Joy Reid’s ‘Medgar and Myrlie’ traces extraordinary lives and love of civil rights leaders

Geoff Bennett:

It's a love story that helps paint a fuller picture of the civil rights movement, that of Medgar and Myrlie Evers.

On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, a pioneering civil rights activist, was killed by a white supremacist outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. His murder thrust his wife, Myrlie Evers, into the national spotlight, becoming a freedom fighter in her own right.

I spoke with author and MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid, who traces their extraordinary lives in her new book out today, "Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America."

Joy Reid, welcome to the "NewsHour."

Joy-Ann Reid, Author, "Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America": Geoff, it is so good to see you, and thank you for having me.

Geoff Bennett:

Of course.

So, Myrlie Louise Beasley met Medgar Evers on her first day of college at Alcorn State. What drew them together?

Joy-Ann Reid:

You know, it was in one sense just his approach. He was very aggressive. He ran up to her as she was leaning sort of against an electric pole, and he said: "Hey, you're going to get shocked. You need to walk away from that."

And she’s like:

"Well, I actually didn't need your help, but thank you," because she was trying to be haughty because she was raised in Vicksburg to be a certain way and to be a certain way toward men. So it was partly his approach. There were a lot of guys who were sizing up the young women, but he just was different. There was something about him.

He was older 7 years older than her. She didn't know exactly how much older, but he just had sort of an air about him. And I think it was because he was a World War II veteran and a football player. Each of those things were the things that her grandmother and her aunt told her to absolutely stay away from.

So, in some sense, I think it was also the danger.

Geoff Bennett:

And you use their relationship as a lens through which to explore the fight for justice, equality, the civil rights movement.

Joy-Ann Reid:

Yes.

Geoff Bennett:

What did that specific approach reveal to you?

Joy-Ann Reid:

You know, what's interesting is, I think that when we think about civil rights leaders, we tend to think of them as sort of just icons in isolation of their actual lives.

But what these were, were young men, very young men in their 20s and 30s. None of those sort of greats that we think of in the civil rights movement even lived to be 40. And they lived whole lives that included falling in love, having children, being parents, being spouses.

And so what I wanted to do was to fill in the narrative about the civil rights movement to put it in the context of the two kinds of love that it took, right? You needed to have the loving family that would support you and allow you to do the thing that could get you all killed, a wife that was willing to live in a house that could be firebombed, then knew how to train your children to understand that their father could die, that their mother could die, that they could die.

Geoff Bennett:

As field secretary for the NAACP, that made him a target of white racists who at the time terrorized Black people in Mississippi with impunity.

And after his tragic death, his assassination, Myrlie Evers committed herself to the fight. I mean, she became an activist in her own right. She wrote a book about Medgar Evers. She ran for Congress. She ultimately led the NAACP.

Tell me more about her second act.

Joy-Ann Reid:

You know, Myrlie Evers was, in some ways, the most reluctant of civil rights leaders. She had no desire to do this. She just wanted to be with her man. She was a literal 1950s housewife and just wanted her man to come home every day and help her raise their children and go to the movies and enjoy their romance.

But that was not in the cards for her. When Medgar died, she was in her early 30s. She was a very young woman who has three children to raise, but she was also angry. And one of the things that really struck me as I interviewed Myrlie Evers is, she still can — she can still access that sense of palpable rage.

She wasn't just sad that Medgar was dead. She was angry. And she channeled that anger into the movement. She was determined to make sure his killer, who was tried twice, to hung juries in the 1960s, in '63 and '64, she wanted to see him imprisoned for the rest of his life. She eventually got that. It took her 30 years.

But she also wanted to see the NAACP live up to its true aims, which they had had a fight with Medgar about what he was doing. They didn't agree with direct action. He did. And she wanted to right that ship as well, because she believed that the NAACP had in many ways failed her husband.

And so her goal when he died was to right all of the wrongs that she believed took her husband from her.

Geoff Bennett:

You know, Joy, one of the reasons I'm so happy this book exists is because so much of their story and their sacrifice has been overlooked by history. Is that what drew you to this project?

Joy-Ann Reid:

Absolutely.

James Baldwin called Medgar, Malcolm and Martin the great triumvirate of the civil rights movement. But people know so much more about the other two than they do about Medgar Evers. He's sort of a — when you land in Jackson, Mississippi, you land in Medgar Evers Airport. A lot of people don't know why.

If you're in Brooklyn, you can go to Medgar Evers College. A lot of people just don't know who that is. They maybe have heard of the name, but they really don't know his story.

