Joy-Ann Reid
Appearances
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
So, Merle Evers, Merle Louise Beasley was her original last name. She grew up in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which was a rural town, obviously very segregated, just like all of Mississippi. And she was raised by her grandmother and her aunt, whose name was also Merle. Her grandmother in particular was a huge influence on her.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
They taught her to be prim, to be proper, to speak properly, to play the piano. And so she was taught to be a good girl. And her grandmother and her aunt gave her three prohibitions when she went to college. They said, you are not to date an upperclassman, a football player, or a veteran. Medgar was all three.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Well, it's funny because Merle's reaction was, you got a huge job ahead of you, buddy. She was actually angry that he said that. It made her angry. And he would say things all the time that would annoy her, right?
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
He was challenging to her in one sense is that he would talk to her about the world, about Kenya, about the Mau Mau who were fomenting revolution to get out from under the British Empire. And he would talk about the world and about the world beyond America, about Europe. And so in that sense, she was intrigued by him, but he also infuriated her and he would say things like that.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Those are the things that would annoy her. But you have to remember, this was also the 1950s when the idea of women being the equal of their husbands was not a thing. It was not a thing for white women and it was not a thing for black women. And so while it did infuriate and annoy her, it wasn't a deal breaker. And that's in part because of the era.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Well, you know, Murley really did aspire to be a 1950s housewife. When she fell in love with this man, she thought they would go off into the sunset and he'd be an insurance salesman. And in fact, he literally got a job as an insurance salesman. And she thought You know, she didn't want to be where they were living, Mount Bayou, which was in the Delta, which she hated.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
The bugs, the heat, she just couldn't take it. She wanted to be in the city. She was bored. She was miserable. She was lonely because he was out selling insurance all day. But she was terrified because while he was selling insurance for TRM Howard's insurance company, And T.R.M. Howard was a hugely influential man among Black civil rights activists.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
He was an activist, but also a businessman and a wealthy man. And she hated the fact that he was risking his life selling freedom and civil rights with insurance and telling these Delta residents, listen, you have rights accruable to you as citizens, while he's saying you also need to have these policies so that your family can survive economically.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
She was terrified, and she was angry that she felt he was choosing this work and this civil rights work over her and their children.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Absolutely. This is one of the most sort of, you know, striking and volatile sort of parts of their marriage. So at one point she says to him, we're poor. We don't have the money to do this. And he accused her of not managing the money well. And she got so angry that she hauled off and she grabbed a frying pan and hit him with it. And he struck her back.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And she was so shocked at this slap that it kind of made both of them stun into silence. And this was the low point of their marriage. They wound up driving together. to her aunt and her mom's house. They were at that point living together because her grandma was getting older. And they were talking about divorcing. And they were at the point where they thought, maybe we can't do this.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And it was a member of the senior NAACP leadership who was like a father to them, who actually counseled them as like a marriage counselor and surrogate father. And so there was a point at which they just decided they were going to try to make it work. And she decided she was going to try to make it work and support his work. And that came at the very, very end, really not long before he died.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
The final year of his life was when she finally accepted that this was his mission.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Well, Merle is starting to doze off. She hears this crash and goes out and sees fire on her front lawn. Obviously, she's incredibly startled. And there had been these cars that would pass by. Slowly rolling in front of the house day after day after day. And this time someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail out of one of them. So at first, of course, she was terrified.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Her next door neighbor, who was a good friend of hers, Jean Wells, runs out and the two of them start turning the fire hose on the flames and they put them out. Luckily, the children didn't even wake up. But it really did bring home to her that the death threats were really coming to roost. And this was just weeks before Medgar was actually assassinated. So it was a horrible premonition.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
But then she felt angry because when the police arrived, the white police officers, they questioned her, looking at the gas can and essentially accusing her of doing it as a publicity stunt and faking it and then writing it off as just a joke that somebody had played. There was no empathy. there was clearly no determination to investigate.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And it just brought home to her once again that there was no justice for Black people in Mississippi.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And, you know, the Klan absolutely sent a message in assassinating Medgar Evers literally hours after that speech. The thing that... President Kennedy said that I think stung the racist South the most is that he said not only did he believe that Black citizens had the right to equal treatment and to equal access to accommodations, but that he planned to make it so with legislation.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
