March 11, 2025 • 61 mins
Political commentator and New York Times best-selling author Joy Reid is joined by veteran reporter April Ryan for a conversation around Reid’s book "Medgar and Myrlie: A Love Story That Awakened America." Representing Delta Sigma Theta, Reid and Ryan’s friendship is electric, recorded live in April 2024 at a full house at the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple. Reid and Ryan discuss “Medgar and Myrlie,” which chronicles the lives and love story of civil rights icons Medgar Evers and Myrlie Evers-Williams and the crucial groundwork they laid for Black Americans that still reverberates today.
Subscribe to the podcast • Let us know what you think by taking the short survey
SHOW NOTES:
Watch the full conversation here.
Read the podcast transcript.
Learn more:
Joy Reid, Medgar and Myrlie: A Love Story That Awakened America
Live event programmed by Michael Green
Live event produced by Jesse Swanson
Live event stage managed by Kait Samuels
Live event produced and mixed by Nick Broste
Production assistance by Bucky Emmerling and Christopher Moore
Podcast edited and mixed by Alisa Rosenthal
Podcast story editing by Joseph Alaimo
Donate now to support programs like this.
Explore upcoming events.
Instagram • YouTube • TikTok • Twitter • Facebook • LinkedIn
This video features materials protected by the Fair Use guidelines of Section 107 of the Copyright Act. All rights reserved to the copyright owners.
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the
Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for
"fair use" for purposes such as criticism,
comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship,
and research. Fair use is a use permitted by
copyright statute that might otherwise be
infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal
use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
This Little Light of Mine · Swan Silvertones
Presenting The Swan Silvertones
℗ 1947 King Records
Composer: John Henry Miles, Traditional
Lyricist: John Henry Miles, Traditional
Music Publisher: No Publisher
[USD0FB31I3L3G0A4]
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
[Theme music plays]
JOY REID (00:01):
Both Coretta Scott King and Myrlie Evers-Williams, they could have been famous on their own without ever meeting these men. They were both brilliant singers and Ms. Myrlie is a brilliant piano player. And Coretta had a whole career as a singer, so did Myrlie. Myrlie was in a group called The Chansonettes. And they were a very popular girl singing group in Vicksburg, Mississippi. They would tour around the city, around like this little Black circuit. And so she had her own thing. And her grandmother and her aunt told her, even as she's growing up, they had no money, they didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had dignity. And the grandma and the aunt said, you are so talented, one day you're gonna play Carnegie Hall. Which seemed like an improbable thing to say to a little girl in the 19, a little Black girl in the 1940s, but that's the way they raised her, with that level of dignity. Coretta, similarly, she was a singer. Very talented, beautiful, glamorous. And so these men, in a way, you know, are the ones who got lucky marrying these incredible women.
APRIL RYAN (00:02):
Yes. Yes.
[Theme music plays]
[Cassette tape player clicks open]
ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:05):
Hey all, thanks for checking out Chicago Humanities Tapes – the audio extension of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m your host Alisa Rosenthal, here to help you find the answers to humanity’s biggest questions by bringing you the best of the best of the live festivals. If you’re in Chicago, check out some of our upcoming live events this spring 2025. Tickets are on sale now for Chris Hayes, Ezra Klein, Jon Batiste, Heather Cox Richardson, Eve Ewing, and more.
Head to chicagohumanities.org for ticket information and to sign up for our email list.
Today (00:07):
political commentator and New York Times best-selling author Joy Reid, joined by veteran reporter April Ryan in front of a full house at the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple to discuss Reid’s book "Medgar and Myrlie
Recorded in April 2024, nearly a year before Reid was fired from MSNBC and her show The ReidOut was removed from the lineup, please enjoy this celebration of Reid and Ryan, two sorority sisters sharing and making history.
[Theme music plays]
[Audience applause]
APRIL RYAN (00:11):
Woo! Up high! Up high! Hello! That's what I'm saying, up top.
JOY REID (00:12):
Yes, hello, up top.