And to my mind, he was in many ways the most heroic civil rights leader in this country, because he was operating in the most difficult state to do civil rights. And that was Mississippi, the most lynchings per capita, the most aggressive Klan organization that killed Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and many, many more, the most aggressive statewide apparatus that was sort of the Klan in suits, a literal spy organization that operated out of the governor's office and the state legislature to spy on the citizens of Mississippi.

That existed nowhere but that state. And he was not just the field secretary. He was the first, the inaugural field secretary. And I can remember Vernon Jordan, the wonderful, great Vernon Jordan. I interviewed him for my first book, for "Fracture," and I remember sitting in his office and him saying to me that he could remember — he was very close to Medgar.

And he said he could remember being on the phone with Medgar, and Medgar literally crying and saying: I can't do this. They won't sign up to vote. They're terrified here. People in the Delta are so scared. They don't want to put their names on an NAACP ledger. And my bosses want me to do this, and they're insisting that's all I do, sign people up for membership in the NAACP and register them to vote.

But they don't understand. They're in New York. And this is almost impossible here, because these people need to develop just the courage to walk into a department store. It's so terrifying that just talking to a white person in the wrong way can get you lynched here.

And I think, for a lot of people, they have forgotten how much bravery it took for him to operate, not in Georgia, not even in Louisiana, not even in South Carolina, but Mississippi.

Geoff Bennett:

What would the civil rights movement have been without the influence, example, and sacrifice of Myrlie Evers-Williams and Medgar Evers?

Joy-Ann Reid:

I actually think it would have been completely different.

Number one, you have to remember that the fight for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, it rolled through Mississippi. The most violent sit-in at a Woolworths at a lunch counter in the United States was at the Jackson Woolworths. This was the famous one where not only was, like, flour and sugar dumped on this integrated group of people that were trying to desegregate that lunch counter

They were beaten. They were beaten and bloodied and left on the ground, and it became an international story. And that provoked — it was one of the things that provoked the Kennedy administration to say, enough is enough. The violence that went through the University of Mississippi when it was desegregated was unlike anything the country had ever seen, and they saw it on the nightly news.

And so the incidents that took place in Mississippi, combined with the Alabama stand at the schoolhouse door, were the sort of final, last straw for the Kennedy administration, and Kennedy, who had been a very reluctant friend of the civil rights movement, because he needed Southern votes.

Remember, back then, these Southern states were still swing states. He had been very reluctant. He really wanted to do a big tax cut. That was his thing. He finally said, nope, I'm going to do it.

And the thing that I think people don't know, because they don't know Medgar, is that he used some of Medgar's language when he did that speech. They shared that they were World War II veterans. He understood the heroism and sacrifice of a fellow veteran, and he was moved by that veteran's status.

And when he promised to do that bill, when Medgar was assassinated within hours after him giving this historic televised speech, the person that he gave the first draft of that bill, the physical draft, was Myrlie Evers.

Geoff Bennett:

Really?

Joy-Ann Reid:

Myrlie Evers-Williams was then just Myrlie Evers. She was in the White House with her children, still a grieving widow, and the president gave her a copy of that bill. And he promised her that he would do — he would get that bill through.

And when that bill started to languish and take a long time, the March on Washington in August was to push him to get back on track and get that bill done. And Dr. King talked about Medgar Evers and Emmett Till as two of the inspirations for that march. And there's two of the people that he talked about the — probably the most when he would talk about the sacrifices.

His original version of the speech that he gave on August 28, 1963, he actually gave in Detroit. And there was a line that got cut out of the final speech that said that, one of these — one day in the future, we will come to a day when the sacrifices of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers wouldn't have to be made.

That was the first version of "I Have a Dream." That was the dream he spoke of. It was ultimately cut out of the speech, but Medgar Evers was on his mind at the march. And Myrlie Evers was the only woman initially invited to speak along with the big six. She just wasn't able to be there because of another commitment.

But Medgar Evers is infused in the civil rights movement. And his contemporaries knew it. It's just that, today, he's sort of fallen out of the public memory.

Geoff Bennett:

Well, this book will certainly help change that, "Medgar and Myrlie and the Love Story That Awakened America."

Joy-Ann Reid, always a pleasure to speak with you.

Joy-Ann Reid:

Geoff, thank you.

Geoff Bennett:

Online right now, hear more about the sisterhood and special friendship that Myrlie Evers-Williams shared with the late Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz. You can find it on our YouTube and Instagram accounts.