Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 9, 1994 TAG: 9407090038
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By James Endrst The Hartford Courant
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
For Evers' widow, Myrlie, Beckwith's freedom amounted to emotional imprisonment, watching Beckwith go free not once but twice in 1964 after his first two trials ended in hung juries.
But Myrlie Evers didn't forget. Myrlie Evers wouldn't give up. And eventually the case - the focus of an upcoming HBO documentary called "Southern Justice: The Murder of Medgar Evers" - was reopened in 1989.
New evidence had surfaced. Beckwith's unrepentant arrogance had come back to haunt him.
A witness reported that Beckwith had bragged about the murder at a Ku Klux Klan rally, saying, "Killing that nigger didn't cause me any more discomfort than our wives have when they have a baby."
Though it came too late to be considered fitting justice, Beckwith, 73, was convicted on Feb. 5, 1994, and given a life sentence.
The reaction from Myrlie Evers today, after all those years of waiting?
"I'm free," she says. "God, I ... am ... free."
For Evers, 61, reliving and recounting the most painful, angry and, ironically, motivating moments of her past has been her job, her life's work and she has done it with dignity, some tears, but mostly with a smile.
"At that time," she says going back in her mind to 1963, "Medgar and I had concluded that time was short."
They didn't know when the strike would come, she says, whether she or one of the couple's three small children might be the target, but they knew there would be violence. The death threats came as regularly as the mail.
"That morning," she says, "when he left home, he told me, `I'm so tired. I don't know if I can go on. But I can't stop."'
He embraced his family for an unusually long time, told them to watch President Kennedy's address on television and that he would see them that evening.
Though Evers made it home, Beckwith fatally shot the civil rights activist just seconds after he emerged from his car.
It's just a few days after the 31st anniversary of the martyrdom of Medgar Evers, and Myrlie Evers is laying the past to rest though she knows she must never bury it. But she remembers.
She remembers how the force of the bullet pushed Medgar from the driver's side of the door to the front of the car, the blood smeared on the side of the vehicle as Evers tried to reach safety, the children screaming "Daddy, daddy, please get up."
Medgar Evers was 37 years old when he was murdered. Already a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement, he spent much of his life facing death, defying the Ku Klux Klan behind the cotton curtain in Mississippi.
Few Americans today, however, know much about him, his death having overshadowed his life.
"Medgar never wanted publicity," explains his wife. In fact, HBO's documentary (which makes its debut July 11) - narrated by another distinguished civil rights leader, Julian Bond - offers little in the way of video history.
That's because, Evers says, there isn't much to be found.
Beckwith, whose virulent white-separatist views would appear comical were they not so ugly and violent, also gave Myrlie Evers the drive to keep going, though she had the children to raise.
She had worked with Medgar - whom she married in 1951 after they met her first day at Alcorn A&M College in Lorman, Miss. - all along. Together, they had pushed for voting rights, fair housing and equal education for blacks in the heart of racist Dixie. Together they had opened the first NAACP state office there.
And, just hours after Medgar's death on June 12, 1963, she picked up where they left off, addressing a group of 500 people at a mass meeting in Jackson.
"Nothing can bring Medgar back," she said then. "But the cause can live on."
She remained active in the movement, but fearing for her family's safety, she and her children moved to California. There, she wrote a biography about her husband and the movement called "For Us, the Living" (Doubleday 1967), ran for Congress and became one of the convening members of the National Women's Political Caucus.
"This documentary has many good points to it," she says of `Southern Justice,' "but I hope the educational aspect of it will really reach people and encourage them to try to find out more about Medgar."
But now it's time for Myrlie Evers to start her new life with her husband Walter Edward Williams, whom she married in 1976 and - with her now grown children - who has been her greatest supporter in her pursuit of Beckwith.
"Most people said I was `living in the past'; that I didn't `need to bring these things up'; `the man is too old,'; `God will take care of him'; `it's going to be too expensive in terms of money for the state'; `the wear and tear on you will be too much'; `don't do this."'
Myrlie Evers wouldn't and couldn't listen, which is why, she says, "Walter Williams has been a miracle. ... This man has lived on a daily basis, 24 hours a day with Medgar and Myrlie and he has loved and cherished both of us and never once told me not to talk about Medgar, not to promote him, not to go for broke with this trial. And I am so fortunate to have him, I am so blessed.
"But when I came home from Mississippi after the trial, Walter said to me: `Do I have my wife now?"'
"Oooo," she says, remembering how it struck her.
Her answer?
"Yeah, you do."
by CNB