APRIL RYAN (00:13):
And down below. Come on soros. First, hold on, hold on. Good morning, Chicago. And down below.
JOY REID (00:14):
Good morning April!
APRIL RYAN (00:15):
What a welcome.
JOY REID (00:16):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (00:17):
If I wasn't awake, I'm awake now.
JOY REID (00:18):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (00:19):
If I wasn't awake, I'm awake now.
JOY REID (00:20):
Hallelujah. We're in church. We can say hallelujah.
APRIL RYAN (00:21):
Praise him, praise him. We're gonna let you know, whatever you hear, keep it clean because earthly and up there are listening. Come on.
JOY REID (00:22):
Come on choir.
APRIL RYAN (00:23):
Oh yes.
JOY REID (00:24):
It's so good to see you and be with you. In soror. Soror.
APRIL RYAN (00:25):
Soror, come on, all my deltas. Delta Sigma Theta. Yes, Incorporated. For those of you who don't know, if you don't know about DST, Google it. But we -
JOY REID (00:26):
And the whole D9, because wherever our Delta Sigma Theta soros are, we know there's AKAs.
APRIL RYAN (00:27):
Yes!
JOY REID (00:28):
We there's Sigmas. We know everybody, we know the brothers are out here. You know there's always some Qs, there's some, okay, where they at? You know they always there. Sigmas. Zetas, yes. The Alphas is always here, too. Let's not be getting by the Kappas, OK? OK, we're just making sure we name check everybody.
APRIL RYAN (00:29):
All right, all right, all right. It's all love, it's all love. First of all, let me say it is an honor to be in Chicago, but to be here with you, my sister. You hold it down at seven o 'clock at night Eastern.
JOY REID (00:30):
6 pm Chicago time.
APRIL RYAN (00:31):
6 pm Chicago time. I watch you, and I'm amazed. I'm amazed at your thoughts. I'm amazed at your wit and how quick you can fire back. And then you could write about anything, but you choose to come and tell us about our history in a time when they're banning our books and telling us we don't belong. Sister, and this not only is a book. It is the number-one New York Times bestseller, "Medgar and Myrlie," and this is a special moment for me because you have taken attacks from those who don't want the truth to be told. And I thank you for standing strong.
JOY REID (00:32):
Thank you, Soro.
APRIL RYAN (00:33):
I thank you for standing strong. So this is a love story, Medgar and Myrlie. And one of the reasons why I said I wanted to do this, and I don't think you know this
JOY REID (00:34):
Well, and I first want to say I want to thank the team in this beautiful church for having us here, the pastor of the church. Thank you all for having us here and thanks Chicago Humanities Festival. It's very exciting to be here with my fellow book nerds. We love that. And of course, to be with my soro - we normally text. So now we can actually see each other in person, because both our schedules are so crazy that we're normally on text message. So it's just good to see you in person. And happy One Day Past Harold Washington Day. April 12, 1983, I was in middle school, or I should say I was in middle school, I was one year old, I was a toddler. No, right, 1983, and I wanted to mention that because him becoming, you know, the first Black mayor of Chicago, happening in the 1980s, occurs because we have the movements that were led by people like Medgar Evers in the 1960s. And so there was a precursor to being able to elect Black leadership even in a northern city like Chicago. And you and I both know that there are incredible links, not just that railroad train station, between Chicago and Mississippi. They're inextricably linked. If you are a Black Chicagoan, your people are probably from Mississippi. There's a connection.
APRIL RYAN (00:35):
Yeah, and as we say the connection, let's talk about the connection with... a boy, who lived here in Chicago, and his mother sent him.
JOY REID (00:36):
Home. Right. To her mother's home. Where she came from.
APRIL RYAN (00:37):
And Medgar Evers was involved in that. We're talking about none other than the Emmett Till story. And during that time, and before we came out, Joy and I were talking. You know, we knew the state was racist. But it became known as the most racist state in the nation, not just because of Emmett Till, but then on top of that, the murder, the assassination of Medgar Evers. So talk to me about the movement with Medgar and Myrlie, the love story, and the tie, the Chicago and Mississippi through, starting with Emmett Till.
