Medgar Evers' Murder Nearly Cost Myrlie Evers Her Life, Too

She didn't act on the intention because of "divine intervention."

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance.

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On June 12, 1963, a white supremacist murdered civil rights activist and NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers, in Jackson, Mississippi.

He became yet another casualty of racism in this country, but the tragedy extends beyond a single individual. His family—especially his wife, Myrlie—was affected, too.

Myrlie Beasley met Medgar Evers her first day on campus at Alcorn A&M (now Alcorn State University) in Mississippi.

In 1950, Medgar was eight years older than Myrlie, a junior at the college, on the football team, and a World War II veteran. Right away, Myrlie’s grandmother and aunt criticized the pairing. They didn’t want an older GI taking advantage of a naive college freshman.

The couple’s love, however, was genuine and deep.

“I had prayed for months about Medgar and me, and by this time I was sure we were right for each other,” Myrlie recalled.

They married on Christmas Eve 1951.

Entry Into Activism

Soon the couple relocated to Mound Bayou, an all-Black town founded by Isaiah T. Montgomery in 1887, and began raising a family. Medgar took a job selling insurance, which took him to all parts of the Mississippi Delta region and brought him face-to-face with the plight of Black people like never before.

Photo Credit: Myrlie Evers-Williams Collection, Pomona College

In January 1954, Medgar Evers applied to enroll as a student at the all-white University of Mississippi, the state’s pride and joy when it came to public universities. Myrlie, who was pregnant with their second child and concerned about both the financial and physical risks, called her husband’s decision “selfish and foolish.”

When Evers was rejected, as predicted, he appealed to the NAACP for support in a lawsuit against the university. Instead, the NAACP suggested that he become the organization’s first field secretary in Mississippi.

Myrlie said she was “scared to death, but if that’s what you want to do, let’s try, because it also means that we come as a package, and that I will have a job.”

Throughout his tenure with the NAACP, Myrlie served as his secretary and coworker in voter registration drives, boycotts, and other demonstrations. The couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where Myrlie would reside until shortly after her husband’s assassination.

The Murder of Medgar Evers

The bullet that killed Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, didn’t stop in his chest. It ripped through his body and through the wall of his home, denting the refrigerator inside where his wife and three children—Darrell, Reena, and Van—were still awake.

Fortunately, the Evers family had trained for just such an occasion. They instantly dropped to the ground for cover.

Unfortunately for Medgar Evers, when he dropped to the ground, he would never get up again.

Years later, Myrlie recalled, “Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw Medgar, I felt his body, I felt the warmth of his kisses, and I relived his death in all its terrible vividness—the shot, the sight of his body, his blood oozing into the armful of white ‘Jim Crow Must Go’ t-shirts he had been carrying, my screams, the lights, the sirens.”

In the moments immediately following the shot, Myrlie relied on the faith that her mama and grandma had instilled in her. She said she “prayed for God’s will to be done and I sobbed and I prayed that what- ever happened I would be able to accept it.”

After her husband died, living with that reality was not a simple matter. Now a single mother wracked by grief, Myrlie shared in her memoir, “I seriously contemplated taking my life.”

She had been pregnant with her fourth child when Medgar was shot, but she miscarried. She took it as a blessing that she did not have to care for an infant when she could hardly care for herself or her family.

Whether it was driving recklessly on dark two-lane highways in Mississippi or stockpiling sleeping pills so that she could take enough to never wake up, Myrlie did not think she could bear the pain.

One day she came close to ending it all. When two of her children were at school and the youngest was napping, she raised a handful of pills to her mouth but could not bring herself to ingest them.

“For some reason—divine intervention I’m sure—I simply couldn’t act on my intention.” In the faces of her children and the face of God, Myrlie found a reason to keep living.

A year later, the young widow took her children and moved to Claremont, California, where they could begin anew. With the determination that comes from necessity, she enrolled at Pomona College and completed the educational journey she had started at Alcorn A&M in Mississippi.

Now the sole breadwinner for the family and armed with a college degree, Evers reentered the working world. She got a job working with the Claremont Colleges in recruitment and later worked in publicity and advertising.

In 1975, she worked as the national director for community affairs at the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) in Los Angeles. In 1976, she opened herself up to love again and married Walter Williams, a longshoreman and union organizer. They remained married until he died of pancreatic cancer in 1995.

If Not Justice, Accountability

Amid all the changes in her life, Evers made time to publish the book For Us, the Living in 1967. It told the story of how Medgar and Myrlie met and fell in love.

In it she wrote, “Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband.”

Her husband’s murderer, Byron De La Beckwith, was not convicted of the crime. He had been tried twice before, and both times the trial ended with an all-white hung jury.

Myrlie Evers-Williams persisted in seeking justice.

The case finally came to trial again in 1994. After the jury deliberated, Myrlie and her children assembled in the courtroom a few dozen feet from her husband’s unremorseful killer.

After interminable moments when the history of Mississippi’s racism and the promise of racial progress hung in the balance, the verdict was read: “The jury finds the defendant, Byron De La Beckwith, guilty as charged.”

That moment came as a welcome and needed expression of the spirit of justice. It meant that with persistent effort and hope, accountability is possible.

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