52 pages • 1 hour read
Joy-Ann ReidMedgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “A Tristate Conspiracy?”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of pregnancy loss, death, and racism, including racist violence.
Byron De La Beckwith, the suspect in Evers’s assassination, was a World War II veteran, a racist, and a known member of the KKK. Arresting Beckwith was difficult, but the government prioritized the investigation, fearing racial conflict in Mississippi. Despite Beckwith’s reputation as a “fanatic,” however, civil rights activists doubted that he acted individually. Several witnesses identified Beckwith but also mentioned other white men watching Evers’s house. The FBI considered Beckwith’s arrest a triumph but did not investigate the involvement of the KKK or others in the case.
Williams distrusted the justice system. As a civil rights widow, she became a frequent public speaker and fundraiser for the NAACP. In one of her speeches, fueled by “love and legacy” (235), Williams stated that Evers sacrificed for all Americans. Williams felt that her voice was “strong” and became a popular public speaker. She was determined to punish whoever was involved in her husband’s death. Still, her grief troubled her, and her children were also distressed. Williams also had a miscarriage. She felt her strength declining, and her sister-in-law stressed the need to “heal” and protect her children.
Williams missed the 1964 March on Washington, which demanded equal rights for African Americans and pressed the government to act, but other women activists gave speeches for her. Despite the government’s fears of unrest, the march was peaceful. However, Williams was shocked and frightened following the news of Kennedy’s assassination, certain that he was murdered by the same “forces” that killed Evers.
Beckwith was tried by an all-white jury, and despite few defense testimonies, he was released on bail. Seeing the governors greeting him, Williams was certain that a “conspiracy” was behind Evers’s murder. Reid explains that the KKK celebrated Beckwith’s release. Nevertheless, desegregation in education proceeded successfully.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on Evers’s birthday. Activists in the South continued the struggle for a stronger voting rights bill despite ongoing violence, including the murders of two white activists. Williams was tired and planned to move to California, where she and her children could be safe. The neighborhood was sad about their departure, and Williams struggled to leave Mississippi and its memories of Evers.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Justice”
William moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Claremont, California. Her children were the first Black students in the city’s public schools. Their white neighbors were mostly kind, but the family still experienced racist behavior. Despite her depression, Williams enrolled in college to complete her bachelor’s degree. The assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the following years made her “relive” her own grief, though she gradually became friends with Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, and King’s widow, Coretta Scott King. Williams continued to ask about Beckwith, feeling that his punishment was her “mission.”
Meanwhile, Williams worked as an administrator of Claremont Colleges and ran for Congress in 1970. Despite losing, she was one of the first Black women to seek election. In the following years, several Black women were elected, and Williams joined the National Women’s Political Caucus. In the 1970s, Williams embraced her natural hair as she led a fundraiser for the NAACP.
In 1975, Williams met Walter Williams, a Black activist and member of the NAACP, who became her husband. He was a kind man whom her children approved of; he also accepted that Evers was the love of her life. Despite this new relationship, the deaths of her mother, aunt, and grandmother in the late 1970s brought more grief for Williams.
During the 1980s, Williams was politically active again, racing for a council seat. She encountered resistance and criticism but persisted. During one of her speeches, a young relative of Beckwith appeared and threatened her. It was later revealed that he was stalking her.
Williams and her husband were living in Oregon when a Southern reporter called her and informed her about new clues to Evers’s murder. Since the case could now be reopened, Williams traveled to Jackson to meet the district attorney. A trial was scheduled, and this time, Beckwith did not have legal support, and the jury included Black people. Several witnesses stated that he had bragged about killing Evers over the years. Beckwith was sentenced to life in prison in 1994. Williams and her children felt that their mission was accomplished and that they could finally celebrate Evers’s victories.
In the 1990s, the NAACP was troubled by an economic crisis and scandals involving sexual harassment. One of the organization’s former executive directors asked Williams to run for the position. She was elected and employed her fundraising skills to “restore” the organization’s “moral course,” establishing relationships with Black sororities and businesses. She left her position in 1998. During that period, she also lost her second husband. Williams remained active, writing her memoirs and books about Evers’s life and receiving honors for her work.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Carnegie Hall”
Reid notes that music was Williams’s first love and a “catalyst” in her life with Evers. Her grandmother and aunt always encouraged her talent and believed that she could play in Carnegie Hall one day as a concert pianist. As a child, Williams participated in a “girl group” that performed on several occasions in their community in Vicksburg. Reid quotes Evers explaining that in a “segregated society,” she did not have the opportunity to be a pianist and therefore chose to study teaching.
