Evers-Williams, Myrlie

▪ 1996

      In a dramatic illustration of how every vote does indeed count, on Feb. 18, 1995, Myrlie Evers-Williams was elected chairperson of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) by the closest of margins, 30 to 29. Plagued with accusations of impropriety, the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the U.S., hoped that Evers-Williams would be able to give it a shot of new life. Reluctant to run because of her second husband's battle with cancer, she eventually acquiesced, admitting, "I just could not imagine us as a people, as a country, not having the NAACP as a strong and viable organization."

      Myrlie Louise Beasley was born on March 17, 1933, in Vicksburg, Miss. Her parents separated shortly afterward, and she was reared by her grandmother and an aunt. In 1950 Myrlie Beasley entered Alcorn A & M College in Lorman, Miss., to major in education. She met upperclassman Medgar Evers, and they married the following year. In 1952 Medgar Evers accepted a job as an insurance agent in a depressed area of the Mississippi Delta. So disgusted was the couple by the poor conditions in which some of the local African-Americans had to live that they became active in the NAACP in order to make a change. Resistance to the then-young civil rights movement was especially virulent in the South, however, and the Evers family, which by 1960 included three children, began to receive death threats. In the early hours of the morning of June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers was fatally shot on his front porch as he returned from an NAACP meeting. Segregationist Byron De La Beckwith was tried for the murder but was set free when a jury failed to reach a verdict. (Not until February 1994 was Beckwith convicted and sentenced to life in prison.) In 1964 Myrlie Evers moved her family to California.

      Vowing not to become a "professional widow," Evers continued the fight for equality. In 1967 her book, For Us, the Living, (written with William Peters), chronicled her husband's life; it was later made into a television movie. She earned a degree in sociology in 1968, and in 1970 she ran, unsuccessfully, for Congress. She served as commissioner of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works. In 1976 she married another civil rights activist, Walter Williams.

      A longtime board member of the NAACP, Evers-Williams watched support for the organization wane as the leadership of the organization was rocked by a series of financial scandals. Following a vote of no confidence for the incumbent leadership, elections were held and Evers-Williams emerged the victor. Walter Williams died four days later. (ANTHONY L. GREEN)

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▪ American civil rights activist

original name  Myrlie Louise Beasley 

born March 17, 1933, Vicksburg, Mississippi, U.S.

      African American activist and the wife of civil rights leader Medgar Evers (Evers, Medgar), whose racially motivated murder in 1963 made him a national icon. In 1995–98 Evers-Williams was the first woman to head the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

      In 1950 she enrolled at Alcorn A&M College, where she met Medgar Evers, whom she married in 1951. The couple became active in the NAACP in the Mississippi Delta region near their home in Jackson, Mississippi, outside of which Evers was murdered in June 1963. Segregationist Byron De La Beckwith was initially tried for the murder but was released as a result of hung juries; however, three decades later, in 1994, after being retried a third time, De La Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

      Left a widow with three children, Myrlie Evers relocated to California. She published the memoir For Us, the Living (1967), earned a degree in sociology at Pomona College (1968), and made an unsuccessful bid for election to the U.S. Congress (1970). She married Walter Williams in 1976. In 1988 she was named to the Los Angeles Board of Public Works by Mayor Tom Bradley (Bradley, Tom). Evers-Williams remained active on the NAACP board, rising to chairman in 1995. Her autobiography, Watch Me Fly, was published in 1999.

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