rights demonstration in U.S. history: the Walk to Freedom, organized by the Detroit Council on Human Rights and joined by clergy, civil rights organizations, and organized labor. After leading 125,000 mostly Black marchers down Woodward Avenue, with many carrying signs declaring “Evers Died for You—Join NAACP for Him,” King gave an earlier version of his “I Have a Dream” speech in which he stated that “before the victory is won, some, like Medgar Evers, may have to face physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children and their white brothers from an eternal psychological death, then nothing can be more redemptive . . . I have a dream.” King expressed the hope “that there will be a day that we will no longer face the atrocities that Emmett Till had to face or Medgar Evers had to face, that all men can live with dignity.”6
That same day, Bobby Kennedy appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and said there was more evidence against Byron De La Beckwith than has been made public, but that he “was not at liberty to discuss [it] further.”
Beckwith’s arrest, the Clarion-Ledger reported, “capped eleven days of intensive investigation by city, county, state and federal agents.”7
Hoover said Beckwith had been arrested on a charge of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and that he “and others unknown conspired to injure, oppress, and intimidate Medgar Evers.”8 Beckwith had turned himself in after his neighbors tipped him off that the FBI was watching his house. He was transferred to Jackson and refused to give any statement. At the Jackson police station, he at first refused to pose for a photo, then agreed to do so “when they said they were just doing their job.”9
Beckwith was clearly a fanatic. One Greenwood resident recalled that after the Brown decision, he “stood on the street corner one day selling copies of Black Monday by Judge Tom Brady.” Beckwith’s former employer, Vincent Cascio, told the Associated Press that if anyone mentioned Blacks around Beckwith, “he would fly into a rage.”10 He had a large gun collection and frequently traded firearms to friends and associates.11
On June 26, Frank Ellis Smith, a former moderate Democratic congressman from Mississippi, wrote to the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, Burke Marshall, sharing what he knew about Beckwith. Smith had been appointed by President Kennedy to the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority after losing his seat in the Democratic primary to segregationist Jamie Whitten, three days after Medgar’s assassination. He wrote to Marshall that “several years ago, De La (Delay) Beckworth [sic] came to my office in Greenwood to ask, in general, why the world was in the hands of the Communists. ‘Let me know if I can kill a nigger for you,’ were his parting words.”12
Smith went on to call Beckwith “a product of all right-wing, racist, organizations”: a former district treasurer of the Sons of the American Revolution, an associate of the John Birch Society, and someone who “occasionally embarrassed the Citizens Council leaders, but they regularly used him as a promoter and agitator.” He also claimed that Whitten had used Beckwith as a campaign operative on the ground.13
Detectives also learned that Beckwith had been under psychiatric care, even speaking with a doctor who apparently treated him “for a condition of the mind” for more than a year.14 Beckwith was all smiles later in July when Sheriff Bob Gilfoy delivered him from the Jackson jail to Whitfield Hospital’s maximum-security wing to receive a mental evaluation to determine if he was fit to stand trial. He posed for photographers and joked about his on-again, off-again marriage.15 He put on quite a show. Few in Jackson’s Black and civil rights community believed Beckwith was insane, any more than they were convinced that he had acted alone.
GUYNES STREET RAN STRAIGHT EAST TO WEST, AND THAT EMPTY expanse of trees and honeysuckle bushes that separated the one-block Black development from Missouri Street and commercial Delta Drive now took on an even more sinister posture. “Not a single person lived back there. Nothing but a lot of grass and a lot of trash and what not,” Johnnie Pearl Young said. It was next to her home, and she was distressed that the gunman appeared to have used her honeysuckle bushes as cover and pushed the butt of his rifle through her fence, to aim at Medgar through that mounted scope. “I was sitting up there in the kitchen [that night],” she recalled, “looking out the back, and when I heard a shot, I said, ‘My goodness, that man came out of . . . that wooded area.”
Medgar, Myrlie, and their neighbors knew he was being stalked. Neighbors remembered that in the weeks before the murder a white car, resembling those used by the local white Top Cab company, was parked on the block or was driven up and down it. Young believed the driver “studied the street [for] at least about two weeks before they got a chance to kill him.” Medgar repeatedly reported their phone being tapped to the New Orleans FBI office, but they never acted on the complaints. The taps on the phone were a likely product of the Sovereignty Commission, which was hoping to find embarrassing or damning information in order to disparage Medgar’s reputation and damage his effectiveness in the movement. The informants feeding information about Medgar’s movements included Black informants like Percy Greene.
Medgar was warned by NAACP aides that he had been followed to the party after Lena Horne and Dick Gregory’s appearance at the June 7 mass meeting. He also received threats that were passed along to him through a sympathetic white lawyer. The two Jackson police detectives who primarily worked the case, and who shared their findings with the FBI, took numerous reports about white strangers who appeared at the Masonic Temple that evening, two standing at the back, one smoking a cigarette, while the third man took a seat, “neither clapping his hands, nor laughing at any of the jokes”16—prompting Lilian Louie, Medgar’s personal secretary, to ask the man if she could sell him a membership. He told her he already had one. She told an associate named Sam Bailey to find out who he was. Bailey “walked over to [the man], and he got up and left in a hurry, and she didn’t see him anymore.”17 At least, not that evening.
Hours before Medgar’s murder, on June 10, at around 1:00 P.M. or 1:30 P.M., Louie looked out the office window and saw the same man lingering across the street for about an hour. Then he entered the building and came upstairs. Lots of white press men were around, she told the detectives, but this man didn’t interact with them, nor did he have a pad or a camera. She asked if she could help him, and he left. Louie’s account was corroborated by Doris Allison, a Black housewife who attended the mass meeting that night, along with two other attendees: Marie Bracey and Pearlina Lewis.18
All three women identified Brian De La Beckwith from his photograph in the newspaper. So, too, did Leroy Kelly Jr., who saw a man who looked like Beckwith enter the Masonic Temple on the seventh after telling two young Black boys outside that he hadn’t been able to get in, to which they told him he could try the back way. Kelly’s wife told the detectives that Beckwith unnerved her so much as he sat, staring and unsmiling, that she thought he might throw a bomb at the stage.19
Two white cabdrivers, Herbert Speights and Lee Swilley, identified a man they described as “42–44 years of age, 6'2"; tall, dark hair combed back and greying at the temples, wearing dark pants and a sport shirt” who on the Sunday before Medgar’s murder came to the Trailways bus station where they were waiting for fares and repeatedly asked, “Where that Evans nigger lived that is the NAACP worker,”20 apparently mistaking Evers’s name. He repeatedly went inside the station to use the phone book and returned three times, giving them possible addresses that they told him couldn’t be right because they were in white neighborhoods.