In December 2012, Williams achieved her dream: She was on stage at Carnegie Hall, fulfilling her dream of performing as a pianist. By then, America had elected its first Black president, Barack Obama. Williams became the first Black woman to give the invocation at a presidential inauguration. The formerly segregated Jackson airport was renamed after Evers, and there was an official commemoration honoring his work. NAACP officials apologized for failing to protect him. Nevertheless, Williams’s joy was tempered by another loss: Her oldest son, Darell, died of cancer in 2001.
Reid concludes that Williams’s “greatest gift” was “the gift of love” (299). She struggled to preserve Evers’s legacy and survived through loss and terror. Reid quotes Williams noting that Evers remained the love of her life, as she still remembered and felt blessed by their life together.
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
Reid uses Evers’s murderer, Byron De La Beckwith, and the circumstances of his trial anecdotally to indicate the pervasiveness of institutional racism and white supremacy. For instance, she juxtaposes Evers and Beckwith, both World War II veterans whose lives diverged sharply after the war, to emphasize the injustices that Black Americans have faced: “Byron De La Beckwith was a World War II veteran like Medgar, but five years older and an ardent racist and fascist” (225). Moreover, despite the government prioritizing the murder investigation due to national outrage, Beckwith was acquitted by an all-white jury—a testament to how deeply embedded racism was within the justice system. Reid also contextualizes Beckwith’s actions in terms of the terrorism that Evers and his family experienced before his murder, underscoring that his assassination was a result of structural problems that allowed racists to operate with impunity rather than an isolated incident of violence due to individual ideology.
The structural nature of the problem made grassroots activism all the more important. Thus, while Williams never abandoned her legal efforts to bring her husband’s murder to justice, her crusade also develops the theme of The Impact of Grassroots Activism on the Civil Rights Movement. Connecting with the people of Jackson, who mobilized to bring the culprit to justice, and galvanizing witnesses were key factors in securing a new trial. Reid employs pathos to describe the scene outside the courthouse following Beckwith’s conviction, highlighting that the justice system had historically been “the focus of so much pain, disappointment, and injustice for so many Black families” (280)—a reality that made the conviction all the more meaningful, Reid implies.
The Power of Love and the Struggle for Social Justice underlies Reid’s accounts of Williams’s activism. As Reid notes, “Still loving Medgar Evers meant continuously pursuing his killer, and Myrlie had never stopped asking about him” (268). Similarly, Reid quotes Williams juxtaposing love and hate to emphasize the nuances of how love manifests in the context of injustice: “It is interesting the two opposite forces: love and hate, how those two can drive you to do things ordinarily you wouldn’t. I was determined that I was going to live” (236). Ultimately, Reid suggests that Williams’s rage may have mobilized her but that it was her love for Evers that sustained her throughout her activist journey. Indeed, among her achievements, the love between her and Evers remained her most vivid memory: “But the greatest gift she had received, in all her years of struggle and striving, the anger and the quest for vengeance, and the pain and loss she had endured, was the gift of love” (299). The metaphor of love as a gift beyond all others emphasizes hope over despair, even in the face of grief.
The Crucial Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Struggle also dominates as Reid explores Williams’s activist work. Williams discovered her own voice as she thrust herself into political action through fundraising and public speaking: “She was surprised by the strength of her voice, which was clear and firm” (235). While struggling to navigate her personal grief, her children’s traumas, and ongoing racist violence, Williams’s survival instinct—an instinct that Reid associates particularly with Black women, honed by the double burden of racism and sexism—guided her. Indeed, Reid suggests that Williams extended the legacy of Evers’s activism by claiming positions in Congress and councils; her work as a board member of the NAACP solidifies the parallels between her work and Evers’s. In all of this, Reid argues, her connection with other women sustained her. The metaphor of “sisterhood” used to describe Williams’s connection to Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz, all “civil rights widows” conveys the empowering bond between Black women that has facilitated civil rights activism.
At the end of the book, Reid also discusses Williams’s intense inner life to illuminate her identity as a Black woman beyond her activism and marriage to Evers. Reid illustrates her individuality, noting that music was her “first love, even before Medgar” (292). Her performance at Carnegie Hall symbolizes the achievement of her lifelong dream and the culmination of her journey to self-empowerment. Williams was able to harvest the results of her fight for justice and come “full circle” as a woman and activist.
