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.
