Myrlie Evers
Myrlie Beasley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on March 17, 1933. She attended Alcorn A&M College, hoping to become a school teacher and follow in the footsteps of both the grandmother and aunt who had raised her. Her plans changed, however, when she met upperclassman Medgar Evers. The two were married a year later and Myrlie left school. Medgar had been passionately dedicated to and involved in the struggle for civil rights for some time and helped inspire a similar passion in his wife. Medgar Evers was assassinated by Byron de la Beckwith in 1963. Following that tragic event, Myrlie moved her family to Claremont, California, where she studied sociology at Pomona College and earned her degree in 1968. Evers stayed on in academia and became assistant director of planning and development for the Claremont College system. In 1975, Myrlie married her second husband, Walter Williams. She then moved to Los Angeles and worked as consumer affairs director for the Atlantic Richfield Company. In 1988, she was the first black woman to be appointed to the five-member Los Angeles Board of Public Works, which oversaw a budget of nearly $1 billion as well as five thousand employees. From 1995 to 1998, Myrlie Evers-Williams served as the first woman chairperson of the NAACP. She published her memoirs, entitled Watch me Fly: What I learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I was Meant to Be, in 1999.
Civil Rights Era
When Medgar became the Mississippi state field secretary for the NAACP, Myrlie worked as his secretary and together they organized boycotts, demonstrations, and voter registration drives, making them prime targets for reactionary segregationist violence. On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy made a televised speech to the nation in which he announced his intention to submit new civil rights legislation for passage by Congress. This elevated the tension in the South to a breaking point. At 12:30 that night, Medgar returned home and was approaching his front porch when he was shot through the back by a military rifle that would later be found 150 feet from the scene. Medgar died fifty minutes later, after being taken to a hospital that initially refused to admit a black patient. The rifle belonged to Byron De La Beckwith, whose fingerprints were found on the weapon's scope. Beckwith was a dedicated segregationist and member of the White Citizens' Council. Although he publicly denied responsibility for the murder, bringing forth three policemen to testify that he had been playing cards with them at the time the crime was committed and claiming that the rifle had been stolen from him some time before, he felt no shame in saying he was glad Evers was dead. Beckwith's trial led to two hung juries and he was allowed to go free. However, since he was not officially exonerated of the crime, double jeopardy did not apply and Myrlie lived for decades with the hope that the case would be reopened and Beckwith convicted. Finally, in 1989, her long-standing hopes came to fruition when she found several witnesses willing to testify that Byron de la Beckwith had in fact been in Jackson the night of Medgar's murder, contradicting the testimony of police officers whose card game had allegedly taken place sixty miles away in Greenwood. This, among other new evidence, prompted Mississippi prosecutors to reopen the case. In 1994, Beckwith was finally convicted of Medgar's murder. He died serving a life sentence in 2001.
Bibliography
Information for this biography was gathered from the following sources: