The Race She Refused to Abandon

Just after midnight on June 12, 1963, Myrlie Evers heard the crack of a rifle shot outside her home in Jackson, Mississippi. She rushed to the carport and found her husband Medgar — the NAACP's field secretary for Mississippi — collapsed in the driveway, shot in the back by a white supremacist's bullet. Their three children, still awake watching President Kennedy's televised address on civil rights, scrambled to the floor as their mother cradled their dying father. Medgar Evers was thirty-seven years old.

What Myrlie did next defined her life. She did not retreat into private grief. She picked up her husband's unfinished work. She spoke at rallies. She moved to California and earned her degree. She ran for Congress in 1970. And for thirty-one years, she pressed authorities to retry Byron De La Beckwith, whose first two trials had ended in hung juries from all-white panels. In 1994, Beckwith was finally convicted of murder. The following year, Myrlie Evers-Williams was elected chairwoman of the national NAACP.

The writer of Hebrews urges us to "run with perseverance the race marked out for us," surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who have gone before. Myrlie knew what it meant to have a witness fall beside her on the course — and to keep running. She did not run on her own strength. She ran because the race was bigger than one runner.

When grief or injustice tempts you to quit, remember: the cloud of witnesses is not just watching. They are cheering you forward. Fix your eyes ahead, and run.