MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid tells the story of Medgar Evers and his wife Myrlie. Medgar was the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, a state that lynched more Black people than any other. The risks of the job created a lot of tension in their marriage — and after Medgar's 1963 assassination, Myrlie's fury drove her to be an activist herself.And film critic Justin Chang reviews Sinners, the new supernatural thriller by director Ryan Coogler, starring Michael B. Jordan.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who were Medgar and Myrlie Evers and why are their stories important?
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. How to Be a Civil Rights Widow is one chapter title in a book by Joy Reid, the former MSNBC Evening Show host. The widow is Merle Evers. Her husband was Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist who served as the NAACP's Mississippi field secretary and risked his life to push for voting rights, desegregation, and freedom.
Reid's book is called Medgar and Merle and is now out in paperback. Medgar and Murley were both from Mississippi. Murley constantly worried about the safety of her husband and their children, with good reason. Their house was firebombed. Later, in June 1963, Medgar was assassinated just outside the door of their home. Murley had heard the gunshot and found her husband bleeding out.
His was the first in a series of high-profile assassinations in the 1960s. Next came President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy.
Joy Reid describes her book, Medgar and Murley, as a love story between two black people in Mississippi, their love for their children, and the higher love it took for black Americans to love America and to fight for it, even in the state that butchered more black bodies via lynching than any other.
The love story between Murley and Medgar Evers also is fraught with tension, with Murley objecting to how much he was away from home, leaving her wondering if he loved his work more than he loved his family. He often left her alone to deal with the constant phone calls, threatening the lives of her family.
After her husband's death, Murley became an activist, an in-demand public speaker, and executive director of the NAACP. She gave the invocation at President Obama's second inauguration. Joy Reid spoke with Terry Gross last year.
Joy Reid, welcome to Fresh Air. Oh, thank you, Terry.
It is so wonderful to be here.
It's a pleasure to have you here. You think, and rightfully so, I think, that Medgar Evers hasn't really gotten the recognition he deserves as an important figure in the civil rights movement. I think he's more famous for getting assassinated than for the work he actually did.
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Chapter 2: What were Medgar Evers' key contributions to 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.
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.
Medgar Evers was the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, but his approach often diverged from the organizations. The NAACP, under Roy Wilkins, defined its work as being work through the courts. But Evers didn't always want to work through the courts. I mean, he appreciated that the work was being done in the courts, but he thought more was needed.
What were the kind of protests that he helped organize?
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.
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.
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.
So a lot of people in Mississippi were too afraid to register for the NAACP or to, you know, call out racism. But the people who were willing to do that were the high school students and the college students. And so Medgar Evers wanted to work with them. What did the NAACP say to that?
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.
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Chapter 3: How did Medgar Evers' approach to activism differ from the NAACP and other groups?
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.
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.
Let's talk about how Medgar and Murley first met. They both went to the historically black college Alcorn A&M, which later became Alcorn State University. He was 25 because he had already come back from the war, and she was 17. So that, at the time, seemed like a very big age difference. They were in different places in terms of fighting for equality. Describe her background.
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.
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.
When she and Medgar Evers started seeing each other, he said, you're going to be the mother of my children. I'm going to shape you into the woman I want you to be. That made me very uncomfortable. I don't like it when men decide they want to be involved with women who they can mentor because that ends up being a very unequal relationship.
You don't want to be your boyfriend or your husband's student. You want to be their equal. So what was your reaction when you heard that?
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?
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.
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Chapter 4: What tensions existed between Medgar Evers and Northern civil rights activists?
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.
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.
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.
Joy Reid spoke to Terry Gross last year. Her book about Medgar and Merle Evers, titled Medgar and Merle, is now out in paperback. We'll continue their conversation after a short break. And later, Justin Chang reviews the new supernatural thriller Sinner. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
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Chapter 5: How did Medgar Evers' experience as a World War II veteran influence his activism?
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.
The final year of his life was when she finally accepted that this was his mission.
One day or night, I forget which it was, when Medgar was working, Merle was at home with the children, and the house was firebombed. A Molotov cocktail was thrown through the window. She was pregnant at the time. How did she respond when she realized what was happening and the house started to catch on fire?
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.
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.
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.
And it just brought home to her once again that there was no justice for Black people in Mississippi.
When President Kennedy gave a speech asking Congress to enact what basically became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after Kennedy's assassination.
So when Kennedy gave this speech asking Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities that were open to the public and to seek greater protection for the right to vote and more fully enforce the Supreme Court's ruling to desegregate the schools. That just like flared up racist attacks in the South.
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Chapter 6: What early life experiences shaped Medgar Evers' views on racial violence?
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.
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.
What she genuinely believed that Maker deserved, which is to have his legacy established for the sacrifice that he had made.
She both became famous, you know, very quickly because of the assassination and also very depressed. It's a difficult combination to deal with, depression and fame at the same time. And she's, of course, in mourning.
Absolutely. And living in that house made it worse, right? Because that house had been designed... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
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Chapter 7: How did Medgar and Myrlie first meet and what challenges did their relationship face?
Thank you.
Thank you.
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