"There are two Americas": Joy-Ann Reid on the legacy of civil rights icons Medgar and Myrlie Evers

Black America has always had a complicated “love story” with America, MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid told me in our recent "Salon Talks" conversation. “It is difficult," Reid said, "because you understand the country has never loved us, right?” Her new book "Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America" focuses on that relationship, by way of the love story between civil rights activist Medgar Evers and his wife Myrlie Evers-Williams, tragically cut short in June 1963 by a white supremacist's bullet. Medgar Evers was shot dead in his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, as he returned home from registering voters.

Reid tells us not just the relatively familiar Medgar Evers story, but also explores how his activist career impacted Myrlie — who is still with us today, at age 90 — and their relationship. Reid interviewed Myrlie Evers-Williams and others who knew them for this book, and even discusses such painful subjects as family quarrels over the persistent and justified concern that Medgar was risking his life, and the couple teaching their children what to do if they heard gunshots outside, fired by the hardcore bigots who would stop at nothing to preserve white supremacy.

One big takeaway Reid hopes readers will bring from "Medgar and Myrlie" is that the struggle for equality for all Black Americans and others is far from over — as are the threats of violence from those who support white supremacy. Reid told me she has been subject to countless threats and angry emails filled with “the N-word” from “people who actually weirdly signed their name in the email.” She defiantly added, “You accept that as part of the platform that you are blessed with, and you're so thankful you can speak for not just your people but this country, and to make this country a better place.”

We also discussed the 2024 election and the startling fact that Donald Trump could attempt a coup, incite the Jan. 6 attack, and at this moment remains free and is a leading candidate for president. Reid contrasted this with how difficult it was to bring Medgar Evers' killer to justice, noting that it took “30-some-odd years it took to convict Byron De La Beckwith, when everyone knew that he assassinated Medgar Evers in front of his own house and in front of his kids, and bragged about it for 30 years.” In contrast, Black Americans accuse of crimes are swiftly prosecuted — even when they're innocent. As Reid put it, “There are two Americas.”

Despite that brutal double standard, Reid is eager to protect our fragile democracy from Donald Trump. “The threat of autocracy is real," she said. "This is a young country; there's really no guarantee.” Reid said she believes her role in the media is to call that out as loudly as possible, while reminding all of us of the painful and complicated “love story” between our nation and her own community.

You can watch my full "Salon Talks" discussion with Reid here or read a transcript from our conversation below, lightly edited for length and clarity. 

First and foremost, you describe this book as a love story. What drew you to this and why did you want to make the love story the focus?

The thing that made me want to write the book is Myrlie Evers-Williams. I had interviewed her before on “AM Joy,” but remotely. Finally in 2018, I got a chance to interview her in person. We flew out to California, and that was my first time actually meeting her. We had this conversation after the segment that struck me and it stayed with me for more than a year, before I really decided what to write. 

She started talking about Medgar, and she said, in her beautiful deep resonant voice, "Medgar Evers was the love of my life." But she was talking about him in such a present way that I was like, "Ms. Myrlie, he's been dead for more than 60 years. You're still talking about him like you're a giggly schoolgirl. This is incredible." She still is deeply in love with this man, and I've never really seen somebody with that intensity. Yeah, I love my husband. We love our spouses, we love our people, but she is so intense with it. I said to her, "You should write about this. I know you've written wonderful biographies, and you should write about this." She said, "I've written so many books." 

A year or more went by and I was trying to decide what to write. I was at lunch with my book agent and I just thought to myself, "I don't want to write another Trump book right now. I did that." Wonderful, bestseller. Happy about it. But I wanted to write about something that I would actually enjoy as a human being. This love story just struck me as something people needed to know, that you couldn't be a great civil rights leader in that era without something to hold you down and ground you, and love is a great grounding.

There was something else, though. In the early part of the book, you said the book is a love story, not just about two Black people in Mississippi, but the story of a higher love: what it took for Black Americans to love America and fight for it. There's such a complicated relationship between Black America, loving this country, and being so dehumanized through time. How do you navigate that? How do people navigate that in your community?

It is difficult because you understand the country has never loved us. I mean, it was legal to kill Black people up until probably the 1970s. You did not see white people, particularly in the South, convicted for killing Black people. It was like "The Purge." White people knew that they had the ability to let off steam by lynching a man, woman or child who was Black simply for sassing a white woman, reckless eyeballing, basically looking at a white person in a way they didn't like. Even a child could treat an adult man as if they were a child and call them by their first name. You wouldn't be called “Mr.” or “Mrs.” You'd be called “boy,” “girl,” whatever. 