Each person interviewed also identified Beckwith. Witness after witness described the 1962 white Plymouth Valiant, with an unusually long rear antenna and a Masonic emblem hanging from the rearview mirror, which was linked to Beckwith, and which multiple witnesses saw in the Joe’s Drive-In parking lot on June 11 and at the Trailways bus station.21
No one seemed to doubt that Beckwith had pulled the trigger, but on June 15, the Mississippi Free Press reported that “the shooting, which seemed to have involved at least three men, was apparently carefully planned,” noting that “J. G. Wells, Houston Wells’s brother, said that when he drove down the street near Evers’s home, he crashed through a 10-inch-high barricade of tin cans. Wells said he thought that the barricade was part of a trap to facilitate the murder since Evers often went home by that route. Because he returned home from another direction Tuesday night, the barricade was untouched.”22
The Free Press also said, “Mrs. Herbert Bishop, whose home faced the barricade, said that she and her children heard a very loud noise at the time of the killing. Willie Mae Bishop, one of the children, who was watching television, told the [paper] that when they heard the shots, ‘we shut off all the lights because we were scared.’ She said that when she looked out the window, she saw three men running from the spot where the shot is believed to have been fired.”23 The Bishops were white, which in Mississippi added to their credibility.
Chamblee interviewed a witness who “saw three men sitting in a room with a rifle around the time Medgar was murdered and included in his report that witnesses reported seeing three men walking quickly away from a house on Missouri Street after the shot killing Mr. Evers was fired, and about a suspect who rode a bus into Jackson from Shreveport.”24
With a man in custody, and despite Hoover’s statement about “persons unknown,” the FBI appeared to have declared victory on the Evers murder and stopped investigating after Beckwith’s indictment. No attempt was made to do a larger inquiry into Klan involvement, even after Chamblee and Sanders reported that a twenty-year-old hotel porter named Estes Knight King had overheard two men discussing killing Myrlie. “The men were standing near the Edward Hotel and . . . they had a suitcase long enough to hold a rifle and were standing beside a red Pontiac.” King heard them saying “they were to do away with Evers wife tonight. And that it would be around 2:00 A.M.” He then tried to make a phone call from a phone booth, and a man in a mask jerked the phone away and told him not to use that phone again, so he contacted the FBI.
“As a precaution,” Jackson police notified all cars to “make a regular check of [the Evers’s] address.” This also did not prompt any investigation into whether Medgar’s murder had been more than the work of a lone fanatic.
Medgar’s name was reportedly on the Klan’s death lists, as were James Meredith’s, John Salter’s, and Ed King’s. After the Freedom Rides, the lists also included young activist leaders from CORE and SNCC. The Brown decision had revived the Klan, which had diminished in membership and power after the Great Depression and World War II. By the 1960s, much of its activity was centered on Mississippi.25 Many white Mississippians viewed the Freedom Rides as an “invasion” by Northern, Jewish Communists, abetted by a handful of bad, ungrateful, and militant local Negroes like Medgar and outsiders like Dr. King, who they saw as disrupting what they chose to believe was a kindly, Christian, and perfectly fair segregation of the races better known as “the Mississippi way.”
Two Klan organizations were active in the South: the original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and what Mississippi investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell called “the most notorious Klan organization in the United States: The White Knights of the KKK.” The White Knights were led by Sam Bowers, who Mitchell said was “responsible for at least ten murders that we know of here in Mississippi (including the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney) [and] probably more.” Bowers began organizing the White Knights in 1963 in response to CORE’s aggressive push for integration in Jackson, where he lived. This was a fight Medgar Evers was intimately involved in.26
Mitchell said it was no coincidence that Evers was killed on the night “President Kennedy delivered his first civil rights speech, where he told the nation that grandsons of slaves are still not free.”
“The Klan panicked,” Mitchell believed, and “they picked that particular night” to show themselves as a national organization. “It was not an accident,” he said.
In the same early-morning hours of June 12 that Medgar Evers was bleeding to death in his carport, Bernard Lafayette pulled into his home in Selma, Alabama. A white man approached and asked for help pushing his disabled car. The man went back to his car, but when he returned a second time, he struck Lafayette on his head with the butt of a pistol. Lafayette called to his neighbor, who came outside with a rifle and fired a shot in the air. “Don’t kill him,” Lafayette shouted, as the man scurried into his car and drove away.
Lafayette was a cofounder of SNCC and the Nashville Student Movement, which saw hundreds of students arrested at sit-ins between February and April 1960. He participated in the Freedom Rides and spent time incarcerated at Parchman. After that ordeal, he helped James Bevel set up the “freedom workshops” for activists emerging from detention as well as new recruits. He was a student of James Lawson, the nonviolence practitioner who had connected with Martin Luther King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and who also trained fellow SNCC founders John Lewis, James Bevel, and Diane Nash in the Gandhian techniques that prompted him to urge his friend not to shoot and kill his attacker.
Lafayette found out that Medgar was dead while he was still in the hospital. All he could think of was Myrlie and the Evers children, frantic and terrified in what should have been their safe home. Nearly a week later, Lafayette had a visitor: FBI Special Agent Edwin R. Tully,27 who told him of a “tristate conspiracy” that involved killing CORE activist Benjamin Elton Cox in Louisiana, murdering Medgar Evers in Jackson, and doing “an Emmett Till”28 on him. Tully said the conspiracy was planned in New Orleans, the original terminus point for the Freedom Rides. Ben Cox had been out of town when the gunmen came for him, so he remained unharmed. Lafayette said such plots were meant to send a strong message to others to warn them away from civil rights activism.29 If the FBI followed up on this tristate conspiracy, Lafayette never heard about it again.
