Thirty-One Years of Keeping Faith

On the night of June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers stepped out of his car in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi home, arms full of NAACP T-shirts reading "Jim Crow Must Go." A rifle bullet struck him in the back. His wife Myrlie rushed outside and found him crawling toward the front door. He died at a nearby hospital less than an hour later.

Byron De La Beckwith stood trial twice in 1964, but all-white juries deadlocked both times. Most people assumed the case was finished.

Myrlie Evers was not most people. She raised three children alone, wrote For Us, the Living in 1967, and never stopped pressing for justice. For three decades she gathered new evidence, lobbied Mississippi prosecutors, and kept her husband's name before the nation's conscience. In February 1994 — thirty-one years after the murder — De La Beckwith was finally convicted.

But Myrlie did more than seek a verdict. She carried forward the very mission Medgar died for, rising to chair the national NAACP from 1995 to 1998.