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.
Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “Love”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual violence, pregnancy loss, death, and racism, including racist violence, the Jim Crow era, and enslavement.
Reid emphasizes that “love” is the central idea of her book, as she explores the “love story” between Medgar Evers and Myrlie Williams. Williams fell in love with Evers on her first day as a 17-year-old student at what was then Alcorn A&M College. A gifted musician and singer, she intended to major in education with a minor in music. Despite the harsh reality of racism in the country, she was determined to succeed, inspired by her grandmother and aunt. At the time, Evers was 25 years old, a confident young man, and a World War II veteran. The two married in 1951, and their relationship was caught up in the momentum of the civil rights movement.
Reid notes that through Evers and Williams’s love story, she also highlights the “higher love” of African Americans for their country. Evers had a deep love for Mississippi and its Black community and stressed that his activist work derived from love. He was determined to fight against the racism that continued to kill and dehumanize Black people. Love also enabled Williams to cope with a life of constant terror and violence.
Evers was assassinated by a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1963, outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, at 37 years old. Williams was a widowed mother at 30 years old; despite her despair and fear, she was determined to honor her “martyred husband’s legacy” (4). At the time, Evers’s death instigated major civil rights protests, galvanizing the Black community. However, Reid notes that Evers has since vanished from “historical memory.” While major milestones postdated his assassination, she argues that his activism was the “foundation” of these later civil rights efforts and achievements.
Reid notes that the book is a “love letter” to Williams, whom she personally admires as an “icon in her own right” (6). Reid’s sources include interviews with Williams, Williams’s extended family and friends, historians, and activists from Mississippi; she also examined archives at the Evers Institute and Evers’s and Williams’s autobiographies.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Mississippi Goddamn…”
Evers returned to Mississippi in 1946 with an honorable discharge from the Army. After his experiences in Europe during the war, Evers came home knowing who he was: “a World War II veteran and a human being” (9). During his service, Evers devoted time to studying the African liberation movement. He realized that African Americans needed a leader to galvanize them against the racist US system but rejected the prospect of “armed revolution.”
Evers had defied his mother’s expectation that he focus on his education; following his brother Charles, he had left high school to enlist in the Army in 1943. However, he was determined to finish school upon his return and aspired to become a lawyer to battle discrimination.
Despite segregation in the Army that limited Black people’s participation in combat, Evers witnessed the horror of the Normandy landings. Evers’s subsequent experience in Europe was formative. While racism existed, Europeans generally treated Black people with humanity. Evers spent time in Paris and had a relationship with a white French woman. Military service reinforced his confidence as a would-be activist, as he recognized the “contradiction” of fighting for freedom abroad while living oppressed at home. Evers returned to America with his brother, determined to fight for freedom.
Reid stresses that while enslavement was abolished after the Civil War, the Southern planter class was determined to preserve their socioeconomic privilege with a system of “American apartheid” premised on segregation and white supremacy. Sexual violence against Black women persisted, and the lynching of Black men was a daily threat. Evers and his brother witnessed their first lynching in the 1930s, which reinforced their “desire for revenge” (21). As boys, they retaliated against racist attacks and used to sell a Black-owned newspaper. Their father encouraged their “bravado,” as he never allowed white people to intimidate him and taught his sons to defend themselves.
Reid explains that Black people in the South were historically excluded from voting through fraudulent practices and “terrorism.” In 1946, Evers and his brother claimed their right to register to vote as veterans. A mob of white men threatened to attack them outside the courthouse, but the brothers achieved their goal. However, on election day, they were barred from voting as armed white supremacists threatened bloodshed. The two brothers were also armed, but Evers persuaded his brother to retreat and avoid violence. Reid notes that despite the result, their act was a historic event in Mississippi, and their efforts were noticed by the NAACP.