Even after Beckwith was indicted on July 230—on what would have been Medgar’s thirty-eighth birthday—Myrlie and nearly everyone in her community still had little cause to trust the “justice” system in Mississippi. Clyde Kennard certainly hadn’t survived it; he died two days later, on July 4 in a Chicago hospital. Cancer had taken what little Parchman Penitentiary had left behind. He was just thirty-six years old, and one of the many millions of Black bodies that had been ground up by “the Mississippi way of life.”
MYRLIE WAS IN CHICAGO WHEN THE INDICTMENT CAME DOWN. She had discovered, as had Mamie Till-Mobley, that being a civil rights widow, she was an attractive prospect as a public speaker and a prolific fundraising and publicity tool for the NAACP. When the June 28 issue of Life hit the newsstands, with the cover photograph of her consoling Darrell at the funeral, NAACP branches all around the country began requesting that she come and talk about Medgar.31
Ruby Hurley and Gloster Current advised her to wait on accepting any offers until after her speech at the organization’s national convention, in Chicago, where she was the first week of July. She was accepting the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal on Medgar’s behalf. Aunt Myrlie traveled with her to look after the children, as did Charles.
Myrlie’s speech was scheduled for the evening of July 4, and she had spent the plane ride to Chicago worried about it. The only time she had spoken publicly before had been at the church rally after Medgar died, and now she found it hard to get what she wanted to say down on paper. The emotions were still too raw. How could she, without any display of guile, encapsulate all that Medgar had meant not just to her and to their children, but to the world, and all that had happened in the brief but challenging weeks since his murder? Myrlie was following Roy Wilkins, Fred Shuttlesworth, and then Bishop Spottswood, who would present her with the award.
With Charles, Aunt Myrlie, and her children in their seats, Myrlie stood alone on the outdoor stage. “I remember looking up at the pure blue of the sky with a sense that perhaps Medgar was somehow aware of this day,” she wrote later. “I was drawing strength from him and at the same time that I had better do a good job.”32 In her speech, written largely at the last minute and under the pressure of love and legacy, Myrlie said of Medgar: “He made the supreme sacrifice, gave his life for all Americans. I pray his death has shocked the complacent into active participation in achieving the goals for which he died.”33
She was surprised by the strength of her voice, which was clear and firm. She spoke for ten minutes, and that was followed by a roar of applause. “I turned and saw Aunt Myrlie wiping tears from her eyes,” she said. “There were others on the platform similarly overcome. I was dry-eyed and calm.”34
She thought a lot about the time Medgar asked her: “Myrlie, when you going to learn to stand up and fight for yourself?” She’d taken it as an insult, and shot back, “I do,” to which he’d responded flatly, “You don’t.” “I didn’t cry,” she later recalled, “which would ordinarily have been what I would’ve done.” Instead, she decided to humor the man who had seemed to take delight in pushing her buttons since they were in college. “Explain to me what you mean,” she said.
“He told me that I had strength that I wasn’t even aware of,” she later wrote. “[He said,] ‘Stop backing away from change and challenge.’” During her speech in Chicago, she had plenty of both.
After that, Myrlie was in great demand as a speaker. Public speaking gave her an excuse for being away from home where she was tormented by memories day and night, but it also was a way to earn money and to make good on her promise to Medgar to properly care for their children. It was not lost on her that her husband had sold life insurance in the Delta but died with a lapsed policy of his own. The NAACP, Dr. King, the churches, and sympathetic people of all races and faiths around the country had stepped up to raise money for the family, including funds to ensure the children would be able to attend college. A small policy the NAACP had taken out for Medgar during his employment and their agreement to continue paying his salary to Myrlie would ensure the family would make it,35 but it wasn’t going to be enough.
At first, Myrlie felt that staying at home “served a good purpose,” she said, “because it made me determined to make whatever system, whatever people were involved, I was going to make them pay. With my last breath. And I prayed to my God to give me direction and give me strength to see the people who destroyed my husband’s body were caught. I was obsessed with that. I tried not to show it every day. That’s why I took to the lecture circuit. That was my opportunity to release, with dignity, the hatred that I had inside of me. It is interesting the two opposite forces: love and hate, how those two can drive you to do things ordinarily you wouldn’t. I was determined that I was going to live. I was determined that I was going to take care of our three children, without begging. I would work hard. And I was determined that with my last breath I would see that those who were responsible for putting those bullets in my husband’s back would pay.”
She packed the children off to Vicksburg to stay with Aunt Myrlie for the last weeks of summer and committed herself to the road, where she had quickly become a prolific speaker and the NAACP’s most formidable fundraiser. With the children gone, though, when she came home to the empty house, she found herself lost in a spiral of grief. She had not brought herself to pack up all of Medgar’s things. His shirts were still hanging neatly in the closet. Sometimes she buried her face in them and hugged them and cried. It was a special torment, as she remembered those last few days when he thanked her for ironing them.
Her friends worried about her. Dr. Britton prescribed sleeping pills but gave her only a few at a time, fearing what she would do with a full bottle.36 There were days of darkness, when she found it hard to get out of bed. And she worried about her children. Reena was able to cry, and sometimes find a night’s peace. She mothered her brothers obsessively, though she was the middle child, but that seemed to comfort her. Van was so young his resiliency came from a lack of memory. The hardest part with him was his constant demand to be told, again, whether his daddy was coming back. That was torture for her, but a healthy expression for her little boy.
Darrell was another story. He seemed to be retreating further into himself, sometimes refusing to eat, or speak. Medgar had been his hero, and he seemed completely lost without him. Photos of Darrell in newspaper and magazine articles show a distant, brooding boy. He seemed unable to confront the depth and power of his emotions over the loss of his father, and nothing seemed to penetrate his silence.37 At times he sat in the carport for hours and stared at the place where his father had fallen. Myrlie asked him what was wrong, and he answered, “Nothing.” Every single night, he slept with his toy rifle, and he rarely slept through the night without nightmares.
