University of Arkansas Press Publishes 'Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr'

Photo Submitted

The University of Arkansas Press has published Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr, by Michael Vinson Williams. The biography, which Publishers Weekly called “an important and readable study of this seminal leader and the history of the civil rights movement,” chronicles Evers’s life from childhood through his assassination in 1963.

Evers was well aware of the dangers he would face when he challenged the status quo in Mississippi in the 1950s and ’60s. It was a place and time known for the brutal murders of Emmett Till, Rev. George Lee, Lamar Smith and others. Nonetheless, as the NAACP’s first full-time Mississippi field secretary, Evers consistently investigated the rapes, murders, beatings and lynchings of black Mississippians and reported the incidents to a national audience, all the while organizing economic boycotts, sit-ins and street protests. He organized and participated in voting drives and nonviolent direct-action protests, joined lawsuits to overturn state-supported school segregation, and devoted himself to a career path that cost him his life.

Williams drew upon personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers’s widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to portray Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provided a detailed account of Evers’s NAACP work and a clearer understanding of the racist environment that ultimately led to his murder.

Neil McMillen, author of Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow, called the book “a well-grounded inquiry into Mississippi’s heart of darkness, … an essential reading of the short life and tragic times of Medgar Evers,” and John Dittmer, author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, said, “Williams captures Medgar Evers in all his complexity in this well-written, solidly researched, important book.”

Michael Vinson Williams is assistant professor of history and African American studies at Mississippi State University. He will be reading and signing Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr at Square Books in Oxford, Miss., at 5 p.m Nov. 15, and he will be appearing at the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock, April 12-15, 2012.