The indignity of being Black in this country has made it very difficult to love America, and yet you had more than 100,000 Black men sign up to fight in World War II, and Medgar Evers was one of them. He goes off at 18 years old, inspired by his brother having done the same thing. He and his brother were very close. He would do whatever Charles would do. He signs up at 18 and he risks his life the way every white man did on Omaha Beach. He's on Omaha Beach with them. He's in the Red Ball Express, a segregated unit. They're the Transportation Corps, but they're still risking their lives with the white men. They're all ostensibly fighting fascism. 

After taking that risk, he comes home, goes back to Decatur, Mississippi, and he's told to sit at the back of the bus. In his uniform. And he says, "You know what? No. I'm not going to do that. I've shown my love for this country just like every white man that wore this uniform, and I'm going to be treated just like every white man that wore this uniform." He, as he said, took the “beating of his life.” They dragged him off the bus and beat him, but he said he was a different man after that.

He is the genesis for the civil rights movement in certain ways. I think Emmett Till's killing, and then you have Medgar Evers. From your point of view, how important was he in this story, that trajectory that got us finally to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act?

I think he's pivotal. It was Emmett Till's story that inspired the Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King's first big act of civil rights activism, but Emmett Till's story would not have been a national story had it not gone to trial, and it would not have gone to trial were it not for Medgar Evers. Because it was Medgar who, as field secretary for the NAACP, went out into the Mississippi Delta and compelled these terrified sharecroppers, including Emmett Till's uncle, to testify against these white men, which was a lynchable offense in Mississippi. You could be lynched for speaking up against a white man in court. He got them to testify, which is how the case even became a case. He brought out three witnesses and then had to quickly put them on a train to Chicago after they testified, get them out of there, because they would've been killed. But he inspired the bravery of people to do the unthinkable, speak out against a white man in court. 

Now, those men were acquitted, wound up selling their story, et cetera, but that case and it being in Jet Magazine inspired millions of young Black people in the South to say, "No more." One of those people was John Lewis, who was the same age as Emmett Till and was one of the young people who said, "No more." Medgar Evers was the person who was training those young people how to do civil rights work. He was the person who was putting them in these NAACP youth committees where they were teaching them how to deal with police, how to march properly, how to fold your arms when you're being beaten with batons. He was the one training them. 

One of the people who took that training is James Chaney, who, in his first act of civil rights activism, pinned an NAACP sticker on his lapel in high school and got expelled for it. Five years later, as a 20-year-old, he's with [white activists] Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner when they are lynched in Mississippi, which causes the North to have to deal with civil rights. He is going to testify for the Civil Rights Act. He's been sending telegrams to John F. Kennedy, as the field secretary. Kennedy finally says, "I'm going to do it." When Medgar Evers is assassinated, hours after Kennedy gives his landmark TV speech saying, "I'm going to do this bill," the first person he hands a copy of that bill to is Myrlie Evers, who comes to the White House, to see a fellow World War II veteran, like her husband. He hands her a copy of that bill.

What I found really interesting is that Medgar was aware of how to use the media to get the story out. That's something every minority community understands. You can have all the achievements you want internally, but Medgar understood that you had to tell the story. It seems so ahead of the times to have that awareness, and he did.

Yeah, he did. He actually published a newspaper. The Mississippi Free Press was a paper that he started with an interracial group of men and women, including John Salter. He's actually Indigenous but presented as white, so he was able to operate as a white man in Mississippi. They started this newspaper because Medgar was so outraged that when he was a kid, when he was 11, he and his brother saw their first lynching, of a man named Willie Tingle, who his father knew. He had sassed a white woman, was lynched and shot full of holes, and his bloody clothes were left in the Decatur fairgrounds for a year. The Klan dared anyone to remove them because they wanted everybody Black to understand: This is what could happen to you if you speak up in any way.

What outraged Medgar, even more than just the brutality, was the fact that no one said anything. There was no church service, there were no marches, there were no protests. He thought the silence was a sign of complete, not complicity, but of terrified acquiescence to a kind of enslavement, and he was not having it. His understanding and belief, including in the Emmett Till case, was that if you're going to lynch our people and you're not going to convict them in court, you're going to be forced to reckon with it and deal with it and read about it.

