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.
Key Figures
Joy-Ann Reid
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and racism, including racist violence.
Joy-Ann Reid is an African American political analyst, author, and television host. She is a national correspondent for MSNBC and has hosted the political commentary program The ReidOut since 2020. Reid previously hosted the daily news programs The Reid Report (2014-2015) and A.M. Joy (2016-2020). From 2011 to 2014, she was the managing editor of TheGrio, an online platform featuring opinion and daily news pieces that primarily address African American audiences and focus on stories that affect Black people. Reid served as a talk radio producer and host for Radio One and an online news editor for the NBC affiliate WTVJ in Miramar, Florida. She has also worked as a freelance political columnist in the Miami Herald; her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, and New York Magazine. During a hiatus from journalism in 2004, she worked as a press secretary for the national voter registration and mobilization entity America Coming Together. She also served the Florida branch of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.
Reid is the author of three nonfiction books: Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide (2016), the New York Times bestseller The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story (2019), and the biography Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America (2024). She was also the coeditor of the book We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama (2017). Reid is a popular keynote speaker, celebrated for her insights, in-depth analysis, and commentary on political issues.
Reid was born in New York City in 1968. Her parents were immigrants from Africa. After their divorce, Reid was raised by her mother in Denver, Colorado, until her mother’s death from cancer when Reid was 17, after which she moved to Brooklyn with an aunt. She graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in visual and environmental studies with a focus on documentary film. In 2003, she was a fellow at the Knight Center for Advanced Journalism. Apart from her interest in politics and elections, she has also taught at Syracuse University and is a Hearst Visiting Professor at Howard University, teaching a course about the impact of race and gender in political journalism. Reid’s work often addresses the intersection of gender and race, as well as media culture in America, tackling timely political and social issues and emphasizing racial justice.
Medgar Evers
Medgar Evers was an African American civil rights activist and organizer born in Decatur, Mississippi, in 1925. His family owned a small farm. His father, James Evers, worked at a sawmill, and his mother, Jesse Wright, was a laundry worker. He had five siblings, including two from his mother’s previous marriage. The Everses were a loving family who emphasized the values of hard work, education, and religion.
Growing up in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression, Evers experienced racism at an early age, witnessing rampant racist violence and intimidation. Evers spent much time with his older brother, Charles, whom he admired and respected. The Evers children attended racially segregated public schools miles away from home. The schools were underfunded, operating with outdated textbooks and few teachers. Evers eventually earned his high school diploma, determined to make something of his life despite his racist environment. He enlisted in the Army in 1943, serving in a segregated field battalion in England and France and participating in the Normandy operation landings in 1944. The segregation and mistreatment of African American soldiers angered Evers, particularly when contrasted with the more equitable treatment they received from Europeans. In 1946, Evers received an honorable discharge for his military service. While some Black soldiers wanted to remain in Europe, Evers decided to return to the US and fight for change.
Upon his return to Mississippi, Evers fought for the right to vote alongside his brother and other Black veterans. He enrolled in Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University), a historically Black agricultural and mechanical college. He majored in business administration and participated in university activities like football, debate, and choir. There, Evers met Myrlie Williams, and the two married in 1951. The couple had three children. Evers earned his bachelor’s degree in 1952. The couple moved to Mount Bayou, Mississippi, where Evers worked as an insurance salesman. Soon, Evers became president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. As the leader of the Council, he was determined to fight segregation and organized boycotts against gas stations that prohibited Black people from using their restrooms. After being rejected from the University of Mississippi Law School due to his race, he joined the NAACP as a field officer. His organizing skills united many disillusioned and terrorized Black people in Mississippi.
In particular, Evers helped the NAACP file a lawsuit based on the Brown v. Board of Education case to challenge segregation at the University of Mississippi (in 1954, the US Supreme Court had ruled segregation at public schools unconstitutional, though it took years to be implemented). Meanwhile, Evers gained prominence as the first field secretary for the NAACP. He recruited new members to the organization, established new local chapters, organized voter registration campaigns and boycotts against companies that practiced discrimination, and led demonstrations against segregation in public spaces. Evers also demanded a new investigation into Emmett Till’s murder, protesting racism in the justice system.
