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

by Joy-Ann Reid

Earlier that day, Charles had ridden with Kennedy through Black neighborhoods, and that evening he watched the returns with Kennedy and his staff, Ethel Kennedy, and NFL player Rosey Grier, before Bobby was cut down in the kitchen after his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel.

Charles later wrote that Bobby’s death shook him harder in a way, because he hadn’t had to see his brother fall with his own eyes.9 Kennedy had had a steep learning curve on matters of race, but at the time he was murdered, Charles saw him as “the most trusted white man in Black America”10 and someone who related to the community’s anguish over Dr. King’s assassination.

Myrlie savored her newfound happiness even more, knowing Beckwith would lose his freedom at least for now, even if not for Medgar’s murder. Even better: the state jury that convicted him included five Black women.

She shared with Mitchell her truth about wishing she had a machine gun on the night Medgar was murdered to mow down all the policemen milling around on her lawn. “And in that moment,” Mitchell said, “I realized I had no idea what she and her family had gone through. None. Zero. How dare I think that I know?

“Mrs. Evers, usually a rock of composure, broke into tears after the verdict was read,” the report said. “She clasped the hand of her daughter, Reena Evers-Everette, while her son, Darrell Kenyatta Evers, clapped in jubilation.”

“It’s been a long journey,” the Associated Press reported that Myrlie said, arms locked with her children’s and tears streaming down her face. “‘Medgar,’ she added, eyes heavenward, ‘I’ve gone the last mile.’”

Reena’s thoughts were also for the heavens. “‘Hi Daddy,’ she said in a voice choked with emotion. ‘We did it.’ She said the pain of her father’s death ‘cannot be erased . . . but now it can be soothed.

Darrell had attended the trial with a goal as singular and furtive as his childhood determination to kill his father’s murderer with the toy gun Myrlie bought him. He wanted to force the coward De La Beckwith to look at his face and to see Medgar Evers staring back at him. “He never saw my father’s face” when he shot him, Darrell told reporters after the verdict. “All he saw was his back. I wanted him to see the face . . . to see the ghost of my father come back to haunt him.”

Darrell Kenyatta Evers was forty-one years old; three years older than his father had been when he died.

From Jackson to Greenwood, no Klan crosses were burned in outrage or in honor after Beckwith’s belated conviction. He had emerged from this very courthouse in 1964 as a white nationalist folk hero. Now, he was just an old man—an opportunity he had stolen from Medgar. He was going to spend the rest of his unhappy life behind bars.

They then arrived at Medgar’s grave, where they stood alone for a long time, surrounded by reverent silence and markers of the sacrifice of thousands of men like Medgar, who had fought America’s wars abroad while some like Medgar had been forced to fight anew at home.

Myrlie always wept at Medgar’s gravesite. Just being there, amid all that silent grandeur, reminded her of what a great man she’d married and how much she missed him.

She then addressed the assembled media, echoing Joe Madison’s words a year earlier at Arlington: “Medgar died for the NAACP. I will live for the NAACP.”

She was awarded the Spingarn Medal—the NAACP’s highest award, which Medgar had received posthumously in 1963. Myrlie thus joined not just Medgar, but also Roy Wilkins, Rosa Parks, and Walter F. White. It was heady company. But there were still more honors to come.

You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea. —MEDGAR EVERS

The airport in Jackson, which opened in 1963 and had been named for Jackson’s segregationist mayor Allen C. Thompson, was renamed Jackson–Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport in December 2004. It was yet another triumph of Medgar Evers over his racist tormentors—and yet another he never lived to see.

Four years later, a new Navy ship was designated to be named in Medgar’s honor. The U.S. Navy secretary who made the decision and the announcement was Ray Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi who was a fourteen-year-old living in a northern county of the state the year Medgar was assassinated.5 And in a reality few could have conceived of back then, the commander in chief Mabus served under was Black.

Todd Jealous, the then executive director of the NAACP,13 who a month earlier had apologized to Myrlie and her family during an NAACP national board meeting in Jackson for the organization’s failure to protect him. “He put his speech aside,” Myrlie told radio host and civil rights activist Mark Thompson regarding Jealous. “And he stood there, and he said, ‘I have an apology to make.’ And he apologized to me and my daughter and other family members for what the Association leadership, top leadership, said to Medgar and the way they treated him. . . . I don’t think there was a dry eye in the place at that time. Because people didn’t know.”

Van, who had turned his father’s fascination with photography into his profession, presented President Obama with two inscribed black-and-white portraits he’d taken: one of Rosa Parks, and the other of his mother with Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz. The president’s senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, who hailed from one of the most prominent Black families in Chicago, told Myrlie the president planned to hang the portraits in his private office.

“I will tell you this,” she said. “The best thing . . . is remembering little details, small little details, about the love of my life, and the life that we had, and how blessed I am to have known that man—to have loved him, and to have had his children and walked through life with him.”