JOY REID (00:38):
So to go back, so just to wrap it all together, the reason I wanted to write about the Everses, not just Medgar Evers, I wanted to write about Medgar Evers because it kind of shocks me and saddens me that so many people don't know who he is.
APRIL RYAN (00:39):
I can't believe that.
JOY REID (00:40):
Which is wild, right? James Baldwin said the three greats in the civil rights movement were, you know, Malcolm, Martin, and Medgar. And so I listened to whatever whatever he says, James Baldwin, our greatest American writer, in my opinion. And so I always felt that the Medgar part of that trio was underwritten about and underknown. The second reason I wrote the book is because I just fell in love with Myrlie Evers-Williams. She is just such a dear and wonderful human being. I got a chance to interview her. I'd interviewed her before, but interviewed her in person in 2018. And we just had this conversation, and I knew that she was herself a civil rights icon. She'd become the leader of the NAACP. But when you just talk to her, what she gives you is this love story. She, to this day, is still madly in love with Medgar Evers, as if it was yesterday. And so you couldn't tell his story without telling their story together. And the third piece I'll say is that there's a connection because of the Emmett Till case, which was the first case that Medgar Evers investigated for the NAACP. He was field secretary for the NAACP in the state of Mississippi.
APRIL RYAN (00:41):
The first ever.
JOY REID (00:42):
The first ever. They actually created the job for him because what he really wanted to do was to go to law school. He wanted to go to Ole Miss so that he could become Thurgood Marshall. That was his original plan was to become a lawyer and to be Thurgood Marshall. But he was dissuaded from doing that. An NAACP leadership who had sort of had an eye on him for years said, we have a better idea. They flew him to New York and said, we're going to create a job for you, field secretary for Statewide for the NAACP. The first big case he did was the Emmett Till case. Now, Medgar and Myrlie had a history in Chicago because like most Mississippians, they had a connection, they had family here. And Medgar Evers and his brother Charles summered almost every summer in Chicago. They did the reverse of what Emmett Till did. They would come up here and they would spend time with an aunt. And one of the pieces of the love story that really connects Medgar and Myrlie, they were in college together at Alcorn State in Mississippi. But one -
APRIL RYAN (00:43):
Where she pledged Delta.
JOY REID (00:44):
Where she pledged Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated! Wise, wise young woman, even at 17. And so, but when she started dating Medgar, her grandmother and her aunt, they were appalled, because he was seven years older than her. He was older than her.
APRIL RYAN (00:45):
25 with attitude.
JOY REID (00:46):
With attitude.
APRIL RYAN (00:47):
In the South.
JOY REID (00:48):
And a veteran.
APRIL RYAN (00:49):
Yes.
JOY REID (00:50):
Which they were like, stay away from them upperclassmen and football players, and the veterans, he was all three.
APRIL RYAN (00:51):
But wait a minute, and a Black man in the south at that time with attitude, what they call attitude. Today we call it swag.
JOY REID (00:52):
Swag. And that was dangerous at that time, but he had grown up in the family reading the Chicago Defender. And so they were a family that gave their kids affirmation. And as a matter of fact, Medgar and his brother Charles used to sell the Chicago Defender because they were a very sort of activist family in a way. Not real activists, but just they didn't bow down to white people. That's the way that their father raised them. And so they would sell the Chicago Defender until the white locals like stopped them from selling it. So there was a whole story in the book about that. But the final sort of crystallization of their romance was when they convinced Myrlie's grandma and aunt to let them both spend the summer in Chicago, not staying together, she stayed with her aunt, he stayed with his aunt, but they spent the summer here and that's where they really crystallized their romance and their love and decided to get married.
APRIL RYAN (00:53):
So let's say this, so he was, she was 17, he was 25, and at one point they had not kissed, and he said, I'm gonna make you into the woman I want you to be. I was like, what?
JOY REID (00:54):
That's what she said. She said, what?
