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David Furst: It's All Of It on WNYC. I'm  David Furst in for Alison Stewart. Last June was the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Medgar Evers, field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP, who at the time was the highest profile civil rights leader to be killed. Journalist and MSNBC host Joy Reid has written a new book about Medgar Evers, but within a framework of love, in particular, his relationship with his wife Myrlie.

The book traces the story of Medgar and Myrlie growing up in their respective Mississippi towns. We learn about Medgar's service in World War II and how his experience in Europe as a Black man reinforced his commitment to fighting for civil rights in America. We also revisit the moment Medgar and Myrlie first met while in college, there was a spark right away, and we see how they became fierce advocates for equality in Mississippi, never leaving the state while facing daily threats. Medgar Evers was assassinated in his own driveway at the hands of a white supremacist.

Now, Myrlie Evers-Williams has been carrying on her late husband's legacy. She once served as a board chair of the NAACP, and continued to fight to bring her husband's murderer to justice. He was finally found guilty in 1994. Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America, is out now. With us is the book's author, Joy Reid. Welcome.

Joy Reid: David, thanks for having me on.

David Furst: You make it clear from the beginning that your book about Medgar and Myrlie Evers, with all they did in the fight for civil rights, is a love story first. Why use the framework of a love story to write about these two icons?

Joy Reid: I did that because I think that the way that we look at civil rights heroes, I think, it's sometimes a little bit too antiseptic. We look at them as these marble statues who did all of these great things as if they weren't men. What these men were, whether it was Dr. King, or Malcolm X, or any of the civil rights leaders that we know the names of and those who we don't but maybe should like Medgar, they were human beings. They fell in love. They had kids. They had school lunches that needed packing, and kids that needed to be packed off to school, and normal lives in addition to fighting these heroic battles for civil rights.

David Furst: These are real people. Exactly, fell in love. Speaking of love, Medgar and Myrlie met in college, what is now known as Alcorn State University. Medgar was a 25-year-old junior, a World War II veteran, and a football player. Myrlie was 17 and a freshman. You write in the book talking about that moment. Medgar said to Myrlie, "You shouldn't lean on that electric pole, you might get shocked." What do you think that moment says about Medgar and his confidence?

Joy Reid: The message "I care". He was immediately showing her his protective instincts over this beautiful young woman. That might have not been game like in the modern era, but back then that was pretty much game, because she took a look at this handsome football player, and he caught her eye. Even though he literally embodied all of the things her grandmother and aunt had told her to stay away from, meaning a football player, an upperclassman, and a veteran.

David Furst: What was the early courting between Medgar and Myrlie like?

Joy Reid: This is one of the things I love most about the story. It was an intellectual courtship initially, because it was a platonic relationship. She definitely had feelings for him and he for her, but it was an unrequited love for quite some time because of the age difference, which he was very much aware of. For her, it was this fascination with this man who was unlike any boy or man she had ever known. He was interested in world affairs, he was obsessed with the anti-colonial movements on the African continent, for instance. You have to realize, this was an era when former colonies in Africa were liberating themselves from Europe, from their European colonizers.

In particular, he was interested in the Kenyan freedom movement, the Kenyan liberation movement in Jomo Kenyatta. That was the kinds of things he liked to talk about. He would tell her about the things he saw in the world. He had been in Europe, which is something most white men had not traveled to Europe. He had been in Antwerp, Belgium, and he had been to France. He'd lived this other life that was so unusual for a Black man of that era, so he had interesting things to say. She wanted to be his intellectual equal, and so she would spend time studying up on world affairs so she could have these conversations with him. Then on the other side, she was an incredible musician, and she would practice the piano. Because he liked her, he would pretend that he enjoyed the classical music she was playing, even though he really didn't. [chuckles]

David Furst: Wow, what a sacrifice. Joy, you were talking about being warned away from him by her family, but you're also describing this very intellectual relationship. When they eventually started dating, Myrlie was at first terrified of telling mama, who was her grandmother. Tell us about that. Why was she so afraid?