When Myrlie was packing to go away on another speaking trip, Darrell—the ten-year-old man of the house—chastised her and accused her of going away all the time, just like Daddy did. Sometimes he threw in, “The same thing that happened to Daddy is going to happen to you.” She tried telling him she was traveling to places where people felt and behaved differently than they did in Mississippi, and she was going away to help them, and to remind people about their daddy. Nothing seemed to comfort her sad little boy.38
Myrlie felt broken, angry, and lost without Medgar. She thought often of taking her own life, sometimes driving fast and erratically down dark highway roads or pouring whatever pills were around the house into her hand and cradling them in her palm, only to be jerked out of her trance by the thought of her children losing their one remaining parent.39
The stress was such that in mid-July, Myrlie miscarried.40 Medgar had worried aloud about bringing a fourth child into the cruel world that Mississippi offered his family, and despite the pain, and the fresh state of grieving forced upon her, she felt a kind of relief. One less person to need her.
Between the travel and the loneliness, Myrlie had come to a frightening place where she wasn’t sure she could keep her promise to Medgar to care for their children. She placed a tearful call to Charles’s wife, Nan, begging her to take the children, for their sakes. Nan understood her. They were close in age, and Nan was a realist, but also sensitive to her pain. She told Myrlie she would take care of her children, “but only if she had to.” In the meantime, Nan told her sister-in-law that she needed to take real care of herself and heal. “Your children need you, not someone else, to rear them,” she said.41
Caring for herself seemed especially difficult with Medgar’s ghost everywhere. She felt him holding her when she buried her face in the sheets of their bed. She took out the letters and postcards he’d written her over the years and read and reread them.42 She couldn’t stop hearing that rifle shot, or seeing him dying, drowning in blood reaching for the door, for her. She lived in a nightmare and couldn’t wake up from it. She had hoped the speaking assignments would ease the pain, but they forced her to relive it onstage.43
Still, she kept up a furious pace, including an engagement in Boston that caused her to miss the March on Washington, which left her with pangs of guilt and regret. The event was for the Negro Elks of Boston, and it included a $4,000 scholarship for each of her children. As a mother, she simply could not responsibly renege.
Organizers of the March had been fueled by the national anger over Evers’s slaying. “Originally it was conceived of as a march for jobs, but as ’63 progressed, with the Birmingham demonstrations, the assassination of Medgar Evers and the introduction of the Civil Rights Act by President Kennedy, it became clear that it had to be a march for jobs and freedom,” 44 said Rachelle Horowitz, an aide to March organizer Bayard Rustin.
President Kennedy had been a fitful friend of the movement. Despite big promises during his campaign, the early years of his administration had been marked by diffidence. He spoke sympathetically with civil rights leaders and used his executive authority to push through desegregation when confronted by violent Southern resistance. But he also had reelection in mind, and he believed an historic income tax rate cut was key to boosting the economy ahead of the 1964 campaign. Meanwhile, the turbulence in the streets of Mississippi and Alabama was not just an international embarrassment, it was a bad mark on his administration. Yet he had to be as careful in his pleas to Southern senators as he was with Southern Democratic governors, as the former held his legislative future in their hands.
The March on Washington, particularly after Medgar’s assassination, was meant not just to call for civic and economic justice for Black Americans, but also to push the Kennedy administration and Congress on the Civil Rights Act, which had become mired in the House as President Kennedy quietly pushed for his tax cut bill to be passed first.45 Medgar’s final telegram to President Kennedy had been sent eleven days before his assassination, calling on the administration to intervene in Mississippi, where young Black marchers were being abused and incarcerated as they marched for justice and equality. He believed in local action—in the rising up of Black Mississippians to claim equality and dignity for themselves. But he also believed in the federal government’s power and responsibility to enforce the rule of law, and the edicts of the federal courts.
“Medgar Evers’ death was a subtext of the march,” then Tougaloo student activist Joyce Ladner said. “Everyone was aware that one of the truly great heroes in the Deep South had just been murdered. And therefore, Mr. President, your request that we go slow doesn’t make sense.”46
Myrlie returned to the hotel from her speaking engagement as the March was well underway. Darrell and Reena were watching it unfold on television. Darrell pointed and exclaimed “Momma, you’re supposed to be in Washington. They’re calling your name right now!” Her heart sank.47 NAACP activist Daisy Bates, an architect of the Arkansas school integration movement and advisor to the Little Rock Nine, delivered a short speech in Myrlie’s place, and Josephine Baker, in full French military uniform, took the stage to greet the massive crowd. They were the only women the 250,000 assembled on the National Mall heard from that day. Coretta Scott King would later recall her irritation that none of the battle-worn female veterans of the movement, from Fannie Lou Hamer to Ella Baker to Diane Nash, Gloria Richardson, and Dorothy Height (the lone female member of the “Big Six” organizers and the godmother of the civil rights movement) was allowed to give a major speech at the March. “That’s how chauvinistic leadership was at the time,” she wrote.48 In fact, Myrlie’s name had only been suggested after Anna Arnold Hedgeman of the National Council of Churches objected to the all-male lineup, in response to which Roy Wilkins put in Myrlie’s name.
The demands of the March matched the NAACP’s consistent demands of the Kennedy White House: that the Kennedy civil rights bill include federal enforcement of desegregation of all public facilities; a federal ban on employment discrimination by race; and voting rights protection for Black Americans, particularly in the South. The administration had feared the March; worrying that it could descend into violence and give the world another Jackson or Birmingham. Instead, it was peaceful, soaring, and it elevated Dr. King to international and iconic status as a moral leader. After the March, President Kennedy invited movement leaders to the White House to discuss advancing the civil rights bill. Among them: Dr. King; Roy Wilkins; John Lewis of SNCC; Whitney Young of the National Urban League; Mathew Ahmann of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice; A. Philip Randolph; and labor leader Walter Reuther; along with Floyd McKissick of CORE; and W. Willard Wirtz, Kennedy’s secretary of labor.
