Major Works
- The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life And Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, And Speeches by Myrlie Evers-Williams and Manning Marable (2006)
- Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be by Myrlie Evers-Williams and Melinda Blau (1999)
- For Us, The Living (1967, 1999) with William Peters.
- No Mountain High Enough: Secrets of Successful African American Women by Dorothy Ehrhart-Morrison Ph.D and Myrlie Evers-Williams:Chairman NAACP (1997)
Biography of Myrlie B. Evers (Myrlie B. Evers-Williams)
By Remi Adebiyi (SHS)
Remi Adebiyi, SHS researcher
The Civil Rights activist and author Myrlie Beasley Evers was born March 17, 1933, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. She was raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi, by her grandmother (Annie McCain Beasley) and her aunt (Myrlie Beasley Polk), who were both were schoolteachers. In 1950, she enrolled at Alcorn A&M College, where she met Medgar Evers, an upperclassman and Army veteran and later the Civil Rights leader who was slain. Evers left school before earning her degree, and she and Medgar married on Christmas Eve, 1951 (Contemporary Black Biography Vol.8: 66). The next year, Medgar graduated, but Myrlie was still a sophomore in college . She left college, and the couple settled in a black town in the Mississippi delta called Mound Bayou. At the time Medgar worked as an insurance agent for Magnolia Mutual Insurance, one of the best jobs at the time for blacks offered by blacks. (Black Women in America: pp. 1264-1266, 1999). When Medgar became the Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Myrlie worked alongside him. She helped him as he worked to end racial segregation in schools and other public facilities and campaigned for voting rights for African Americans. On June 12, 1963, Medger Evers was shot to death in front of his home by a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith.
UPDATE (2014):
After the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, she moved to California with her children. She also made an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Congress in 1970. Myrlie married Walter Williams in 1975, but in 1995 Williams died. Evers made history in 1995 when she became the first woman to chair the NAACP. After leaving that position in 1998, Evers-Williams established the Medgar Evers Institute in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1999, Little, Brown re-published her memoir, Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be, which describes her journey from being the wife of an activist to becoming a community leader in her own right. She fought to bring the killer of her husband Medgar Evers, a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith to justice, and today she continues her first husband’s work and memory. She served as editor on The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches (2005). On January 21, 2013, she delivered the invocation at the second inauguration of Barack Obama.
For Us the Living: The Story of Medgar Evers, authored by Myrlie Evers, was made into a television film with the screenplay by Ossie Davis in 1983. Another film, Ghosts of Mississippi, is the story of the final trial of the assassin, Bryon De La Beckwith, who was charged in 1963 with the murder of the husband of Myrlie Evers-Edgars’s 60’s civil rights leader Medgar Evers. The movie covers District Attorney, Bobby DeLaughters’ alliance with Myrlie Evers as he becomes more involved with bringing Beckwith to trial for the third time 30 years after the first trial.
Related Websites and Bibliography
- Biography of Myrlie Evers-Williams
- NAACP History: Myrlie Evers-Williams
- Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute
- Black History biography of Evers-Williams is available. Contemporary Black Biography, Vol. 8. Thomson Gale. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Thomson Gale.