APRIL RYAN (00:55):
I was like, wait a minute. But yeah, I mean, think about that. 50s and 60s and men were looking for a certain type of woman. And Myrlie Evers, for those of you who understand, thank you for your wisdom. For those of you who don't, read the book. So, but she had her own, she reminds me of Coretta Scott King in a lot of ways. She was a singer, she had her own, she was moving, she wanted to be an educator. And she had her own, but then here comes this man up and changed her life, literally.
JOY REID (00:56):
And I love the connection to Coretta. They actually ended up being dear friends along with Dr. Betty Shabazz because they shared this horrible experience. But what she shared with Coretta, both Coretta Scott King and Myrlie Evers-Williams, they could have been famous on their own without ever meeting these men. They were both brilliant singers and Ms. Myrlie is a brilliant piano player. And Coretta had a whole career as a singer, so did Myrlie. Myrlie was in a group called The Chansonettes. And they were a very popular girl singing group in Vicksburg, Mississippi. They would tour around the city, around like this little Black circuit. And so she had her own thing. And her grandmother and her aunt told her, even as she's growing up, they had no money, they didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had dignity. And the grandma and the aunt said, you are so talented, one day you're gonna play Carnegie Hall. Which seemed like an improbable thing to say to a little girl in the 19, a little Black girl in the 1940s, but that's the way they raised her, with that level of dignity. Coretta, similarly, she was a singer. Very talented, beautiful, glamorous. And so these men, in a way, you know, are the ones who got lucky marrying these incredible women.
APRIL RYAN (00:57):
Yes. Yes.
JOY REID (00:58):
Right? And but because it was the 1950s no matter how talented and accomplished you were as a woman once you were married you were the chief cook bottle washer you know laundress you know that's what you became and that's what both of these women became but you also became the sounding board when they're giving a speech or the person that they're practicing it with the person who's advising them on style and presentation because it was the women who knew how to do that. And so they were a key partner in the movement, we just don't often hear about their role.
APRIL RYAN (00:59):
And for those of you who have the book on the last two graphs of page 43, listen to them opening the book. "He seemed to get a kick out of challenging Myrlie, frequently, leaving her both annoyed and enraged. He surprised her one day when out of the blue he said, 'You're going to be the mother of my children.' When she objected, considering that they had never kissed, his reply was equally blunt
JOY REID (01:00):
So read her response, she said, "You got a whole job ahead of you if you think that's what you're going to do." So she was tough. She did not put up with his stuff. But yeah, their relationship was, it kind of reminded me a little bit of "Moonlighting." I don't know if y 'all are old enough to remember "Moonlighting." They were like the Bickersons. They would like bigger. They were like Ralph Cramden and his wife on "The Honeymooners." So they would constantly be at each other because he was constantly challenging her. First of all, the age difference. So he was much more worldly and just knew more. But she wanted to be up to his level. I mean, she would study and try to get up on world affairs just to talk to him, because she was like, I'm not going to be unequal in this conversation. I'm going to be able to bring my own opinions to bear. And honey, when I tell you she brought her opinions to bear.
APRIL RYAN (01:01):
She to this day is a force. She's 91, right?
JOY REID (01:02):
She is 91 years young and fresh.
APRIL RYAN (01:03):
Fresh. She is a force to be reckoned with.
JOY REID (01:04):
Yeah.
APRIL RYAN (01:05):
And she was a force throughout this whole time. But let's get to the point there. Let's talk about the Emmett Till trial. Let's talk about all of that, how it helped form her and shape them as a couple to move higher and give more recognition to Medgar, also making the NAACP say, "Hmm."
JOY REID (01:06):
I mean, this was one of the instances in which Myrlie was super proud of Medgar, but really terrified. Because what he had to do in order to investigate this murder of this Chicago boy who was staying with his uncle in Mississippi when he was kidnapped and lynched, the state of Mississippi tried to bury it and cover it up. Because it was an illustration of how bold the Klan had become that they would kill a northern boy. Normally, they would kill scores of Black men, women, and children, but no one ever said anything about it. These cases never went anywhere because people need to understand that it was essentially legal for white people to kill Black people in the United States really up until maybe the 1970s or 80s like there was -
APRIL RYAN (01:07):
Wait a minute wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on.
