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

by Joy-Ann Reid

The mayor spoke of the twenty-four-hour police protection we have. . . . There are questions in the minds of many Negroes whether we have twenty-four hours of protection, or twenty-four hours of harassment.

Salter later described it as “a lavish display of unbridled hatred.”

that was one of my father’s main goals and objectives, a nonviolent action. That had more power than anything else.

The story of the Woolworth’s protest rocketed through Black Jackson neighborhoods and hardened people’s resolve.

with the federal troops gone, McDowell would be forced to face the angry, spitting crowds alone on his first day of class in June. He would do so with a gun concealed in his belt.

After more insulting questions, the officers told her it was likely just a prank.

That night, “Medgar took me in his arms and held me and rocked me back and forth,” Myrlie wrote. “‘I don’t know what I’d do if anything ever happened to you or the children because of what I’m doing,’ he said softly.”

Myrlie reminded him that whoever tossed that Molotov cocktail wasn’t trying to kill her, they were trying to kill him. “And if anything happened to you,” she told Medgar, “I don’t think I could live.”

Where is the safest place in the house?” The children would yell that it was the bathroom tub, with proud delight. It was low to the ground and at the back of the house. “He took them through drills.”

Once, Myrlie recalled, Darrell declared, “I hate white people,” and Medgar told him, “You’re wrong. You’re only hurting yourself . . . hating people is no way to live.”

At the mass meeting that night, Wilkins took to the stage and spoke passionately, in terms Medgar had used before. “In Birmingham,” he said, “the authorities turned the dogs and fire hoses loose on peaceable demonstrators. Jackson has added another touch to this expression of the Nazi spirit with the setting up of hog-wired concentration camps. This is pure Nazism and Hitlerism. The only thing missing is an oven.”

Houston Wells and other friends of Medgar had begun pressing the national office to provide Medgar with security protection, in the form of bodyguards or, at least, armed patrols at the Evers home. The requests were repeatedly declined.

“I was livid that the NAACP put so little value on Medgar’s life,” Myrlie wrote. When she told Medgar as much, he replied: “It’s okay. When my time comes, I’m going to go regardless of the protections I have. Besides, I don’t want anyone to get hurt trying to save me.”

On the night of Wilkins’s rebuke, as they lay holding each other after much tossing and turning, Medgar for the first time expressed doubts about bringing another child into the world,26 particularly in the state considered the most violent and segregated in the nation.

“The battle . . . being fought here in Jackson, as elsewhere in the south, is our nation’s primary crisis,” Ms. Horne said. “Let it be understood that the courage and grim determination of the Negro people in these cities of the South have challenged the moral integrity of the entire nation.”

When the words of ‘We Shall Overcome’ rang from thousands of throats, we were overcome, and elderly Negro men wept along with high school girls.”

“Freedom has never been free,” Medgar told the crowd that night. “I love my children,” he said to a hushed room. “And I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die and die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.”

For all the pride and joy she felt in that moment, in her heart, Myrlie knew with an aching certa...

They already lived with safety plans—never sit or stand by a window; always exit the car on the front passenger side, to be closer to the house’s front door; and avoid the large, wooded lot adjacent to the Youngs’ home.

on one of the calls that day, Medgar seemed shaken. He was being followed every day, by one or two police cars, but that day, he told Myrlie, as he was stepping out of his car, one of them had jammed “into reverse” and tried to back into him.

“I jumped away just in time,” he told her. “I have witnesses . . . several other people saw it. It was no mistake.” This incident seemed to genuinely rattle Medgar, who didn’t frighten easily.

Medgar, already under intense pressure from national headquarters, was “functionally immobilized.

For the first time, he expressed genuine fear that something might happen to him, and he made her promise that if anything did, she would take good care of their children.

“I told him I couldn’t live without him,” Myrlie said. “Medgar was shedding tears at the same time. And he told me, ‘Myrlie, you are stronger than you think you are. You take care of my children.’

I’ll never forget that, never forget that. He trusted me. He felt that I had a strength that I knew I didn’t have. But he knew that I was a fierce protector, not only of him, but ...