You make it clear how important Myrlie was, and not just their love story, but the way she even challenged him, at one point asking, "Who do you love more? The movement [or me]?" Why was it important to share that? 

Because I think people need to understand is that these men weren't cast off a marble statue. They're marble statues now, they've got statues to them, but they were actually real men, regular guys in their 20s and 30s who had 20-something young wives. In addition to being civil rights leaders, they were husbands, fathers. Medgar was the fun dad on the block who was throwing footballs with all the kids. He was living an actual life. You cannot expect that a young woman who was a 1950s housewife, who literally married a man she thought was going to be an insurance salesman, would just accept that with this insurance you're going to sell civil rights and we're going to have our house firebombed and we're going to have death threats. That every time she picked up the phone, they were saying, "I'm going to come and shoot you, shoot your family, shoot your kids." 

That's not the life she signed up for. I think it's important for us to be real about it, and I really respect it. We did over six interviews, one in person, most on the phone. She was real with it. She told you, "I was not in favor of this. I did not want him applying to University of Mississippi Law School. I did not want him risking his life. I wanted my husband home. I was in love with him and I wanted him home." That's honest. We hear a little bit more now about Michelle Obama's reluctance about Barack Obama running for president, or Alma Powell's insistence that Colin Powell not do it. The reluctance is part of the story, and I wanted to humanize the movement by showing its love, its tension, its arguments, its pain, its depression. That's what people actually went through in this movement.

You have a whole chapter on how to be a civil rights widow.

Yeah, it's my favorite chapter in the book.

It’s very interesting. Myrlie went on to do a lot of great work and even ran for office, but also became friends with Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow. Why is it your favorite chapter? 

It's my favorite chapter because it's the chapter where I could really explain to you the difficulty and challenge of being a woman in that situation, and in Myrlie Evers-Williams' case, of being the first nationally known civil rights widow, the first to have to write this template. Think about it: You're a woman, you're a Black woman, and it's the 1960s, so what do you have to be? You can't be loud, you can't be angry. You have to be pretty. You have to dress appropriately. Your children have to be perfect. They have to look perfect. They can't cry. They can't scream. 

Anything you do, as Black people, we're so over-judged. You know, as a Muslim, you understand. Everything that you do is over-judged and people will overcorrect to find something negative about you. They would have taken any opportunity to denigrate Medgar and say it was his own fault that he was dead. And in fact a lot of the white newspapers did. They said, "This is his fault. He shouldn't have been stirring up the Blacks. Let the Negroes be quiet. If he had not stirred them up, he wouldn't be dead. It's his own fault." She knew that's what they wanted to do, so she was trying to navigate with no template and no one to show her what to do, because no one else had dealt with this, except maybe Mamie Till. There had been plenty of other civil rights widows in the state of Mississippi, but none of them had a TV camera in their face because they were only known locally. She was the first one who walked out to Dan Rather in her face and cameras. 

She wrote a template that she could share with Betty Shabazz when it happened to Betty, she could share with Coretta when it happened to Coretta, and they became what I call the original group chat. They had to have each other's backs because they were on a world stage grieving, and they were single moms in the '60s, struggling, depressed, angry, but also having to be perfect.

You had to do so much research for this book. I know you knew the history before, but what was it like to put it all together and see the way that Black people through time have been treated? There's a quote from James Baldwin, who was a friend of Medgar's, from 1961 where he says, "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in the state of rage almost all of the time." Has it changed that much? If you're aware and you see injustice and you wonder how does it continue? Either directed against the Black community, or the double standard where white people in power like Donald Trump are treated vastly different than everyone else.

To be a Black person in 2024 in America is to be in a state of complete perplexed confusion about what is wrong with a country that hates your history, that to this day can't admit even the basics of what was done to your ancestors, that can't accept any responsibility for the lack that has carried through the entirety of your existence in this country, and that thinks 60 years of relative freedom is enough. "Now, Blacks, please get out of Harvard. Now, Blacks, you can't get any more loans. You can't even give each other loans of $20,000 unless you give them to white men who get 99% of funding for their businesses. We want 100."