Ten days later, the Kennedy bill cleared its first hurdle in the House. Images of the Woolworth’s sit-in mayhem were distributed to members during the summer hearings, and the outrage over Medgar’s murder hung over the proceedings, as the national civil rights groups pushed hard on the White House and the Congress for the bill. Then at just after 10:00 on Sunday morning, September 15, the KKK responded in kind: laying dynamite on the site of the 16th Street Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham, which had been a launch point for civil rights marches, including those led by Dr. King. The explosion killed four young Black girls who were inside the choir dressing room on the church’s lower level, and nearly blinding a fifth. The bombing added a fresh shock for a nation that had seen what felt like a year of racial siege. With a horrified nation looking on, and a feeling of near civil war wafting across the American South, House Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Cellar, a liberal New York Democrat, author of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the bill’s champion in the House, opted to send an even stronger bill to the Rules Committee, whose chair was a segregationist Virginia Dixiecrat named “Judge” Howard W. Smith. The date of the bill’s arrival to the Rules Committee was set as November 19. After that, its next destination would be the House floor.
ON NOVEMBER 22, A FRIDAY, REENA WAS HOME SICK WITH A COLD, and Myrlie was leaving the next day to speak in Chicago and New York. Myrlie telephoned her hairdresser Alleyne “Skeet” French to see if she could fit her in. She left Van next door with the Wellses and went to her appointment. She was lost in an issue of Look magazine—the one with John F. Kennedy and his son on the cover—and she and Skeet were commenting on what a beautiful child John Jr. was when the phone rang.
Myrlie guessed, “I’ll bet that’s Reena,” who hated being in the house alone. Skeet picked up the phone, and then she screamed. Myrlie panicked, as Skeet snapped on the radio. President Kennedy had been shot as his motorcade moved through Dallas, Texas—Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s home state. Myrlie dissolved into a mass of hysterical tears, reliving every moment of Medgar’s murder and being overwhelmed by fear.
Skeet held Myrlie and rocked her back and forth, begging her not to cry herself sick. Finally, Myrlie composed herself enough to call Reena and told her to turn off the television and wait for Mama to come home. She called the Wells house and asked Carolyn to go next door and check on Reena. Then she climbed into her car and began what felt like an endless drive home. She thought of Jackie, and Caroline, and John-John. She prayed they would not soon be living her nightmare. Darrell was still at school, and she hoped the nuns were comforting him.
When she arrived home, Reena was in bed, convulsing in tears, and all Myrlie could do was take her daughter in her arms, lead her gently into the living room, and turn on the television, in time to hear Walter Cronkite deliver the news that President Kennedy was gone, shot dead with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight, just like Medgar had been.49
Darrell came home, went into his room, and closed the door. The next day, Myrlie was in Chicago, feeling utterly dejected. When a group of women said Mrs. Kennedy would be fine because she was rich, Myrlie lost her composure and yelled at them that Mrs. Kennedy had just lost her husband and the father of her children. Money was hardly the point. She stormed out of the room and went back to her hotel. It felt like the second longest night of her life.
Myrlie was convinced that the same forces that had taken Medgar had gotten Kennedy. The president had announced on the night of June 11 that he would send a sweeping civil rights bill to Congress, making law what National Guardsmen had made fact on campuses from Arkansas to Mississippi to Alabama since Brown v. Board and right up to the day of his speech. On June 12, a Klansman killed Medgar in front of his own home. On September 15, Klansmen blew up a church in Birmingham, killing four little girls, just two weeks after the August 28 March on Washington. Now Kennedy was dead, too. Nowhere in the American South was safe for Black people or for anyone who sympathized at all with them.
During Medgar’s last national trip, he had written his family a sweet letter, hoping for a wonderful Christmas with Myrlie and their children. Instead, the year would end as it had begun: with violence, agony, turbulence, and death.
THE TRIAL OF BYRON DE LA BECKWITH BEGAN ON JANUARY 28, 1964, and it went about as Myrlie expected. The Greenwood White Citizens’ Council set up a legal fund, with the town’s three bank presidents as “acting financial advisors,” so Beckwith could afford an expensive three-man defense team consisting of Greenwood’s city attorney, Hardy Lott; Stanley Sanders, a former DA; and Hugh Cunningham, a partner in Governor Barnett’s law firm and one of the state’s top defense lawyers. Of the pool of nearly two hundred male potential jurors (women couldn’t serve on Mississippi juries until 1968) only a handful were Black, and they were systematically excluded by the defense. After four days of selection, the jury consisted, as was the Mississippi way, of twelve white men.
William Waller, the thirty-seven-year-old district attorney, was asking for the death penalty, but Myrlie saw him as just another face of white Southern injustice. He was a segregationist and had no trouble telling her so. That didn’t mean he wasn’t also ambitious, and he made it clear he intended to win the case, which was being closely watched in Washington, D.C.
Myrlie was being called as a witness, and when she asked how she would be addressed in court, Waller dismissively told her not to expect to be called “Mrs.” or “Ms.” She was in Mississippi, after all. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” he told her. “You were born and raised here. You know what the customs are.”50 Whites referred to Black adults as Aunt or Preacher, boy, girl, or Nigger—always by their first names. Myrlie let Waller know she would brook no such disrespect, that her husband had lived and died for this. He asked if she’d rather be called “Mrs. Evers or win a conviction.” She wanted both and let him know she assumed he would do just enough during the trial to satisfy the press and no more.51
The trial included more than a dozen prosecution witnesses, from people at the Evers home that night to police officers, detectives, forensic pathologists, medical and fingerprint experts. Waller presented testimony from the man who traded the gun to Beckwith, his fingerprint on the scope, and evidence of his obsession with maintaining segregation. Several Guynes Street neighbors testified about that night, as did the police officers who responded and the detectives who investigated the case and found the rifle. The cabdrivers identified Beckwith as the man who came looking for the Everses’ address.
Myrlie was the second prosecution witness, and neither side addressed her by name at all. She described that agonizing night and the telephone threats they had received for months. The defense team quizzed her about her and Medgar’s attempts to integrate Jackson public schools, Medgar’s application to Ole Miss, and about why Darrell’s middle name was Kenyatta. The FBI’s New Orleans office, via an agent observing the trial in Jackson, sent teletypes summarizing each day’s testimony to the New York office. This included defense attorney Hardy Lott’s attempts to impeach Jackson police officer Ralph Hargrove, who photographed Medgar’s body at the University Hospital, for being a graduate of a correspondence school and having no more than a high school education, and attacking the police identification of the latent fingerprint on the scope as Beckwith’s.52
Beckwith’s defense consisted almost solely of testimony from two Greenwood police officers who claimed they saw him in his hometown, eighty miles from Jackson, around the time Medgar was killed, just after midnight. Beckwith was the last to testify, and he denied killing Evers, though he admitted to owning lots of guns, including an Enfield .30-36 rifle, which he claimed was stolen before June 12. He even admitted to trading for a telescopic sight like the one that killed Evers, though Cunningham dismissed this, saying the fingerprint proved “the defendant may have had the telescope—not the gun—in his hand.”53 Beckwith also claimed he got the bruise over his eye, which matched what the shotgun sight recoil would cause, at a shooting range.