Joy Reid: Yes, because she had been told very specifically those three kinds of men, upperclassmen, football players, and veterans, and she knew him being all three, and the age. The age difference really made a difference. You have to realize that for a lot of these Black men that went off to World War II, they were starting college at an older age, just by definition, because of that. He was aware of it, she was aware of it, and so he starts this lobbying campaign. He traveled up to Vicksburg, not to see Myrlie on the school breaks, but to see them, to see mama and her aunt whose name is also Myrlie. He really lobbied them.

He wanted them to know that he respected Myrlie, that he would provide for her, that he was a good man, a good guy, and that he had positive values, good values that he had been raised with. Now, the challenge for them is that he was also very open that he was a civil rights man. That scared mama and aunt Myrlie. They were very afraid as any Black person would be in 1950s Mississippi, of any Black man who spoke up about rights and civil rights and voting rights. He had tried to register to vote. He'd done all the things you were not supposed to do as a Black man. That definitely made them nervous, but over time, he won them over.

David Furst: The campaign worked.

Joy Reid: Yes.

David Furst: I want to get more into Myrlie's background. She was born and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi. You write that, "Along with mama, she was raised by a village of women." Can you explain that, and talk about the values that they instilled in Myrlie?

Joy Reid: Absolutely. Myrlie's father was also a World War II veteran, but he came back really broken from the war, and just not able to really care for her the way that a father should. She was really left in the hands of these women. Her mom was a teenage mother, and her grandmother lived across the street. One day marches across the street and takes this baby from this 16-year-old who Myrlie would later nickname Madea. Madea almost grew up like a sister of Myrlie's, but not as a mom.

Then her grandmother, who also raised her daughter, Myrlie, who was quite a bit older than baby Myrlie, they used to call baby Myrlie's sister because she was the baby sister, and aunt Myrlie was in her 20s. She had had this full life. Her son lived in and out of the house, but it was really the women who were around. It was mama, it was aunt Myrlie, and it was when she could be there, Madea. Those were Myrlie's village. They taught her her values. They had her playing the piano and teaching her to play, and hyping her up and saying one day she'd make it to Carnegie Hall, which seemed very unusual for a little Black girl in Mississippi, but they would tell her this is the dream.

They wanted to rear her to be an educator like them, to value education. Even though they were poor by the standards of white Mississippi, Myrlie thought they were rich, because they were so rich in tradition and so rich in love. She didn't even know they were poor until she visited Madea at work at a white family's house and realized, "Oh, okay, they have indoor plumbing. They're the ones who are rich."

David Furst: Medgar was also born and raised in Mississippi but with a slightly different childhood. He grew up in Decatur, a small, poor rural town, and life was difficult. He witnessed his first lynching as a young child. Can you talk about the realities that Medgar had to face growing up in Decatur?

Joy Reid: The thing that brings the two of them together is they're both, obviously, the scions of enslaved people in Mississippi, and that in and of itself gives you a legacy of lack and a legacy of terror. They both grew up knowing and understanding white terrorism, and that was just a part of life. For Medgar, it was an unusual seeding in that community, because his father who they called Crazy Jim, because he was this unusual Black man who didn't bow down to white people, and so of course, white folks thought he must be crazy. The fact that he stood up to them, yes, he must be mad, so they called him Crazy Jim. Their mom was a homemaker, but she also did white people's washing, and she was very, very religious.

Medgar and his brother Charles grew up in a blended family. Their parents had had other children, had been married to other people before, but when they came together, there are two sons, that were common to them, Charles and Medgar were super close. Medgar and Charles slept in the same bed. Charles would warm up the bed for Medgar because he didn't like being cold and to make sure his feet weren't cold. They just grew up as this unusual family that stood out because the father was so bold, and because they did things like read the Chicago Defender to read about positive things about Black people, not just that Blacks were slaves and useless and worthless other than their physical labor.

David Furst: You're talking about Medgar's father, James Evers, right?

Joy Reid: Yes. Absolutely.

David Furst: Tough guy. Wouldn't take any abuse from white people. What did James teach Medgar and Charles about maintaining your dignity while also trying to stay alive in the South?

Joy Reid: One of them stories that both Medgar and Charles separately tell, now, Charles was a bit of an exaggerator. He had, Medgar being like seven, but Medgar said, "No, I was about 11," when they first saw this lynching of this man named Willie Tangle, who was a friend of their father's. He was dragged through the streets and lynched, shot full of holes, and hung up in the Decatur fairgrounds when Medgar was 11 and Charles was 12. They had to walk to school every day seeing his clothes propped up, left there by the clan to make sure that that was a message to every white person.

To contrast with that, their father in their presence had stood up to a white shopkeeper who tried to cheat him. Now, James Evers, crazy Jim, couldn't necessarily read, but he could add, and he knew he'd been cheated. When this white shop owner tried to tell him that he was wrong, he broke a Coke bottle and threatened him, and said, "If you come across that counter, you're going to catch the end of this." They saw that and witnessed the father stand up to a white man. That was one lesson they learned.

They also saw that he had to sit up all night with his shotgun out in case that white man and a posse came for him. Also, when it came to the lynching, Medgar asked his father, "Could white people do that to you?" His father, as tough as he was, crazy Jim as he was, had to say, "Yes, at any time, any white person that wanted to kill me could do that too." They grew up with this sense of boldness, but also a complete lack of a sense of safety.

David Furst: We're speaking with Joy Reed, host of MSNBC's, The ReidOut, also the author of the new book, Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America. In the 1940s, Medgar and Charles both drop out of high school and enlist in the army to serve in World War II. Medgar was on the beaches during D-Day. The Army was segregated at the time, but as Black men, they find more freedom in Europe than in America. First of all, why did he enlist?

Joy Reid: I think from what I can understand and from what Ms. Myrlie said and what others said and in the research, it was because of Charles. Medgar absolutely admired his older brother Charles. He was his best friend, and he was his mentor, and he was his idol. When Charles enlisted, Medgar decided to do the same, and he really followed him across the waters. Also, I think it was to get out of Mississippi and see the world. I think for a lot of Black men in that era, the war was not something frightening. It was an opportunity. It was an opportunity to get out of the South in particular and to get out of these small towns where they had no rights.

He emerges in Europe as this young man who sees a place where there is no segregation, there's no de jure segregation. He dates a white woman, something he could have been lynched for in Mississippi. He's able to walk freely through Europe when he's not on base. He's just a man, a regular ordinary man. A taste of that really fuels both his and Charles's activism when they get home. The first thing they do when they get home is they try to register to vote. Now, they are met with hundreds of gun-wielding white men who say, "You're not doing that." They did manage to register. They didn't manage to vote because even more white men showed up when they tried to vote. It changed them. I think it changed a lot of Black men who served during that era.

David Furst: That experience in Europe really fueled his thinking when he returned.

Joy Reid: Absolutely. I think it wasn't just that. I think one of the undertold stories of the Civil Rights Revolution is that it was made in part because Black men had served in World War I and especially World War II. Not only did that give them a sense of their own dignity, a sense of their own valor, but it also made very clear the contradictions between a country officially fighting fascism, but where fascism was the law at home, the literal law in Mississippi. They came home, a lot of these men, saying, "We're not going to fight fascism abroad and then accept fascism at home."

The other thing I think it did is it took men like Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, who also fought in the war, and it gave them a different perspective about Black men, about their capacity for heroism and valor. The bravery of these men actually touched people like Truman, who grew up super racist. When he saw that these men could serve and did serve and were willing to serve their country, it gave him a perspective that allowed him to change his views policy-wise. I think it did the same for Kennedy. Kennedy respected Medgar Evers. He respected him so much that when he was assassinated, he buried him with honors at Arlington National Cemetery because he was a fellow veteran and in his mind, a hero.

David Furst: Let's enter the 1950s now. Medgar and Myrlie are now a married couple. Medgar accepts a job deep in the Mississippi Delta in Mound Bayou, the oldest Black-founded town in the nation. First of all, tell us about this town. What was it like in the 1950s?

Joy Reid: Mound Bayou is this historic community, and there were so many of these Black towns that grew up. We've now heard a lot about Black Wall Street and some of the other towns that were burned to the ground many years later. Mound Bayou is still there. It was founded by some enslaved men who served on the plantation or lived on the plantation, I should say, were captive on the plantation of the brother of Jefferson Davis, ironically enough. The president of the Confederacy. His brother saw himself as a progressive slaveholder.

