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

by Joy-Ann Reid

The planter class was determined to secure white minority rule through an aggressive system of American apartheid. After witnessing the election of Black statewide officials—including two United States senators: Hiram Rhodes Revels (1871) and Blanch Kelso Bruce (elected in 1874 and serving from 1875 to 1881), plus a Black lieutenant governor, Alexander K. Davis (1873–187633), which made Mississippi, ironically, a model of Reconstruction—Mississippi’s white Democrats vowed to beat back racial progress by any means necessary. When Reconstruction collapsed in the 1877 compromise made on the backs of the formerly enslaved, Mississippi was the most ferocious Southern state in forcing a total reversal. It was the first state to erect barriers like poll taxes and literacy tests to keep its Black majority from ever exercising the vote again.