Beckwith seemed delighted when some of his racist tracts about “opposing the evils of segregation” were read back to him—including a January 1963 letter to the National Rifle Association which said, “we in Mississippi are going to have to do a lot of shooting to protect ourselves against ‘bad Negroes.’” In a January 1964 letter to Field and Stream, Beckwith proposed an article on “varmint hunting at night in summertime in the South,” and another letter said he was writing a book titled My Ass, Your Goat and the Republic, dealing with states’ rights and integration.54
Beckwith’s demeanor as each piece of evidence was presented was jaunty and relaxed; he seemed full of confidence that he would soon be free. Time wrote that Beckwith “performed more like a circus clown than a defendant in a first-degree murder case. Constantly shooting his French cuffs, he propped his feet up on a nearby chair, swigged soda pop, glowered at Negro newsmen, hallooed to white spectators, was once restrained by a bailiff from sauntering over to the jury box to chat with his peers, and with the exaggerated Southern courtliness upon which he so much prides himself, even offered cigars to prosecutor William L. Waller.”55
In summation, Hardy Lott told the jury that “not a single witness” had put [Beckwith] at the scene. Waller portrayed Beckwith as a fanatic who “did not come to Jackson just to kill Medgar Evers,” but to “kill evil” as he saw it “and to get the number one man.” He told jurors he had never seen more evidence in a felony case, and likened the defendant to the killers of Emmett Till, who sold their story to Look for $4,000, without using Till’s name, saying Beckwith had “gotten a real big kick out of being a martyr,” adding, “What worries me is that two or three months from now, I will pick up a Saturday Evening Post and read ‘My True Story.’ He’s already written it.”56
On February 6, the day the jury was to begin its deliberations, Governor Barnett appeared at the courthouse pledging full cooperation with the federal government. But he also came to the courtroom and warmly greeted Beckwith and shook his hand. Myrlie later wrote, “If there had ever been a question of where the governor of Mississippi stood, it did not survive that scene.”57 She believed that Barnett belonged in the docks with Beckwith, and that Mayor Thompson and William Simmons, the head of the White Citizens’ Council, did, too. She was convinced they had conspired to murder her husband.58
The next morning, Beckwith got another high-profile visitor when Gen. Edwin A. Walker strode into the courtroom to take his turn shaking Beckwith’s hand. Walker was a West Point graduate and Korean War veteran who in 1957 had been forced, as the commander of the Arkansas Military District in Little Rock, to help break Gov. Orval Faubus’s eighteen-day-long refusal to accede to the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School by nine Black children. Soon afterward, President Dwight Eisenhower relieved Walker of his command when it was discovered that, as a John Birch Society member, he was indoctrinating his troops using the group’s racist literature. In 1962, Attorney General Kennedy issued a warrant for his arrest on seditious conspiracy charges after he helped organize the violent protests against James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, leading him to declare himself a political prisoner of the Kennedy administration, whose members he accused, along with other northern Democrats, of being Communist sympathizers for supporting integration.59
The trial’s biggest surprise however, came from the jury. Rather than the quick acquittal that was expected, this jury, after twenty-two hours of deliberations over three days, announced that they were hopelessly deadlocked, prompting Circuit Judge Leon Hendricks to declare a mistrial, which, in Mississippi, was the equivalent of an earthquake.
Prosecutors tried again in April, and Beckwith seemed to take it more seriously, as did his racist supporters. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in Jackson on the first day of the trial, perhaps to send a message to Beckwith’s second jury. Hugh Cunningham took the lead this time.60 The final jury panel was again all white and all male, and it included seven college graduates and two Northern transplants.
The second trial began on April 6, 1964, and a new development included testimony from Fred Beard, the manager of Jackson’s WLBT, who described the threats that poured in after the TV station aired Medgar’s speech on May 20, 1963. Beard recounted people vowing to “do bodily harm to Evers.”
The then assistant district attorney, John Fox III, solicited testimony from Herbert Speight—one of the two cabdrivers—that Beckwith (or, according to Speight, “if it was not Beckwith . . . his twin brother”) had asked him and a fellow cabdriver at the Trailways terminal for Evers’s address—and that he had been “beaten up as a result of the testimony he previously gave.” Even so, Speight gave the same testimony in the second trial. A coworker of Beckwith also testified that Beckwith “brushed it off” when he asked about the scar left by the scope over his eye.
Testimony this time also alluded to a conspiracy to kill Medgar Evers, or to cover it up. Mrs. A. W. Branch and her son, Charles Branch, of Sidon, Mississippi, said that on the night of Sunday, June 9, three days before Evers was killed, they saw an individual getting in or out of Beckwith’s white Valant while it was parked on a lot adjacent to the Greyhound bus station in Greenwood; and that Charles Branch told Beckwith, who was inside the station, that he’d seen this, and that Beckwith went outside and talked to this unknown individual. A note in an FBI file during the trail said this was not developed to any significant degree.61
In the prosecution’s closing arguments, Assistant DA Fox called the Evers killing “the worst crime, the most cold-blooded killing I’ve ever seen,” adding, “It is not a crime of passion or revenge. It is one man’s short-lived hold on destiny in which he can become a big, big martyr.”62 He then asked the jury, “Does [Beckwith] come to you in any manner of innocence? Rather, he sat upon that throne of glory and reveled in it, and his attitude was almost beyond comprehension to me.”63
On April 17, 1964, Beckwith’s second trial also ended with a hung jury. This time a grinning Beckwith was released on $10,000 bond, and he returned home to Greenwood and to his job selling fertilizer. He would bask in the glow of his new status as a conquering hero of the white, segregationist South. “Beckwith’s trip from Jackson to Greenwood was covered later on television,” Myrlie wrote. “Smuggled out of town hiding on the floor of an unmarked car, the drive turned into a triumphant ‘welcome home’ as he neared” his hometown. “Crowds stood along the highway, some with large welcome signs, cheering and calling to him as the car went past. Beckwith told reporters it brought tears to his eyes.” 64
He remained under indictment, and under Mississippi law he could remain so until his case reached some form of conclusion. Waller was dubious about trying him a third time. “I think the defense case was much better this time,” Waller told reporters. “I don’t see any reason to assume we can put on a better case; I don’t know what my attitude will be in the future.”65 Justice would not only not be done for Medgar, it would be delayed into nonexistence.
IN MERIDIAN, SGT. WALLACE MILLER, A MISSISSIPPI NATIONAL Guard veteran who served the police department by day and was a senior official of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan at night, celebrated the jury’s failure to convict Beckwith and his release by planning a cross burning in front of a Black church in Lauderdale County. Miller had been the Klan’s first recruit in the county and was considered its best promoter. He tipped off Meridian newspapers to the cross burning and posted photos of himself with the charred cross after the flames died away. The Klan wanted their victory over desegregation to be widely known.66
One month later, though, the lawsuit filed by Medgar, Myrlie, and the other Black parents desegregating Jackson schools came to fruition. The city’s schools were ordered to desegregate starting at kindergarten, to allow Black children to catch up academically. By the time desegregation reached Reena and Darrell, they would have been ready for college. For Myrlie, the victory was bittersweet because desegregating Mississippi schools was something Medgar had wanted so badly.
“Segregation was finally broken in Mississippi public schools,” she wrote. And the wins kept coming. “Medgar was dead, and suddenly there were victories on every side. . . . The Jackson police department hired Negro policemen,” she wrote. “Some schools were desegregated. The airport was integrated.” 67 Freedom Summer launched in June 1964, led by Bob Moses, Julian Bond, and fellow SNCC organizers, and it led to federal registrars being sent to register Black voters in several Mississippi counties. The national media swarmed back into Mississippi, as it became the center of civil rights attention again.
The assassinations of Medgar Evers and President John F. Kennedy also galvanized Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson was in the Oval Office with Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy as the three men conferred on solving the seemingly unsolvable riddle of how to accommodate the legitimate demands of Black citizens without setting the South, and the country, on fire. Kennedy had hoped for a calm in the storm of Southern protest and “massive resistance” in order to introduce the civil rights bill that the NAACP, King, and the other major civil rights organizations were demanding; instead he’d gotten Bull Connor unleashing dogs, batons, and water hoses on Black marchers in Birmingham in May 1963 and Gov. George Wallace blocking the doors of the University of Alabama on June 11. The subsequent, relatively peaceful desegregation of the university with the help of the federalized Alabama National Guard—unlike the deadly chaos at Ole Miss—seemed to provide that window. But the Klan had moved to slam it closed forever. Medgar’s assassination was meant to send a message to Kennedy and other national leaders that the South would not come to heel, that it was willing to shed blood to prevent desegregation from proceeding at Washington’s demand.
Johnson, a man of the South, understood that Washington needed to respond. A country ruled by violence and repression couldn’t remain a country for long, that was a lesson the nation ought to have learned during the Civil War. Kennedy had mounted a lobbying campaign among major business and among governors and mayors across the South, urging them to commit to voluntary desegregation and come out publicly in support of the bill, and gotten assassinated for it. He had simultaneously hesitated to push the bill in Congress, lest it jeopardize the tax cut bill that his fellow Democrats in the House and Senate—the ones from the South—had the power to kill. Johnson also planned to force Kennedy’s bill through the House and Senate. He would leave the lobbying to the civil rights groups.
In a meeting at the White House on December 29, 1964—the day after Thanksgiving—Johnson told Roy Wilkins what he intended to do. “He said he could not enact it himself,” Wilkins later recalled. “He was the President of the United States. He would give it his blessing. He would aid it in any way in which he could lawfully under the Constitution, but that he could not lobby for the bill. And nobody expected him to lobby for the bill, and he didn’t think we expected him to lobby for the bill. . . . He was asking us if we wanted it, if we would do the things required to be done to get it enacted.”68 Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell got to work on liberal Northern and Republican members of Congress. Besides Mitchell’s uniquely effective persuasive skills, the men had the moral authority of the NAACP, which was further enhanced by the shock and outrage over the assassination of Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran who had been buried with the nation’s highest honors.
On July 2, which would have been Medgar’s thirty-ninth birthday, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 WAS A MONUMENTAL AND HISTORIC achievement. After it passed, the back of segregation began to break, even in Mississippi. “Negroes were admitted to theaters, restaurants, motels, hotels and parks,” Myrlie wrote. “Medgar had fought for all these things, had given eight and a half years of his life to lead the fight. There are those who said that his death and the outrage that attended it throughout the country had been the final straw that broke the back of the opposition.”
THAT SUMMER—WHICH HAD BEEN DESIGNATED AS “FREEDOM Summer” by COFO—brought more than one thousand volunteers from around the country to Mississippi to join with local organizers to register voters. The legislative victory in Washington had been bittersweet, in that the Civil Rights Act lacked a strong voting rights enforcement section; a compromise from the original bill that had been needed to get it through. But the summer of 1964 would also bring fresh tragedy. On June 21, CORE workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two young Jewish activists from New York City, and James Chaney, a twenty-one-year-old local Black civil rights worker, disappeared into the Delta night.
Schwerner, twenty-four, had, like Medgar before him, joined the top of the Mississippi Klan’s death list. As a white leader of CORE, he was especially derided by the Klan simply as “Goatee.” Chaney had been a youth activist in his hometown of Meridien. At fifteen, he’d been suspended from his segregated Catholic school with a handful of friends for affixing handwritten NAACP badges on their shirts. He later joined CORE, and became a liaison between local activists and Schwerner. Goodman, twenty, hailed from an affluent, liberal family in Manhattan and had grown passionate about the civil rights struggle as a high school student. He’d attended a three-day training program in Ohio for the Freedom Summer project. He was murdered on his first day in Mississippi.