Evers enrolled in Alcorn College using the GI Bill after being rejected by the segregated University of Mississippi. He majored in business administration and was a diligent student and active on campus. He was still resolved to study law, but his life changed when he met Myrlie Beasley (later Myrlie Williams) in 1950.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Medgar and Myrlie”
Evers and Williams met on campus at Alcorn College. Reid notes that the two had “pure chemistry.” Williams had been raised by her paternal grandmother, whom she called “Mama,” and her namesake aunt. Her grandmother was a retired schoolteacher and a community “force” in Vicksburg; despite economic struggles, she had managed to build a beautiful household filled with love. Williams grew up in a religious community, and her life revolved around church activities. She sometimes visited her mother, who gave birth to Wiliams as a teen and lived in a separate house, but her father was rarely home. He was also a war veteran, but unlike Evers, he returned home desperate.
Reid stresses that while Evers learned to “fight” racism, Williams “was taught to withstand it” and learned to survive (41). Vicksburg was a deeply segregated town, and, like all Black children, Williams was always prepared for an attack and knew how to avoid racist groups. As their relationship developed, Evers would “challenge” Williams with political conversations about African revolutionaries. Reid notes that Evers was “radical” and that Williams admired his love for Black people and America.
Williams’s grandmother and aunt initially opposed the relationship, concerned about her young age and the dangers of Evers’s activism. Williams’s mother, though, understood and supported her. Evers endeavored to win the respect and trust of Williams’s family, who eventually agreed to their wedding. The couple married in 1951.
Williams left college when Evers graduated. She hoped to move north, but Evers insisted on staying in Mississippi. Reid notes that Williams was not an activist at the time and was happy being a “wife,” but Evers insisted that she had more to offer. Eventually, the couple moved to Mount Bayou, a community in the Mississippi Delta founded by emancipated Black people. Evers worked at an insurance company owned by a wealthy Black man. While selling insurance, Evers also worked to help the Black community, as “financial, physical and sexual abuse” were still common (54). He often helped Black families escape lynching. His employer initiated him into the RCNL, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, where he started his first activist campaigns, including a boycott of a segregated gas station. Evers approached people to inform them about voting registrations and community meetings. Reid explains that Evers was not a supporter of nonviolence, as he and his brother were often forced to carry arms to defend themselves.
While Evers was passionate about his work, Williams was lonely and worried. The couple struggled at first, as Williams also had a miscarriage. Evers stood by Williams’s side, and the couple ultimately welcomed three children.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
In the book’s Prologue, Reid highlights The Power of Love and the Struggle for Social Justice, establishing love as a central thematic element. She connects the idea of love to Evers and Williams’s personal and political lives to underscore their powerful connection as a couple navigating a turbulent social context and to emphasize African Americans’ passionate fight against racism during the civil rights movement. Indeed, the two are intertwined, as Reid suggests that the couple’s love for each other bolstered their commitment to the fight for justice. Evers and Williams’s relationship was both grounding and liberatory, Reid suggests. While the way their love manifested was inextricably connected to their sociohistorical context, the feeling itself transcends temporality: “The thing about love is that it has no chill. It takes no prisoners and makes no exceptions for the times or the environment or the dangers ahead. It has no situational awareness, particularly when it is true and intense and existential. At its best it is fearless” (1). Love is a powerful motivator, Reid suggests, because it refuses to compromise with anything that might limit its expression.
In this, Reid treats Evers and Williams as representative of how love has defined both Black people’s lives as families and communities and their ideology as American citizens. The civil rights struggle was a result of Black Americans’ “higher love” for their country despite the hostility and deathly violence it exerted on Black bodies. Likewise, Reid discusses Evers’s activism as a “labor of love” (3), indicating that the struggle for equality and Black people’s demands for social change ultimately benefit the country by promoting a freer and more democratic America. Framing the civil rights movement as rooted in love also heightens the contrast between civil rights activists and their opponents. For example, Reid juxtaposes Ever’s “deep and unfaltering love for Mississippi” with the racial hatred that permeated the state that “butchered more Black bodies via lynching than any other” (2). This imagery establishes the racist environment that Evers and Williams navigated and further illustrates the power of their love.