And to find out that literally Barack Obama's two terms as president are your reparations, and Juneteenth, which you already celebrated anyway, is your reparations. Yet you built this country. You literally, physically, built this country, and yet the attitude toward you from a lot of your peers and your fellow citizens is: Just shut up and be grateful. It's infuriating, and that is why James Baldwin is my favorite writer. He is, to me, the greatest writer in American history. He's speaking a truth that still exists. He's been long gone, but it's still true.

When you read James Baldwin or Malcolm X ... I'm like, "Wow." The courage to do that at a time where you could be killed for those words without any recourse whatsoever, it's a different level of courage than today, where maybe you can lose a job. 

It's so true. To be honest with you, one of the things I hope that people get out of this book is the idea of courage. I used to tell my students when I used to teach a class at Syracuse, and I taught a class at Howard, I would always tell my students, "None of these men, Medgar, Malcolm or Martin, lived to be the age when Kobe Bryant was when he died." He was 41. Medgar was 37. He was the first and the youngest to die. He died five years before Dr. King, two years before Malcolm X. He was the first to lose his life, before Goodwin, Schwerner and Chaney, so he was the first to take this journey.

He also knew this journey was coming. He knew he wouldn't live long. He knew he wouldn't be an old man. And the fact that they had the courage to do that, but people today don't have the courage to accept a mean tweet that's not even on Twitter anymore because it's on a platform nobody except the media reads. ... The fact that yes, you will get death threats. You and I have both been there. You get, I mean, rape threats, on my end. You get the N-word. I've been called the N-word so many times by people who actually weirdly sign their names in the email, which is really strange. You want me to know your job and your name and everything, and you're fine with that? But you accept that as part of the platform that you are blessed with, and you're so thankful you can speak for not just your people, but for this country and to make this country a better place. The fact that people with money, people who can afford full-time security guards, won't speak up against that man who wants to be an autocrat, that's shameful.

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My last two questions are about this election. First of all, putting aside everything else, the fact that Donald Trump attempted a coup more than three years ago, incited a terrorist attack and walked free — there's no accountability at all.

That's the tip on this one.

I'm not even kidding, it's intellectually difficult for me to comprehend that this is where we are as a nation. The debate is, "Should he be on the ballot?" when the debate should be, "What prison cell should he be in today?" How do we have this lack of accountability. How did we get here?

It is incredible to me. Having just written a civil rights book about the 30-some-odd years it took to convict Byron De La Beckwith, when everyone knew that he assassinated Medgar Evers in front of his own house and in front of his kids, and he bragged about it for 30 years, and it still took that long to bring him to justice, and it only happened because finally there was an interracial jury with women on it, and that we had to have literal change in who could be on a jury, I am not surprised that it is taking so long for Donald Trump to come to justice. But it is sad, and it is a sad statement on our country's judiciary system that the scrubs who busted into the Capitol are cooling their heels in jail.

Enrique Tarrio is finding out that in fact he is Black, and Black Lives Matter, because he's in jail, and Donald Trump and Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani are playing golf. On this day that you and I are talking, we just found out after weeks of waiting that voila, the appeals court says Donald Trump cannot in fact take SEAL Team Six and kill his political opponents. It took them weeks to answer that question. There are two Americas.

Last thing about the media. We're in the 2024 cycle. What are the challenges in covering Trump, but not normalizing Trump? And also not elevating Trump where it’s like he's president of the United States. If you watch the media, it's Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump and then Biden. I'm like, "Who's president? Oh, that guy's president?" Does it fall on Biden to get more press? Is it that corporate media understands, they're a for-profit business, we're not pretending, we know what it's about, Trump's good for business, so they're just going to keep covering him? Where's the push and pull? What's the right route?

It is a challenge because we have to balance, we have to state the threat, and the threat is very real. The threat of autocracy is real. This is a young country, there's really no guarantee. Sudan couldn't remain a country, there's no reason why we should have to remain a country that is not an autocracy. You have to balance stating the threat, and the media does have responsibility to do that, and Joe Biden is not necessarily the threat, so I think people sort of gravitate toward that.

Just to bring it back to sort of the Medgar of it — I'm trying to think like him now, I'm trying to bring him into my head, if you don't state a problem, no one knows the problem. The reason he went into the newspaper business was because no one was stating the problem. Right now, Trump is the problem, so we have to talk about it. It is on the Biden side to get their story and their narrative out. It's not our job. We have to state the problem, and right now, the problem is that we have a certain percentage of our country that wants to live in a dictatorship and will say so on TV.