Myrlie Evers-Williams
On June 12, 1963, Myrlie Evers watched her husband Medgar Evers, the NAACP's field director in Mississippi, pull into their driveway and get shot in the back by a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith. She cradled him as he died on their front steps. Their children were inside. Beckwith was tried twice in the 1960s and walked free both times with hung juries. Myrlie Evers-Williams spent thirty years making sure the case stayed alive. In 1994, Beckwith was convicted. She then became chair of the NAACP and rebuilt the organization from near-bankruptcy.
Myrlie Evers grew up in Vicksburg, Mississippi, raised primarily by her grandmother after her parents separated. She met Medgar Evers at Alcorn State University. They married in 1951, and he became the NAACP's first field director in Mississippi in 1954, which made their family a target in one of the most dangerous states in America for civil rights work.
Medgar Evers organized voter registration drives, investigated racial murders, and documented the conditions facing Black Mississippians. He received death threats constantly. On June 12, 1963, hours after President Kennedy delivered a nationally televised address on civil rights, Medgar Evers pulled into his driveway and was shot in the back with a high-powered rifle. He died on the steps of his home, in front of his children, as Myrlie tried to keep him alive.
Byron De La Beckwith was identified as the shooter. He was tried twice in the 1960s. Both juries, all white, hung. He walked free twice. The FBI later confirmed that jurors had been influenced by the segregationist state sovereignty commission.
Myrlie Evers-Williams did not let the case die. For three decades, she gathered evidence, kept records, and pushed for a new investigation. She moved to California, wrote a book about Medgar and their life together, and raised three children as a widow. She built a career in civil rights work and in 1987 became the first Black woman elected to the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.
In 1994, thirty-one years after the murder, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Medgar Evers. He died in prison in 2001.
That same year, 1995, Myrlie Evers-Williams was elected chair of the NAACP, an organization that had accumulated millions in debt and was in organizational crisis. She spent three years rebuilding it financially and structurally. In 2013, she delivered the invocation at President Obama's second inauguration.
I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of seeing my people die. I want justice. I will settle for nothing less.Myrlie Evers-Williams
She raised three children while carrying the grief of watching her husband die on their front steps, while the system let his killer walk free twice. She pursued justice for thirty-one years without institutional support and without certainty that she would succeed. The conviction in 1994 happened because she refused to let the case become a closed chapter.
Myrlie Evers-Williams is proof that persistence across decades can change an outcome that power assumed was settled. The legal system said it was done with Medgar Evers in the 1960s. She said it was not. She was right.
She also demonstrates the weight that civil rights widows carried without recognition. Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, and Myrlie Evers-Williams all spent decades carrying movements and fighting for justice while simultaneously raising families and building careers. Their contributions to the movement extend far beyond the men they lost.