This idea of love is related to Williams’s experiences and The Crucial Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Struggle. Reid illustrates that Williams’s love for Evers and their children empowered her to be a protective wife and mother, defying the terror of racist violence and thrusting her into a long struggle for justice over Evers’s murder. She appeals to pathos to describe Williams’s love story with Evers, highlighting the resilience of Black women: “They embarked on a perilous, often contentious romantic journey that got swept up in Mississippi’s civil rights struggle and ended in blood, tears, and a woman’s quest […] for vengeance” (2). Reid also draws attention to Williams’s contributions, public and private, and Evers’s activism—e.g., his service as a secretary. Even as Reid illuminates Evers’s significance as a civil rights leader, she centralizes Black women’s experiences through Williams, depicting their perseverance, their social consciousness, and their defiance of societal boundaries.
These opening chapters also highlight The Impact of Grassroots Activism on the Civil Rights Movement, arguing that Evers’s activist work set the course for the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Indeed, her stated objective is in part to reinstate Evers as a significant figure in historical memory. While Reid cites various historical facts as evidence of Evers’s centrality to the civil rights movement—she explains, for instance, that Evers was the first major civil rights activist to be assassinated and that his murder conveyed the harsh reality of racial terror and violence on a national level—she also uses less overt rhetorical strategies to create a portrait of Evers’s prominence. For instance, Reid employs anecdotal evidence and primary sources (e.g., interviews) not only to illuminate Evers and Williams’s personal experiences but also to reinforce readers’ connection to their stories, securing the couple’s place in the readers’ minds.
Reid suggests that Evers was, in some ways, representative of the civil rights movement even before he became involved with it—or, indeed, before the movement itself existed. As Reid explains, Black veterans’ experiences during World War II were a determining factor in the emergence of the modern civil rights movement. Black men’s military service and their time in Europe reinforced a new political consciousness and sense of self. This was true of Evers, who Reid notes gained “confidence and perspective” as a Black soldier in a segregated army (12), realizing the inherent “contradictions” of American democracy. Reid cites an anecdote of Evers’s relationship with a white French woman to illuminate his experiences outside the limitations of the Jim Crow system, suggesting that in Europe, Evers was able to connect with his manhood and humanity without the threat of racial violence. His familiarity with African decolonization movements during the 1940s further helped him develop a Pan-Africanist approach to activism and made the dismantling of white supremacy his key goal.
Reid also contextualizes the civil rights movement with reference to the Jim Crow system. As she explains, Jim Crow laws created a system of de facto enslavement after the Civil War, establishing a system premised on white supremacy. The white planter class promoted legalized segregation and economic exploitation of Black workers to preserve their own socioeconomic privileges. Reid describes this system as “an aggressive system of American apartheid” (26)—an allusion to South Africa’s infamous racist caste system that underscores the brutality of the system. Moreover, she suggests that legal forms of oppression worked in tandem with extralegal ones, such as lynching. Reid notes, for example, that violence, persecution, and political “trickery” all worked to bar Black Americans from voting.
Here too, Reid argues, Evers was a pioneer. Evers began his voting registration efforts prior to his involvement with the NAACP. Evers’s act demonstrates his belief in self-determination and the Black community’s resilience, which reinforced his grassroots efforts as a civil rights leader. Through this anecdote, Reid offers insight into Evers’s character as a man and activist, depicting him as someone who led by example.
Reid also uses anecdotal stories to illuminate Williams’s life experiences beyond her marriage to Evers. These early chapters hint at Williams’s personal aspirations and dreams, which Reid explores further at the end of the book. Williams’s upbringing in a Black matriarchal household suggests her strong sense of womanhood and her commitment to survival and resistance. Those values guided her life as a wife and mother, but they would also shape her later work as an activist. A quote from Evers himself foreshadows this, as he told her, “You have so much more than that to give” (50). At the same time, Reid emphasizes the mutuality of their relationship; indeed, she suggests that far from expecting Williams to confine herself to a domestic role, Evers helped galvanize Williams to participate in the struggle through remarks like the one above.