JOY REID (01:08):
It was legal.
APRIL RYAN (01:09):
Let's just talk about just, was it last year? We just got the federal anti-lynching act.
JOY REID (01:10):
We just got that.
APRIL RYAN (01:11):
We just got it, it just became a law.
JOY REID (01:12):
Yeah, and Ida B. Wells was fighting for that from the early 20th century and they couldn't get it because what happened was you had an oligarchy in the South and you had at the top of it the planter class who had been the enslavers. After slavery, they lost a lot of money and they lost a lot of workers. but they tried to reassemble as best they could the same situation where they had cheap access to cheap Black labor. And so subordinating Black people was job one, two, three, four, and five, making sure they didn't get educated, making sure they didn't leave and couldn't leave the plantation and keeping them down so they could still make money. And so one of the ways they did that is they constructed what they called the Mississippi Way. And it was a class system that the top class were them, the planner class. Below them is sort of a merchant class, the people who ran the banks, the people who owned the stores, the people whose stores served white people. They were that sort of next upper class. They formed these things called the White Citizens Councils. So they could foreclose on your mortgage if you joined the NAACP. They could fire you from your teaching job if you joined the NAACP or registered to vote. Then below them, you had the white merchant class whose stores served Black people. That's like the people who killed Emmett Till. They were that class which, and I can't say the word, I guess, in church, they call it a P -E -C -K -E -R -W -O -O -D. That's what the white people called that next class of white people because their shop served Black people. Those are people like the World War II veteran and his brother who killed Emmett Till. Their shop, they were considered a lower class of white, but what they did to keep that class of white people on the side of the rich white people is basically the purge. They freed them who would be the people in the Klan. They were the cops, the store owners, the working class whites. They were essentially free to kill any Black person they wanted, knowing they would never go to jail. Even if they were prosecuted, which was rare, the juries were all white male. Women could not serve on juries in Mississippi until 1968. And the Blacks could not get on the jury because what they would do is it wouldn't let you register to vote. If you can't register to vote, you're not in the jury pool. And if you try to register to vote, they just kill you or get you fired or do whatever they needed to do. So you essentially were guaranteed legal, the purge. And so that class of people were the enforcers of the system. And then at the bottom were the Blacks. And so, you know, when this investigation happens, you've got Medgar Evers having to try to find Black people who are terrorized. They are a terrorized group of Mississippians. And he gets three of them to testify against these two men who, again, knew they could legally kill this boy. They go to trial and he gets not only the uncle to testify and then puts him immediately on the $11.50 train to Chicago to get him out of town with his family.
APRIL RYAN (01:13):
$11.50 train.
JOY REID (01:14):
It was an $11.50 one-way ticket. And people would do it to get out of Mississippi. It's how the Great Migration happened. People just got on that train and came here. And so he got them out, and then you had two people who worked on neighboring plantations, one who heard the screams of the boy as he was being beaten to death, and another who knew and worked for one of the Milam, one of the two killers, and knew that he'd done it. Those two also, he got them to testify. It's incredibly brave for them to do that, and then he got them out of town. But it was because there were witnesses that they had to go through with a real trial, and because the whole world knew about it because of Jet Magazine. Because Mamie Till said, if you're gonna kill my boy, you're going to see it, everyone's gonna see it. And she was inspired to do that by a woman named Rosebud Lee. Rosebud Lee's husband, Reverend George Lee, was killed for trying to register Blacks to vote. He went up to the voter registration place with a batch of applications from Black people. And the Klan pulled up beside his car, shot his jaw off. And then the sheriffs declared it was just a car accident that killed him. And the reason his jaw was off is that his fillings flew out of his mouth, and it was just an accident. And that's what caused his death. But Reverend Rosebud Lee said, it ain't going down like that. And she actually originated the open casket funeral, the horror of an open casket funeral, to make sure that people understood what the Klan had done. And Mamie Till got that idea of doing that for Emmett from her. So there are all these connections between people you don't know and the people you do. But for Medgar, it was publicizing those lynchings and not letting them go unremarked on that was just as important as getting justice.