That's true. I think that's true. And I think part of that is because of the just momentous year in which he was murdered, 1963. So many things happened in 1963. the kind of overwhelmed knowledge of what happened, of what he did.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
He promised to pass a bill. Now, Medgar had actually been preparing his testimony to go to Washington to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about pushing for such a bill. Part of the work that he was doing and part of the constant telegrams to D.C. were demanding that they do something. And one of the things they wanted done was a bill.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And so, you know, the message that was sent in the hours after that speech was that we're going to exact retribution. And there were actually three attacks that took place, or at least one that did not come to fruition. But they did them so close in time that the FBI believed that these multiple attacks were a message from the Klan, including the assassination of Medgar Evers.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Well, you know, the children were they got to stay up, you know, the three average children. Well, Van was a baby. He was only three. But the two older children were allowed to sit up and watch President Kennedy's speech. And they were so proud to hear the speech because it used and echoed some of the language that their own dad had given him.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
in his landmark speech that he gave on Mississippi television, which had never happened. People had never seen a Black person, you know, speak on television before. And to hear President Kennedy echoing their father's words felt so great to them. And so they were excited and they were allowed then to stay up a little later, the older two, who were nine and eight,
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
to watch a little bit more TV, a little bit of entertainment TV, before their dad came home. And a little after midnight, they hear their father's car pull up, and they're excited because he would normally bring them home sweets or Cracker Jacks, you know, something, a little gift when he would come home. And so they were excited, thinking, oh, what's he going to bring us?
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And all of a sudden, they heard the shot. And it wakes Murley up, who had been lying down on her bed. They were all in her room watching TV. And she was holding Van, and she had started to doze off. It startles her awake, and all of the family kind of go to the door. Now, at first, the kids did what they were trained to do. They went to the floor. They did what their father had taught them.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
But when they hear their mother scream as she makes it to the door and sees her husband lying in the carport, this horrifying scream makes all the children run to her. And so they're all standing there watching him try to drag himself in this situation. tremendous pool of blood that's later described as if somebody had butchered a hog.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
You start with this landmark speech that President Kennedy gave hours before Medgar was assassinated in front of his home, a speech in which John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, was echoing the language that Medgar Evers, a fellow World War II veteran, was using in order to push for civil rights and change in Mississippi. Then he is assassinated.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And he's got his key out in his hand, and he's trying to get to the door, but he can't. And she's got her little children standing there screaming, begging him to get up. And then they had heard a second shot, which they thought might be the gunman coming to kill them all. But it turns out that was Mr. Wells, the next-door neighbor, shooting in the air to scare the gunman away.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And Mr. Wells and their neighbor across the street... whose husband was Merle's other best friend. They come with another neighbor, and they put Medgar on the mattress of Rina, the little girl's bed, and they put him on that mattress and take him to the hospital. And Merle never saw or spoke with him again until she saw him in a casket.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
You know, it was a tremendous outpouring. You know, some 5,000 people came and they packed into the auditorium, the space where they usually did their mass meetings, but it was overcapacity. It was blazing hot, almost 100 degrees in Mississippi. And people were outside who couldn't get in.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And then afterward, they had gotten permission, the organizers of the funeral, to do a peaceful march with him because his body was going to be taken to a train station so that it could be sent to Washington, D.C., so he could be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, something that also caused lots of rage among white supremacists in the United States. But this peaceful procession
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
quickly turned violent when some of the young people who were marching at the back began to sing freedom songs. They were prohibited from singing at this funeral procession. Absolutely. They were told they could only do a quiet, mournful march, and they were not to sing freedom songs at all.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
But these young people started singing This Little Light of Mine, and it was Medgar's favorite freedom song. And once that started, The batons started flying, and the police reacted violently and started beating marchers who then started running toward downtown Jackson. And before long, it was nearly a riot.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