Evers’s activism made him a target for white supremacists but never caused him to abstain from the freedom struggle. He and his family were subject to intimidation and terror, including several death threats and the firebombing of their house in May 1963. In June 1963, Evers was assassinated by a member of the KKK outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, hours after President Kennedy addressed the nation supporting civil rights. Evers was buried with military honors, and the NAACP posthumously awarded him the Spingarn Medal for his service. National outrage and anger among the African American community over the failure to convict his murderer, Byron De La Beckwith, lent momentum to the struggle that would ultimately secure the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Following decades of investigation and trials, Beckwith was convicted in 1994.
Despite his early death, Evers’s activism had a lasting impact on the freedom movement; Reid particularly highlights his commitment to on-the-ground organizing as part of her discussion of The Impact of Grassroots Activism on the Civil Rights Movement. Evers’s brother succeeded him at the NAACP and was elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, in 1969. Williams established the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute in Jackson, Mississippi, to honor his commitment to social justice. In 2017, his home was designated a historical landmark by President Obama.
Myrlie Williams
Myrlie Williams is an African American activist and the widow of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. She was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1933 and raised by her grandmother and aunt, who were schoolteachers. Williams attended the Magnolia High School, where she often performed as a vocalist and took piano lessons. In 1950, Williams enrolled in Alcorn College to major in education with a minor in music. There, she met Evers, whom she married in 1951. When Evers graduated, Williams left college and worked as a secretary for an insurance company.
When Evers was hired as a field officer in the NAACP, the family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where Williams worked as Evers’s secretary. As the couple witnessed the poverty and injustice that rural African American communities experienced, they worked together for social change. They managed the first NAACP office in Mississippi, organizing demonstrations, boycotts, and voting rights campaigns while investigating cases of racial violence and demanding economic equality and justice. After Evers’s assassination and an all-white jury’s failure to convict his murderer, Williams fought for decades to secure justice. Williams’s endeavors kept the case open, and Beckwith was finally sentenced to life in prison in 1994, 30 years after Evers’s death.
Despite her grief, Williams continued her life in those intervening years. In 1967, she moved to California with her children, expanding her activist work. She earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Pomona College and cowrote a chronicle on Evers’s life and work titled For Us, the Living (1967). She also worked in university administration, serving as a planning director at the Center for Educational Opportunity for Claremont Colleges. She also made bids to be elected to Congress, though these were unsuccessful. In 1976, Williams married Walter Williams, another civil rights activist. In 1987, she was appointed a commissioner to the Board of Public Works by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, becoming the first Black woman to hold the position. Williams continued to work for her community in the 1990s, joining the board of directors of the NAACP to assist with the organization’s scandals and financial problems. As chairperson, she used her fundraising skills to help reduce its debt and improve its prestige. Williams was named Woman of the Year by Ms. magazine in 1998. Having achieved her goal at the NAACP, she left the organization in the same year.
Williams established the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute in 1999 to honor the legacy of her first husband. Meanwhile, she continued her efforts to preserve his memory and worked as an editor on a book based on Evers’s writings and speeches: The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches (2005). The same year, she also published her autobiography. Entitled Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be, this recounts Williams’s struggles to access education and raise her children after Evers’s death. She received the National Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2009, among other honors. In 2013, she became the first woman to deliver the presidential invocation, at Barack Obama’s second inauguration. Williams’s family continues to support her in the fight for equality, which still inspires generations of activists. Reid numbers herself among those galvanized by Williams’s example. Though Medgar & Myrlie (as its title suggests) is an homage to both activists, Williams has received comparatively less attention—an oversight that Reid, as someone interested in the intersections of Blackness and womanhood, seeks to remedy by foregrounding The Crucial Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Struggle.
