Myrlie Evers-Williams introduces the President

Over here in the UK many Black people may not have heard about Myrlie Evers-Williams. This week she was catapulted into the global spotlight by introducing the President of the United States, Barak Obama for his Presidential inauguration.

Her key role in the President’s inauguration was no accident, this was a deliberate choice by the Obama’s that is significant for her, the President and American history. Back in 1963 when Obama was but two years old, Myrlie’s husband Medgar, a second world war veteran and Civil Rights activist, was assasaniated on his way home by Bryon Davis who belonged to the ‘White Citizens Council, and later the Klu klus Klan. Two trials and all-white juries in the racist South would not convict Davis and he was a free man until 30 years later when new evidence was produced and he was convicted.

The decade that finally saw Davis convicted also witnessed Myrlie Evers-Williams become president of the NAACP.

Giving Evers-Williams this role was in many ways Obama trying in part to heal America of its dark and brutal past.

About 10 years ago, I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with Medgar Evers's older brother Charles Evers during a visitor programme organized by the US Embassy. He was 80 years old, bright and lucid.

Charles Evers was quite a character. A fierce warrior in his own right, Evers had steeled himself to deal with the Jim Crow racism of Decauter Mississippi his own way. His way of beating the system was join the mob, get involved in bootlegging, strip joints and other aspects of organized crime. But he told me when his brother died all that changed. He would continue his brother's work.

Soon after his brothers death, he would be elevated into the political spot light mixing with Kings, the Kennedys and the Rockefellers. As we sat across his office he leant over to reach a book. ‘Just one thing I’d like to impart with you, Mr Woolley’, he said. With that he opened a book signed it, then handed to me and saying, ‘Have no fear’, which was the title of his autobiography.

Just a few pages into the book, you get a picture of what he and his younger brother were instilled with by their father in racist Mississippi in the 1920’s:

One Saturday, when I was about nine and my brother about six, we went with Daddy to pay his commissary bill. Daddy couldn’t read or write but he could add, subtract and multiply faster in his head than any could with a pencil. ..Daddy looked at the bill and saw he’d been overcharged five dollars - big money in those days. Daddy refused to pay.

Jimmy Boware - owner of the shop- got nasty as a rattlesnake . ‘N…r’ he shouted, ‘don’t you tell me I’m telling a lie.’ His eyes looked like they were dripping with poison.

Boware started behind the counter to get his pistol from the drawer. Daddy blocked his path, snatched a Coke bottle , broke it off at the neck and pointed the jagged end at Boware who screamed, ‘I’ll kill you, you sonofabitch!’. Daddy said real soft, ‘You better not go around that counter. Move another step and I’ll bust your brains in.’ 15 mean whites came to the store. What kept them from pulling a gun on Daddy or dragging him off to a lynching tree? Daddy stopped them. He wasn’t scared and he’d have killed a few of them before he died. They knew that."

90 years after Jim Crow, 50 years after the death of Medgar Evers, President Obama chose his most special political moment to pay tribute to the struggle of Evers family and of all African Americans.

Simon Woolley

‘Have no fear’. A Black man’s fight for Respect in America. By Charles Evers