What he would do is he would allow Black men to run businesses on the plantation. One of them was one of his young enslaved captives who was really great at business and math. He ran a general store on the plantation. When the union comes marching in, the white family flees and it leaves the Black enslaved people in charge of the plantation. They actually continue to run the plantation and turned it into a little town. When the war is long over Jefferson, Davis' brother comes back and reclaims his property, but they actually wound up buying it from him, weirdly enough. That didn't last. Over time, they lost the plantation to the Davis family who took it back.

They went in search of a new town to remake this experience, and they found this swamp land in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. They built up a town that was the jewel of the Black world for many people. It had a hospital where Black people could be born and not be in the basement and be treated with dignity. It had the first HMO in the country that allowed people to afford healthcare. It had its own movie theater, beautiful homes. It was a place that Black people wanted to live, deep in the delta. It was a place of dignity, no segregation. You could come in the front door, you could eat in a restaurant, and you could be a human being.

David Furst: Joy, we're in the 1950s now, and I want to get to a historic moment in the lives of Medgar and Myrlie Evers and America. Emmett Till's murder in 1955 in the Mississippi Delta. How did Till's death affect the Evers family, their thinking, and how they thought about their own safety?

Joy Reid: At the time that this young man whose family is from Mississippi, comes down to visit his cousins and stay with his uncle for the summer, he's then lynched. Mississippi tries to cover up this murder, and this becomes Medgar Evers' first official investigation as the Mississippi Field Secretary for the NAACP. He goes back in his mind to Willie Tingle, who when he died, there were no services, there were no protests, there was nothing in the papers. It was as if this man just disappeared and vanished into the earth. He was determined that when Black people were lynched, that was not going to happen. This was a case that he was determined to make sure went to trial.

He went into the Delta, which was part of his job, and he dressed as a field hand himself along with two other NAACP investigators. They just asked people to tell what they knew. He managed to get not one, not two, but three witnesses to testify at that trial, including Emmett Till's uncle. Who he then had to all shepherd out of town on a train, that $11 trip to Chicago to save their lives, because you could be lynched for testifying against a white man in court. It's why it was essentially legal to kill Black people because you would never be convicted.

He manages to get this to go to trial. There's this dramatic moment at the trial where Emmett Till's uncle points to the white men who abducted his nephew and killed him and said, "Dar He." The two words that would've cost him his life had he stayed in Mississippi. It was a historic moment, and it meant that even though those men weren't convicted, that case went to trial. Of course, Mamie Till Mobley made it a national and international scandal by showing the body of her child when she got back to Chicago, having an open casket funeral, which she actually did as something that she saw done in Mississippi by the wife of a man named Reverend George Lee. He did that first in Mississippi, and his wife Rosebud, pioneered this protest and Mamie Till followed it with her child, Emmett Till.

David Furst: Now, in the mid-1950s, the Evers moves their family to Jackson, the capital of Mississippi. They settled on a small house on Guynes Street. I hope I'm saying that correctly?

Joy Reid: Yes.

David Furst: Thank you. North of downtown. What kind of reputation does Medgar begin to earn in Jackson?

Joy Reid: It's interesting because the move from Mound Bayou, while it was this colossal achievement for Black people, Myrlie hated it. Ms. Myrlie hated it because it was out in the Delta. It was lots of bugs [crosstalk].

David Furst: Okay, time to move.

Joy Reid: Time to move. When Medgar gets this opportunity to move and have the Jackson office, be the home office of his NAACP field secretary duties, she is thrilled that they're going to be in the city. Jackson is downtown. It's near the shops even though they're segregated shops. It's near the movie theaters, even though they're segregated, so she was thrilled to move. Not so thrilled with his new job, though, because it meant that his profile was going to be much, much higher, because there was only one field secretary, him. He was the first to ever have the job and the only one holding it.