Myrlie was in Washington, addressing the NAACP convention when she learned of the disappearances. “We should have known this would happen again,”69 she said in her speech. The Johnson administration sent former CIA director Allen W. Dulles to assist in the search,70 but Myrlie knew in her heart what the outcome would be. The NAACP, led by Aaron Henry and Charles Evers, called on President Johnson to extend federal protection to Black voters in Mississippi, and they led a protest outside the Justice Department over the missing activists,71 whose youthful faces were by then splashed across the pages of national and international newspapers.
The general public was more alarmed by the men’s disappearance because two of them were white. The administration’s urgency soon included the attention of Robert Kennedy and his Justice Department aides Burke Marshall and Nicholas Katzenbach,72 but none of this could change the facts of life in Mississippi. The bodies of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were found forty-four days later, on August 4. They had been lynched and discarded in an earthen dam.73
Myrlie was exhausted. Her world oscillated constantly between violent reminders of hate in Mississippi and of the progress Medgar would never enjoy. Their home was a torment of memory. The carport still bore a faint stain of Medgar’s blood as he dragged himself from the driver’s side of his car to the entry door. She was not comforted by the plum and fig trees Medgar planted, nor by the hackberry tree or the oak tree she and the children planted in the front yard to remember him. She was being too protective and too dependent, especially on young Reena, who was just nine years old but had become her emotional support. Cars still drove slowly past the house, sparking fresh fears of another shooting or firebombing. The ugly calls still filtered through her attempts to ignore the phone. Sometimes, one of the children picked up the line.74 It was all just too much.
Myrlie began to consider a plan of escape.
She briefly weighed returning to Vicksburg, to a house Aunt Myrlie had renovated for her and the children, but she dreaded becoming “poor, unfortunate Myrlie” who had to return home to Auntie and Mama. The notion felt infantilizing. New York, where the NAACP headquarters were, felt too big and overwhelming. Eventually she settled on California, which Medgar had visited and loved. California felt somehow magical. The state had become a magnet for Black people seeking a respite from the inchoate violence of the American South. It had racial discrimination, like everywhere in America, and deep social and economic inequalities, but it felt like a land of possibility.
Myrlie had been there a couple of times, including to Los Angeles, where Althea Simmons of that city’s NAACP office gave her the grand tour. In 1963, three Black members had been elected to the city council, including future mayor Tom Bradley. But the city, with its teeming and struggling Watts neighborhood and growing gang crisis, didn’t seem appealing. If she were going to go west, it needed to be to a place where her children would feel safe, secure, and free. Ultimately, she settled on Claremont, in eastern California, “in the lower slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains . . . with tree-lined streets, plentiful parks, and well-maintained homes, all conveying a sense of safety and propriety.”75 The schools were excellent, which was important to her.
Claremont was also about as far from Mississippi as she could get.76 Myrlie took the money she had saved from her speeches, and the little bit left over from Medgar’s salary, and put a down payment on a modest house. She didn’t even notice, until it was almost closing time, that the neighborhood she had chosen was almost entirely white. As word got around, some NAACP colleagues criticized her. Why not live in predominantly Black Pomona? Did she think she was too good? Did she want to be white? She was so stung by this she came close to forfeiting her deposit.
In the end, she stood beneath her and Medgar’s plum tree in the backyard of their Jackson home, and she asked for his approval. His was the only one that mattered to her. She had promised to raise their children and to keep them safe. She knew that in Claremont, she could accomplish that.77
Reena and Darrell most decidedly did not want to leave their home and their block on Guynes Street, their school, and their friends. “There were lots of boo-hoos,” Reena recalled. Who would she ride bicycles with? Play jacks with? Have watermelon-seed fights with? “This is our house,” she protested,78 but her mother insisted it wasn’t safe to stay.
The Evers children were not the only ones devastated by the news that they were leaving. “This block was a family,” Dennis Sweet III said.
Jean Wells and Johnnie Pearl Young were losing their dear friend. Carolyn Wells recalled that after the shooting, Myrlie was a constant fixture at their home, when she wasn’t traveling. Houston and Jean Wells would sit with her on the front steps trying to console her. “Then she decided to move to California.”79
“I remember [thinking] . . . why are they leaving us?” Sweet Owens said. “It just looked like they just up and left, and they were gone.”
Charles had been trying to fill in, not just at the NAACP, where he declared himself Medgar’s successor as field secretary, but also on Guynes Street. “He was trying to [help us] heal,” Dennis Sweet III said. “He knew we were hurt. We were terrorized. He would pick us up, the boys, especially, [and take us out]. He’d bring us gifts like Mr. Evers used to do—bring balls to play with and stuff.”
Even “Uncle Charlie,” as the kids called him, couldn’t make up for the loss of their friends, the Evers kids. “It was traumatic for us because Reena and I were close. We were the same age and [in] the same class. We were best buds.”
Also, Charles wasn’t Medgar. In Chicago, he’d returned to the hustle, working various odd jobs, marrying and divorcing, and eventually drifting into the numbers racket, returning to bootlegging, running nightclubs, and even delving into “running girls” on the side. According to a later interview in Playboy, he also found time to teach history and physical education in a majority Black town called Robbins, outside Chicago. Returning to Mississippi was not something he’d planned. Nor had he relished the notion of taking up Medgar’s role at the NAACP. He did it anyway, but with more anger than relish.80
On moving day, Myrlie panicked, suddenly racked with doubt. Althea Simmons of the Los Angeles NAACP office had come to help with the move. A moving van was parked outside, and Reena was tearfully grabbing the remainder of her things. Darrell, now eleven years old, was away at a summer camp sponsored by NAACP supporters. Myrlie recalled sitting “like a zombie on a windowsill, watching my life of twelve and a half years disappear.”81
“I can’t leave, Medgar,” she moaned. He had vowed never to leave Mississippi and always said he wanted to raise his children here—yet now she was ripping them away from their home. His home.
“No,” Myrlie protested. “I’m not leaving.” But Althea urged her on, and before long, they had loaded Reena and Van into Medgar’s powder-blue Oldsmobile, and they were wheeling down Guynes Street and on to California.82