When she returned, he asked Myrlie to take Van inside, so he could spend time on his own admiring the plum tree he’d planted there. Myrlie felt that something had shifted in Medgar. He was settled, and no longer afraid, but also palpably despondent. “Myrlie, I think we’re going to have our best year ever for plums,”39 he said, with a kind of empty optimism that made her feel more sad than hopeful.

he and Myrlie talked in a way that left her more afraid than ever. “If I go tonight, if I go next week, if I go next year, I feel I’m ready to go,” he said, in a voice as calm as could be.

a local white attorney who was privately sympathetic to the movement had told him to warn Medgar that he should “be careful to have someone see him home each night and to arrange for guards around the house.” The attorney had it on good authority that “an attempt was going to be made on Medgar’s life.”

On Tuesday, June 11, Medgar was up early, and after breakfast, Myrlie noticed he kissed each child on the forehead repeatedly. He held her close and lingered in the hug. He called home several times that afternoon.

“What’s the matter, haven’t you got anything to do?” she remembered chiding him after the third call. “I just wanted to hear your voice,” he told her. “My love...

He was more disheartened than I had ever known him to be.”

There were the persistent threats and police harassment. Medgar mused to a friend, “I’m looking to be shot, any time I step out of a car.”

In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case.”

“I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments.”

Kennedy went on to announce that with the pace of integration moving anemically, despite progress in “seventy-five cities” over the prior two weeks, the legislation he planned to send to Congress would “authorize the Federal Government to participate more fully in lawsuits designed to end segregation in public education,” and seek greater protection for the right to vote. It was a full-scale war on the Southern way of life, and an embrace, from the White House, of the “first-class citizenship” Medgar had been touting.

“This is one country,” Kennedy said. “It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to 10 percent of the population that you can’t have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go in...

“NAACP T-Shirts were being sold by Medgar who had no enthusiasm at all,” Salter said. “He said virtually nothing at the meeting [and] looked, indeed, as though he was ready to die.”

“I’ve made up my mind. And I think I’m doing what I have to do.”

He was no longer the indecisive person who might be crying at his desk.

They sat up with a bolt of excitement. “Daddy’s home!” However, their joy quickly turned to shock, as the low hum of Robert Stack and Walter Winchell was shattered by a single loud bang. It sounded almost like an explosion.

Standing in the dark, she pulled the door open, to find her worst nightmare had finally become real.

“Daddy, get up. Get up, Daddy. Get up!” Now the children were screaming, too.

“Too late. That was it. My life, my love, was gone. There were three little children standing there.”

“He must have been awfully tired,” Myrlie later recalled. “Because he got out on the driver’s side, and we had determined that that was not the thing to do. You get out on the other side, which was closest to the door, and there was less of a chance of being a target. But he got out on the driver’s side that night, and he was the perfect target.”

When they arrived there, Medgar had been wheeled into the Negro wing. Britton yelled to the all-too-passive white physicians, “Do you know who this man is? This is Medgar Evers, field secretary of the NAACP.” That caused them to take action,56 but there was no saving him.

“My mission now was to protect them,” she said of her three young children. It was what she promised Medgar. She just didn’t know where to begin, because she had never had any intention of living without him.

When she got to the children, they were silent. They seemed stunned. She held them and told them everything was going to be all right. Neither she nor they seemed to actually believe that, though.

Then she somehow managed to get back across the street to her house, which the police, who had now grown in number, were now scouring. “They were standing in my yard, stooping over the blood in the carport, everywhere,” she recalled. “And I saw them and recognized them as the men who had followed Medgar everywhere for months; the men who had tried to run him down a few days before, the men who had asked me if I had used the gasoline can recently, and they looked at me and I screamed at them, ‘Get off my property!’”

Myrlie’s shock and grief now turned into a cold rage. “I clenched my fists and wanted a machine gun to mow them down, knowing and not caring that I, too, would be cut down as Medgar had been. For the first time in my life, I felt a hatred so deep and malignant I could have killed every one of them.”

She screamed at these empty white faces, demanding to know if a Negro’s blood looked any different to them, or if they thought that by killing Medgar, th...