Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America

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.