In 1967, when this brave book was first published, Myrlie Evers
said, "Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my
husband."
Medgar Evers died in a horrifying act of political violence.
Among both blacks and whites the killing of this Mississippi civil
rights leader intensified the menacing moods of unrest and
discontent generated during the civil rights era. His death seemed
to usher in a succession of political shootings--Evers, then John
Kennedy, then Martin Luther King, Jr., then Robert Kennedy.
At thirty-seven while field secretary for the NAACP, Evers was
gunned down in Jackson, Mississippi, during the summer of 1963.
Byron De La Beckwith, an arch segregationist charged with the
crime, was released after two trials with hung juries. In 1994,
after new evidence surfaced thirty years later, Beckwith was
arrested and tried a third time. Medgar Evers's widow saw him
convicted and jailed with a life sentence.
In "For Us, the Living" this extraordinary woman tells a moving
story of her courtship and of her marriage to this heroic man who
learned to live with the probability of violent death. She
describes her husband's unrelenting devotion to the quest of
achieving civil rights for thousands of black Mississippians and of
his ultimate sacrifice on that hot summer night.
With this reprinting of her poignant yet painful memoir, a book
long out of print comes back to life and underscores the sacrifice
of Medgar Evers and his family.
Introduced in a reflective essay written by the acclaimed
Mississippi author Willie Morris, this account of Evers's
professional and family life will cause readers to ponder how his
tragic martyrdom quickened the pace of justice for black people
while withholding justice from him for thirty years. Since the
conviction of Beckwith in a dramatic and historical trial in a
Mississippi court there has been renewed acclaim for Evers. One
speculates that, had he lived, he might have attained even more for
the equality of African Americans in national life.
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