African American activist and the wife of civil rights leader
Medgar Evers, whose racially motivated murder in 1963 made him a
national icon. In 199598 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