The world paid profound attention to it for that moment. But then later that summer, you have the March on Washington event. The bombing in Birmingham that killed four little girls. And then at the end of that year, you have the assassination of the president of the United States. Those things alone overwhelmed the knowledge of Medgar Evers just in the moment.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Right. So Merle Evers, you know, had to write this playbook for herself because Medgar Evers was assassinated two years before Malcolm X and five years before Dr. King. So there really wasn't another person that she could, you know, use as a template. The only thing closest to it was Mamie Till Mobley, but Mamie Till was a mom, not a widow.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And, you know, she also wanted to ensure that she was able to establish Medgar's legacy. And so anything you did if you weren't dressed in a certain way, if you weren't properly demure, if you seemed angry rather than just in grieving, if you seemed too loud or too soft or too anything, but especially too angry. She knew that it would derail her.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
What she genuinely believed that Maker deserved, which is to have his legacy established for the sacrifice that he had made.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Absolutely. And living in that house made it worse, right? Because that house had been designed... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And then you have two years later, Malcolm X being assassinated. And then five years after Medgar, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. And then in between, you've got Freedom Summer. and the assassinations of Goodwin, Schwerner, and Cheney. So there's so many events that happened both in Mississippi and nationally that his legacy sort of became overwhelmed.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
So you start with Emmett Till. At the time, most high-profile lynching that had taken place in America. This was a 14-year-old boy who had family in Mississippi, had roots in Mississippi, but lived in Chicago. He came down for the summer to be with his cousins. He's murdered for sassing a white woman.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
It is only because of Medgar Evers that there was ever a trial, because typically in the South, when a Black person was murdered by a white person or white people, nothing happened. It wasn't, in fact, illegal, in a sense, to kill Black people. You could kill at will if you were white, because the justice system would never hold you to account.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
But Medgar really believed that people should be held to account for killing Black people, for destroying Black bodies and Black lives. He is the one who went into the Delta to compel terrified sharecroppers, including Emmett Till's uncle, to testify against white men. He, of course, then had to spirit those people out of the state of Mississippi.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
But it is only because of him that the world really knew about this case and that case ever went to trial. You talk about Kennedy's speech. Kennedy is literally echoing the man who had been repeatedly telegraphing him from Mississippi, Medgar Evers, who was demanding, begging for federal troops to come to Mississippi because Mississippians were being denied the basic right to vote.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Well, James Meredith actually made the call to the NAACP to Thurgood Marshall from Medgar and Merle Evers' home. So he calls and, you know, it is Medgar that gets him representation from the NAACP after, you know, James Meredith, he's a very special guy. I interviewed him for the book and he's very caustic. And he gets into this argument on the phone with Thurgood Marshall and hangs up on him.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And it's Medgar that says, you know what, we might want to call him back. And he talks James Meredith down, which was not easy to do. But his brother Charles was similar in temperament, so he knew how to deal with someone like him.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And he manages to call back and get James Meredith the NAACP lawyers that actually successfully get him through the court cases that get him admitted in a very violent, riot-induced way into Ole Miss.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Well, and, you know, in addition to being the field secretary, he was actually the first field secretary. They created the position for him as in part a way to discourage him from reapplying to Ole Miss. They saw in him an activist who had potential, but they really didn't want him to make this application himself. They were like, come and work for us. He went to New York, he applied.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
interviewed with Roy Wilkins, and they gave him the job. What they told him to do was go back to Mississippi and register people for NAACP memberships and register them to vote. But what he understood is that people weren't going to register to vote if they were being terrorized.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
You know, not only could you be evicted from the plantation where you lived if you tried to register to vote, you could be lynched for it. And so people were too scared. And he understood that what you needed first was people to develop the courage to move forward and demand their citizenship.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
They said no. Quite simply, they said, this is not what we want. And Medgar was threatened with being fired multiple times because he believed that the courage that was needed was found in the youth. It was young people, quite frankly, like James Chaney, who as a 15-year-old was expelled from school for pinning an NAACP membership sticker on his lapel.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
He was part of these NAACP youth councils that Medgar was setting up all over the state. And so he's nurturing these young people who wanted liberation now. They didn't want to wait for court cases to be listened to by white people. They believed that they could get their liberation for themselves.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And that courage absolutely existed in college students from Tougaloo and Alcorn and from high school kids. And he believed in them. And his bosses said, unacceptable. We're wasting money bailing them out of jail. Stop.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Well, I think part of it was that he had this fundamental belief that people needed to fight for liberation for themselves. They didn't need the courage imported in from the North. And that only when Mississippians themselves were fighting for their liberation would that liberation be real. Because those Northern activists were going to go home.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
