For Us, the Living

"Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband." Myrlie Evers said this in 1967 when her brave book was first published. In 1994, at long last after three controversial trials, justice was served when the killer was convicted and given a life sentence. At thirty-seven Medgar Evers, field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP, died in a horrifying act of political violence. Outside his home, in the summer of 1963, he was gunned down by a midnight assassin. This memoir by an extraordinary woman tells a moving story of her courtship and marriage and of her husband's unrelenting devotion to the quest of achieving civil rights for thousands of black Mississippians. Readers of Myrlie Evers's story will note an aching piece of irony. Her husband's tragic martyrdom quickened the pace of justice for black people while withholding it from him for thirty years.