Summary of Medgar and Myrlie by Joy-Ann Reid: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America

By Justin Reese

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Medgar and Myrlie by Joy-Ann Reid: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America

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MSNBC's Joy-Ann Reid's biography of Medgar Evers and Myrlie Evers highlights their transformative leadership in the civil rights movement. Evers, a slain pioneer, was a key figure in the fight for freedom in the most hostile and dangerous environment in America. Myrlie, Evers's wife, was a key partner in their activism, working alongside him to fight against public accommodations, school segregation, lynching, violence, and despair within their state's "black belt." Despite threats, they continued their fight, organizing picket lines and boycotts. On June 12, 1963, Evers was assassinated by the Klan. Myrlie continued her civil rights legacy, writing a book about Medgar's fight and becoming a NAACP leader. Reid's groundbreaking account explores the on-the-ground work of winning basic rights for Black Americans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Feb 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224496761

Book preview

Mississippi Goddamn . . .

In 1946, Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran, returned to Mississippi after spending time in Europe. He was a technician fifth grade in the Quartermaster Corps of the U.S. Army and had served in England, Belgium, and France. However, upon returning to Mississippi, he found himself treated as a second-class citizen by the U.S. Army. Medgar was plagued by questions about why he put his life on the line for his country and how he would be treated back home.

From 1943 until his discharge in 1946, Medgar used his time in the military to serve and study. He developed a fascination with the African liberation movement in Kenya and its leader, Jomo Kenyatta. Medgar admired Kenyatta's intelligence and the idea that Negroes could follow someone like him. He even dreamed of arming his own black shirt Army and mounting an uprising against the racist white system in Mississippi.

Medgar also idolized his brother, James Charles Evers, who was three years older and their father's firstborn. They were close from childhood, with Charles acting as Medgar's protector. After America's entrance into World War II, Medgar dropped out of high school to enlist in the Army, defying his mother's admonishment to finish school after his service. He dreamed of becoming a lawyer and combatting discrimination against Black Mississippians in the courts.

Medgar, a Mississippi native, entered basic training at the segregated Camp Shelby and was deployed to England and France during World War II. He experienced the mass death and horror of the U.S. military assault at Omaha Beach in June 1944, which was the largest amphibious invasion ever attempted in military history. Medgar was assigned to the all-Black 325th Port Company as a designated supply clerk, helping to load and unload weapons and supplies for the front lines.

Despite the segregated Army, Medgar relished his experience in Europe, where he saw no Jim Crow system of formal racial segregation and no Ku Klux Klan. People in England, especially France, often treated Black Americans with a normalcy that elided race. His military service gave him confidence and perspective, highlighting the contradictions between fighting for liberty and freedom abroad and at home as a Negro man.

French women seemed particularly intrigued by Black American men, and going around with them was neither illegal nor frowned upon. This allowed Medgar to experience a mesmerizing change of status, such as a romance with a white woman in Cherbourg. In France, over 350,000 Black men had served during World War I, and Black soldiers could move around freely outside American barracks.

Medgar wanted to stay in France after the war, like Baldwin and Richard Wright did. He shared Wright's impatience with the limits America placed on Blackness and wanted to raise Black children in freedom there.

Medgar and Charles Evers, two Black Southern boys, were raised in a society where they were taught that there were three kinds of white people: those who hated them but were too cowardly to do anything about it, the dangerous ones who would kill you just as soon as look at you, and the nice-acting ones who despite their kindness wouldn't do a damned thing about it. This lesson started young, with Medgar's childhood friendships ending abruptly when they reached school age, especially puberty. The lines were most sharply drawn in the South, and the white children seemed to instinctively learn to fix their mouths into a sneer, replace their Black friends' names with nigger and boy, and demand that these friends call them sir and miss, especially in front of white adults.

Death arrived quickly for Black boys in Mississippi, as their specter began to hover the moment they were old enough to possibly catch the attention of the wrong white man's daughter or if she flirted with them. More than a few white men bragged about their nigger women on the colored side of town, producing a society of constant socioeconomic contradictions and inexplicably complicated social rules. Slaveholders had raped enslaved Black women so routinely that they invented new racial categories to characterize the resulting offspring: mulatto, quadroon, and octaroon—based on the percentage of white the person was. Many of these children were put up for sale regardless of being their owner's child and were often the subject of confusion and wonder at how a Negro could look so white.

In Mississippi and across the American South, Black life was cheap, with Black people being killed for anything or for nothing. The law, deeply enmeshed in white supremacy, wouldn't touch them, and the peckerwoods were the most dangerous whites. Charles Evers later wrote that his system might as well have been slavery, with white folk segregating the niggers to hold them in line.

In the late 19th century, white plantation owners in rural Southern towns closed Negro schools during planting season to ensure that Black children could pick cotton in their fields. This led to a separation of life for Blacks, with everything in their lives being separate from white people. Black people were portrayed as moronic, simple, and docile, and black men as dangerous to white