When they were finished with their freedom summer, they could go back. Now, that didn't always happen. Obviously, Goodman and Schwerner never went home. And they were taking risks, tremendous risks as well. But he just fundamentally believed it had to come from within the Mississippi community. He also believed that they were just going to relearn the same lessons he had already learned.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
He had already worked in the Delta. He already had lived in the Delta. And they were just going to show up in these communities and find out how terrified people were. And they would have the same results he did, not being able to register people to vote. And that's exactly what happened. Expand on that. What happened? So Bob Moses and other activists came down.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Of course, Bob Moses was this brilliant activist from New York and a math genius. And he comes down and he winds up working in the Delta. actually using some of the infrastructure that Medgar had helped to set up in these NAACP satellite offices. And some of those same activists joined and helped out, but there were a lot of Northern activists that were working there as well.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
But when the numbers came in, from how many people were actually being registered, the numbers were actually quite low. And Medgar was frustrated that he had already known that and felt that the Northern activists didn't quite understand the kind of terror that they were dealing with.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
It absolutely did. And You know, it's interesting because the Freedom Riders themselves really wanted Dr. King to be on those buses with them because they thought that they needed his notoriety in order to get the attention. But it turned out white Southerners did the work for them by firebombing buses, by reacting with such tremendous violence and vehemence.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
It turned the national spotlight on the South. And the original destination of the Freedom Rides was New Orleans, but they didn't get through Alabama and Mississippi yet. without tremendous headlines that were caused by the violence that was meted out upon them.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Well, you know, what's fascinating about Medgar Evers and all of those black men who fought in World War I and World War II is that when they returned, they had traveled more widely than most white Americans had. He had seen Europe, a place where there was no de jure segregation, where he could have a white girlfriend, and he did, in France, whose parents completely approved of the relationship.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
He could walk around freely without fear of lynching. And despite the fact that their units were still segregated and white officers and commanders still spoke to and treated black servicemen as second-class citizens, they officially could not enforce Jim Crow in Europe. And when Medgar came back, he was already someone who... was interested in the world.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
He was kind of fascinated with the anti-colonial movements in places like Kenya. He came back even more convinced that Mississippi was not only not the world, it was an aberration in the world, and that Black people were meant to live the way he had been able to live freely in Europe.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And while that didn't mean that he could bring his white girlfriend home to Mississippi, he certainly could not, it meant that he ought to be able to be treated as a man. And when he arrives back in Decatur, Mississippi, he gets on the bus in his full uniform and is told to go to the back of the bus. And he says, I'm not going to do that.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
I was willing to die for my country overseas, and I'm not going to come home and be treated as a second-class citizen. And he took the beating of his life, he said, but he was a different man after that.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
So the Evers family knew a man named Mr. Tingle who lived in town, in the town of Decatur.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And when Medgar was either seven or 11, depending on whether he or Charles Evers, his brother, who was a very ostentatious fellow, was telling the story, they were walking to school and they saw the past by the bloody clothes of this gentleman who had been lynched for sassing a white woman, which was something that could get you lynched in the South and particularly in Mississippi area.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And they had actually seen this gentleman being dragged through the streets earlier in that morning. And he was beaten. He was shot. His body was shot full of holes. And the clothes were left behind in the Decatur fairgrounds as a message to every Black Mississippian that this could happen to you if you stepped out of line in any way. And that made an impression on him. He never forgot it.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And it was his father who collected the body and brought him to the funeral home. Yes, his father's uncle had a funeral home. And so his father, who they called Crazy Jim because he was one of the few blacks who did not bow down to white people, which made white people think he was insane. And they called him Crazy Jim. He picked the body up, took it to the funeral home.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And Medgar asked him, could you be lynched that way? And his father, who again was the strongest person he knew, was a tough guy who would stand up to white people. He said, absolutely, I could be lynched. And it gave Medgar this sense of a lack of safety. That his strong, big, you know, tall dad also couldn't protect him. Couldn't protect him any more than Willie Tingle could be protected.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
And it terrified him. And the thing that really enraged him was the silence. The fact that there were no marches, no protests. This gentleman was not spoken about in church on Sunday. He was sort of forgotten as if he just vanished.