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.
Themes
The Impact of Grassroots Activism on the Civil Rights Movement
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and racism.
Reid’s book is, among other things, an argument for the historical significance of Evers’s activism. While Evers’s life and work have been somewhat overshadowed by other historical events and figures of the 1960s, Reid contends that Evers’s grassroots activism was “the foundation” of the civil rights movement. Evers, with Williams as his partner, managed to instigate social change amid the deeply white-supremacist US South through grassroots efforts at the community, local, and national levels.
Indeed, Reid argues that Evers’s activism predated both the full emergence of the modern civil rights movement and his own involvement in the NAACP. In the late 1940s, Evers actively claimed his right to vote as an individual and as part of the Black veterans’ community, becoming known among white supremacists as an “agitator.” This event demonstrated his commitment to the cause of equality and suggests his influence on later developments in the civil rights movement, which would hinge on the mass mobilization of ordinary individuals like Evers himself.
Evers’s move to Mount Bayou afforded him the opportunity to expand his activism. There, Evers sought every “opportunity […] to help his people” (53), taking advantage of his work as an insurance salesman to galvanize the Black community in Mississippi by conducting hands-on investigations of racist violence, organizing people to register to vote, initiating peaceful protests, offering security and training to Black people during court battles, and offering monetary support to activists. In all of this, Evers followed an “educational process” to mobilize the terrorized local Black community in Mississippi, emphasizing power building from the “bottom-up.” As Reid illustrates, those practices helped build the mass civil rights movement in the South.
As Reid demonstrates, Evers’s consistent focus on direct-action protests would put him at odds with official civil rights strategies when he became a field officer in the NAACP. Reid notes that the “growing movement was built on the direct action that belied the staid legal tactics of the NAACP” (89). As her word choice (e.g., “staid”) suggests, Reid paints the former as far more dynamic and effective than the latter, in part because it emphasized “defiance” of systemic oppression rather than attempting to work within those very systems to challenge their values. Evers, for example, disagreed with the NAACP’s insistence on court battles and allied with “impatient” young activists, leveraging his position to distribute funds in support of student activists, nurturing the next generation of civil rights leaders who would become prominent in the 1970s. Moreover, despite his emphasis on Black politics, Evers was also innovative in pursuing interracial cooperation as a key strategy for social change. That his belief in defiance and self-determination anticipated later developments in the civil rights movement vindicates his approach, Reid suggests. In profiling Evers, Reid thus makes a tacit claim about the kind of antiracist activism most likely to yield results.
The Crucial Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Struggle
The book explores Evers’s significance as a civil rights leader while also emphasizing the crucial role of his partner, Williams, in the civil rights struggle. Through this, Reid challenges the notion that the civil rights movement was largely the provenance of Black men, arguing that Black women were just as critical to the struggle, even if their roles were not always as visible.
Reid stresses Black women’s historical significance by providing parallel biographies of Evers and Williams, demonstrating that while Williams may have learned many lessons alongside Evers, she also came to the civil rights movement with a unique perspective shaped by Black womanhood. Williams was raised primarily by her grandmother and aunt and was supported by her mother despite her absence; these women instilled in her a commitment to survival and resistance to racism. As Reid stresses, “Medgar may have learned to fight the Mississippi system at every turn, but Myrlie was taught to withstand it” (41), implying that where Evers excelled at direct confrontation, Williams furnished much of the perseverance needed to see the struggle through. In keeping with this portrayal, Reid highlights the various ways that Williams supported her husband’s civil rights activism, including working as a secretary in the NAACP herself and engaging in community building: “Even with her new domestic role, Myrlie’s car gave her the freedom she craved and helped to solidify her relationships with some of her still-reticent neighbors” (95). Though these roles were less public than Evers’s, Reid argues that they were vital not only to Evers but also to the broader Black community, helping to assuage their terror and reinforce their collective power.
That said, Reid also highlights that Black women—Williams included—did sometimes occupy high-profile roles in the civil rights movement. For Williams, the shift to a more public-facing position was unplanned and unhappy: Following Evers’s murder, Williams was thrust into a lifelong struggle for justice. Despite the circumstances, Williams employed her resistance and survival skills to become the “torch bearer” of Evers’s legacy and channeled her rage over his murder into activism of her own. As a “prolific” public speaker and fundraiser for the NAACP, Williams called for unity and the intensification of civil rights efforts; throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, she would also actively participate in national and state politics.
Williams’s perseverance in pursuing justice ultimately led to the sentencing of Evers’s killer, Byron De La Beckwith, three decades later. However, Reid shows that while this phase of Williams’s activism may have begun in personal tragedy, its reach extended far beyond herself and her family. For instance, Williams’s contributions as a board member of the NAACP were crucial for its survival. Despite her “mixed feelings” about the organization due to their clashes with Evers, Williams prioritized community and the civil rights cause, declaring to the group’s members, “We will move forward because we are family” (286). Her word choice is telling; Reid suggests that Black women’s activism has often been grounded in the love of family—but family in the most expansive of senses.
The Power of Love and the Struggle for Social Justice
Love is central to Reid’s book; in fact, she states that it was her reason for writing it. Williams and Evers experienced a “true and intense and existential” love that characterized their personal and political lives (1), and Reid uses their relationship to explore a broader, social idea of love that she connects to the African American experience, stating that the book “is also about the higher love it took for Black Americans to love America and to fight for it” (2). Reid thus positions love as key to the civil rights struggle in America.
Reid characterizes the biography as a “love story,” emphasizing Williams and Evers’s unconditional love as a couple and the way it fortified them to endure their trials during the civil rights movement. As they experienced marital crises due to Evers’s work and the constant threats against his life, love held the family together and helped Williams accept their mission as civil rights activists. As she would later explain, “I chose love, and I stayed. Medgar told me to be sure that I knew what I was doing, because he knew what he was doing” (116). Williams’s “fierce love” for her children also rendered her the main “protector” of the family while Evers was leading the movement.
After Evers’s murder, love remained Williams’s key source of empowerment. While Reid notes that her husband’s murder caused her rage and a desire for “vengeance,” it was enduring love for Evers that sustained her in her long quest for justice and in her broader civil rights work: “It is interesting the two opposite forces: love and hate, how those two can drive you to do things ordinarily you wouldn’t” (236). Williams survived a long battle to bring Evers’s murderer to justice, signifying the power of her love. Thus, amid all her achievements, Williams felt that “the greatest gift” was “the gift of love” (299).
Through Evers’s and Williams’s stories, Reid illustrates that African Americans’ passionate battle against racism and their fierce criticism of America’s social injustice derives from an “unfaltering love” for their country and their people. For Reid, Williams and Evers’s political activism was “a labor of love” (3), spurred by both love of family, which motivated them to envision a liberated life for Black people broadly, and love of community. Their collective efforts for social justice cultivated a sense of “togetherness” and reinforced their courage to face terror.
