Medgar and Myrlie by Joy-Ann Reid

Author:Joy-Ann Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

How to Be a Civil Rights Widow

This is the decisive battleground for America. Nowhere in the world is the idea of white supremacy more firmly entrenched, or more cancerous, than in Mississippi.

—MICHAEL SCHWERNER, TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST MURDERED BY MEMBERS OF THE KKK, ALONG WITH ANDREW GOODMAN AND JAMES CHANEY, BOTH TWENTY-ONE, IN MISSISSIPPI IN 1964

When you are the wife of a civil rights martyr, everyone wants to take your picture. You make the covers of Ebony and Jet—and even Life. The photographers prefer that you appear demure and serious, befitting your tragedy, but you must neither smile nor cry, nor should your children, because it would ruin the photograph. You and the children must always be neatly and tastefully dressed, and you must never yell or scream, because that would be undignified. Your face must always remain perfectly composed, with enough powder and lipstick to make you pretty but not so much that you appear gaudy.

The newspapers will print your home address, and the curious will find your street, stand in front of your house, and point. The home of the martyr is a public attraction, and people will knock on your door and pose your children on the lawn or even on the carport where their father’s blood still casts a shadow that all the scrubbing bubbles and bleach you could muster could not remove. When you speak, you must talk of grace and forgiveness, and say something profound about faith in God and his unchangeable will.

Myrlie Evers had to learn these rules because one wrong move, one errant word or flash of public anger, could ruin the legacy of the man she loved. Medgar Evers, who would have turned thirty-eight years old in less than a month on July 2—twenty years after he enlisted in the United States Army to fight the Nazis for his country in World War II, only to find himself fighting Nazism in America when he came home—had been gunned down and stolen from her and their three young children just feet from his own front door, leaving Myrlie alone to tell his story.

She had to be a quick study, without a tutor. Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King still had their husbands, Malcolm and Martin, and were not yet experiencing the torture Myrlie was enduring. Freedom Summer was still a year away and Michael Schwerner’s wife, Rita, could still hold him in her arms and pursue their dream of helping to change Mississippi and America together. He had not yet climbed into that station wagon with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman and sped away from the Neshoba County jail with a convoy of Klansmen in pursuit. Jackie and Ethel Kennedy still watched their young husbands leave their bedsides every morning to wield the awesome power of the federal government. It was Myrlie Louise Evers, just three months over thirty years old, who was the first of the national civil rights widows.

Eight years earlier, Mamie Till-Mobley had preceded her in public mourning, not as a widow but as a grieving mother.

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