Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America

by Joy-Ann Reid

Kennard’s trial began on November 21, 1960, and lasted one day. He was sentenced to seven years at Parchman, a place that was con...

Medgar attended Kennard’s trial and reported to the national office about the charade he observed. Evers also released a statement to the United Press International and the Associated Press, calling what happened to the thirty-three-year-old veteran—just two ...

He railed, “In a courtroom of segregationists apparently resolved to put Kennard ‘legally away,’ the all-white jury found Kennard gui...

After his statement was published, Medgar was served with a subpoena by the Forrest County Circuit Court, demanding to know why he should not be cited for contempt of court for criti...

Medgar was found guilty of contempt and sentenced to thirty days in jail plus a $100 fine—...

For Amos Brown, now a senior at Jim Hill High School in Jackson, being the president of the NAACP’s West Jackson Youth Council meant being stripped of his chance to be valedictorian, barred from senior prom, and threatened with expulsion, all because he used his NAACP platform to expose the truth about Mississippi’s separate and deeply unequal schools.

Stores that do not recognize Negroes as Miss, Mrs. or Mr. do not deserve to have Negroes trade with them. Stores that do not employ Negroes are likewise not worthy of our patronage.

added the requirement that voters demonstrate “good moral character,” to the registrar’s satisfaction. This was directed squarely at the NAACP because segregationists regarded membership in the organization as a sign of moral decay.

Another amendment eliminated the state’s requirement that it provide free public schools, allowing Mississippi the option of having no public schools at all if it had to have even a single integrated one.

A third amendment eliminated the requirement that jurors be registered voters, which was a way of getting around a Fifth Circuit Court decision finding that Black Mississippians wer...

When people would go to jail or when they would have a picketing incident, he would already have raised money in the local community, among poor, low-wealth people for whatever eventuality would come up to get people out of jail, to help with bonds, to pay lawyers and that sort of thing.”

Baker had left the national NAACP over differences in strategy—differences Medgar was painfully familiar with—and over the chauvinism she faced in the movement.

The Freedom Rides were set to arrive in Jackson the following March.

The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) focused its activities on the rural Delta towns that had proven to be the hardest to crack when it came to voter registration, due to the ongoing state of Klan-led terror.

You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom. —MALCOLM X

Dressed in their Sunday best, the “Tougaloo Nine,” as they became known, first visited the “colored” George Washington Library and then proceeded to the segregated Main Library in Jackson and began a “read-in,” sitting down, books in hand. The librarian called the police, and they were quickly arrested.

the courthouse on Eastland Street, whose principal feature was a sixty-by-eighty-foot mural, depicting contented Black slaves picking cotton while a judge advises a benevolent-looking family of white masters, titled “Pursuits of Life in Mississippi.” “No one could get a fair trial standing in front of that mural,” Rev. Ed King said.

Medgar wrote in his field secretary report on the incident that “hordes of policemen and two vicious police dogs converged on Negro citizens only

Accused of “parading without a permit,” all nine students were convicted of “breaching the peace.”

‘Myrlie, I cannot fight everyone out there and come home and fight with you.’” She held her breath waiting for what he would say next. “He said, ‘If we can’t make it, I will have to leave.’

I remember saying to him, ‘You love your work more than you do me or your children,’ [and] he said, ‘It is because of you and my children that I’m doing what I do.’ I couldn’t accept it . . . I didn’t accept it. Not then. I did later. But not then.

I had to learn the deep meaning of prayer, because when he left the house every day, I never knew whether I’d see him again.”

“Quite honestly, our marriage improved tremendously after reaching that [low] point and crossing it,” Myrlie recalled.

“I heard three uniformed officers of the Jackson Police Dept, whom I cannot identify or describe, looking out a window at me and one of them remarked, ‘There he is, we ought to kill him.’”

Now these former Confederate states were fighting modernity with every legal and violent trick they could dream up, while Washington was focused on the Cold War.

Mayor Thompson took to the airwaves on April 7, with an address calling for “racial peace” in Jackson.27 Instead, sit-ins and demonstrations against segregation broke out all over Jackson,

“Let it not be said of us when history records these momentous times,” he told those who packed into the gaping auditorium, “that we slept while our rights were being taken away by those who would keep us in slavery and by those who say that we are doing all right.”

protests met with an immediate and vicious Klan response. The first group of Freedom Riders were dragged off their bus, beaten, and jailed in North Carolina and again in South Carolina. When a second group arrived in Anniston, Alabama, they endured a Klan firebombing of their Greyhound bus that rocketed the Freedom Rides to a worldwide news story.

people inside.35 Even as the administration sent federal marshals, they criticized the Freedom Riders, with Robert Kennedy saying the protests, and the violent rioting they triggered, had embarrassed the United States before the world.

Abernathy, a World War II Army veteran born in 1926 in Linden, Alabama, and whose father had been the first Black man to qualify to vote in their rural county, tersely responded, asking: “Doesn’t the Attorney General know we’ve been embarrassed all our lives?”

Medgar had long believed that World War II had ripped open the great contradiction in America’s claim to be a great nation, let...

In a 1959 speech, Medgar had stated that “a kind of national soul-searching b...

While fighting a war against forces proclaiming a doctrine of racial superiority, it became increasingly difficult to jus...

She was nearly nine months pregnant and refused to bond out despite the pleas of other SNCC members, including Lafayette, saying, “Any Negro child born anywhere in Mississippi is born in jail” 42 anyway.

Kennedy, the ardent cold warrior, also wanted the demonstrations to stop, to alleviate the damage to America’s reputation around the world, which the Soviets were fully exploiting.

it is generally believed he was killed because of his actions in trying to get Negroes registered to vote.”

After spending the night in a lonely dorm, James Meredith walked into the admissions office on October 1, flanked by his U.S. Marshal escorts and Assistant Attorney General John Doar, and registered for classes.

But for the two years he attended Ole Miss, he never had an easy day. He needed armed federal guards protecting him daily, and he was shunned by most of his fellow students, making him, as he called it, “the most segregated Negro in America.”

them it did.23 Medgar always made it clear to his children that they were inherently equal—and that he was working hard to make sure they were treated that way.

The petition, which cited the Brown decision, was submitted on August 17, 1962, and it contained the names of nine parents and fifteen children, demanding that they “and other similarly situated Negro children, be admitted to the so-called ‘white school’ nearest their residence or within their proper district.”

The signers’ names would be in the local newspapers, meaning they could be fired from their jobs in the white community.

The white Southern press typically presented Black life as a constant exercise in gratitude at the undeserved blessings of white beneficence.

The fight for her children’s education brought out a fire in Myrlie she scarcely knew was there.

it took a few strong people, particularly in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, to say, ‘No. We pay taxes. Our children will go to those schools too, whatever it takes.’”

Despite the fear and hardships, Myrlie recalled the sense of togetherness and courage her neighbors got from acting:

[Black Mississippians] had finally come together with a strength that said, this is something that must be done, and we will pay the price.

I am so thankful that I was a part of that.

When the students finally arrived to march to Capitol Street, “there was nothing to be seen but an enormous mass of humanity, flooding the street, spilling over the sidewalks.”

Myrlie knew that once the broadcast aired, the white Mississippians who up to that time had despised Medgar as a faceless troublemaker would now know exactly what he looked like.

The danger of that was incalculable. When the speech was over, he could be recognized everywhere: at a stoplight in the city, on a lonely road in the Delta, in the light from the fuel pump at a gas station.”