There was a lot of fear, not just among Myrlie, but among her new friends and neighbors on the block. They were like, "The guy moving on to our block," which is currently populated mostly by teachers and men who were middle-class Blacks to the extent that those existed in Mississippi. Now, we were going to have the highest-profile civil rights leader in the state living on the street. There were a lot of people who were afraid to have them on the block. Then it was punctuated by the design of the house. There were two Black men, Black real estate developers who created the block, and it was revolutionary in its own right.

It was a sub-development for Black, mainly World War II veterans who bought with the GI Bill and their wives. Medgar's house was designed with no front door. He had it designed to his specifications with only a side door and a carport where you'd have to come up that carport so that you could see who was coming in the house. It didn't have a sloped roof like all the other houses because he didn't-- I'm sorry. It had a sloped roof, unlike the other flat-roof houses so that no one could get on the roof and come into the house. It was designed specifically for security. People were nervous and a lot of people would not greet them when they arrived on the block.

David Furst: I have so many questions I want to get to but I just want to-- Medgar would work long hours, late nights, sometimes seven days a week. This is a lot of stress in addition to the hours. This is very stressful work. How did Medgar's job and the pressure affect the health of their relationship?

Joy Reid: It was stressful. Myrlie miscarried for the first time when they were still in Mound Bayou before they even left just because of the stress of worrying about him and not being able to know at the end of any given day, whether he was coming home, and just the loneliness and the depression. In my interviews with her, she was very open about that, about dealing with depression and loneliness as a spouse. When they moved to Jackson, things only got worse because now they had not one, not two, but eventually three children, and she was essentially a single mother.

She was the person driving not only her kids but other kids to school every day, was cooking for all the NAACP and other luminaries coming to town. If Dick Gregory or Lena Horne was in town, she had to put them up and cook for them and wash for them. Because remember, she's a 1950s housewife. All of these domestic duties are hers and hers alone. She was stressed. They would argue about money because once she had her third child, she stopped being his secretary so there was no second salary. They had two car notes, a house note. It was a lot of stress.

Their marriage at one point really broke down. It got to the point where she confronted him and said, "You have to choose between this work and me and your family, and you need to tell me right now, who do you love more? Me and your kids or this work?" His answer to her didn't make her happy but it was honest. He said, "I'm doing this because I love you. The reason I'm doing what I'm doing and risking my life is for you and it's to make Mississippi better for you and the kids." In other words, I ain't stopping.

David Furst: I ain't stopping. Joy, you write in the book that when we think of civil rights history and its famous figures and those that we lost to racially motivated violence, the name Medgar Evers tends to get lost. Why do you think that is?

Joy Reid: I think part of it is the year in which he died, 1963. 1963 was such a momentous year for civil rights, and so many things happened shortly after he was assassinated. Recall that initially after the assassination, there were protests from Philadelphia, to New Jersey, to Mississippi, to the Carolinas, everywhere. People understood this as a national event. Shortly after that, you had the Freedom Rides coming through Mississippi. You had, not long after that, The March on Washington. You had, not long after that, the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls.

Then of course, at the close of the year, you had the assassination of the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. I think events overtook Medgar, even though, ironically enough, he was involved in each of those events. The first person to hold a copy of the civil rights bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of '64 was Myrlie Evers, who stood there with her children in the White House after being invited by President Kennedy, and he promised her he would do that bill. Medgar was in the process of preparing to testify in favor of having such a bill when he was assassinated.

The March on Washington was punctuated, of course, by Dr. King's famous speech, but he gave a version of that speech before the March on Washington in Detroit, in front of 20,000 people, in which he said, "I have a dream that one day people like Medgar Evers and Emmett Till can live to adulthood in freedom." That was something that was cut out of the final version of the speech to make the speech a bit milder because of the fears of the Kennedy administration. The clan that killed those four little girls was an offshoot of the same clan that killed Medgar Evers. You could go on and on. These events are all related [crosstalk].

David Furst: There's so much more we need to read about, and you can read all about it in the new book, Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America. Joy Reid, the host of MSNBC's, The ReidOut. Thank you so much for joining us on All Of It.

Joy Reid: Thank you.

David Furst: This is All Of It on WNYC. Thanks for listening.

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