APRIL RYAN (01:15):
And as the lynchings and Emmett Till, everything was being publicized, people were, white people in the racist state of Mississippi had their eye on Medgar Evers.
JOY REID (01:16):
Yeah.
APRIL RYAN (01:17):
Let's talk about this Lena Horne concert. Lena Horne and Dick Gregory came down to Mississippi in support of the movement. And there were 3,000 - first of all, when just two Black folks come together in some spaces, it's considered a conspiracy. And back then, there were laws that Black people could not congregate like that. You, in your book, said 3,000 Black folks were there. 3,000. But then they had some spies in the midst. Talk about that.
JOY REID (01:18):
So, right, and this is one of the reasons, and one of the tensions in the book, you know, Miss Myrlie was, she did like to speak up, and one of the things that she constantly communicated to Medgar was just terror. You know, when he was investigating the Emmett Till case, she was terrified. He would spend 12 hours a day driving into the Mississippi Delta dressed as a sharecropper to investigate these killings. She was scared the whole time. And as you build up to that concert, it was more of a speech. It was like a whole rally in the Masonic Temple in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963. The build-up to that was just constant terrorism even into their home. People calling day and night, threatening to blow up the home, kill the children, you know, shoot Medgar, shoot her or shoot the kids. It was just constant. And she was a very reluctant civil rights wife. She didn't want him in this business because she wanted him to be alive. But by the time you get to Dick Gregory and Lena Horne coming down, Medgar had built up what he really wanted was a King-style movement in Jackson. He wanted boycotts, he wanted the same kind of things that were happening in Birmingham to happen in Mississippi. His bosses did not agree, but the young people did.
APRIL RYAN (01:19):
His bosses, name names.
JOY REID (01:20):
The NAACP, Roy Wilkins and the NAACP were very much against what he was doing. So this is a man who was being constantly threatened with being fired by his NAACP leadership, constantly facing death threats, had no personal security. The NAACP notoriously told him they had better things to do with their money than to protect him. And he was at odds with his wife because she was scared and wanted him to just not do it. So into all of that you get this sort of big final rally where Dick Gregory and Lena Horne come to town. Now, when these celebrities come, they have to stay with the Everses or stay with another Black family because they couldn't stay in hotels. And so, you know, Myrlie is figuring out, how do I feed these celebrities? What do we have in our budget? Because I don't have extra money to do this. They're fighting about that. But the other thing that happens at this big meeting is that there are interlopers in the room. And Medgar's secretary, who used to be Myrlie, Myrlie used to be the secretary, but when she has her third child, she stops working and is a stay at home mom. The secretary says she notices this man who comes into this meeting, he's smoking a cigarette, he's scowling, he's sitting in the front, but he's not engaging in any way. So she sends one of the other NAACP workers down to engage him, he doesn't engage, he eventually leaves. She later testifies that she believes that that man was Byron De La Beckwith.
APRIL RYAN (01:21):
And what's happened to Byron De La Beckwith?
JOY REID (01:22):
Well, it's interesting, because you mentioned living in that town in Tennessee, where he's from.
APRIL RYAN (01:23):
Chattanooga.
JOY REID (01:24):
Chattanooga, Tennessee.
APRIL RYAN (01:25):
Ten months and I was out.
JOY REID (01:26):
Ten months and you were out. Well, three years after that intersection of the two of you in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that man was starting life imprisonment in prison because Myrlie vowed when he killed her husband, and he was also a World War II veteran. This is a story about World War II veterans on both sides of the fascist line, because some of them fought fascism overseas and then came home and were fascists at home, because he was a veteran too. But Myrlie vowed to get him. It took her 30 years, but in 1994, partly because of evidence she still had in her possession and some new evidence uncovered by a brilliant reporter named Mr. Mitchell, he got incarcerated and spent the rest of his miserable life in prison.
APRIL RYAN (01:27):
Now when we say love, love is an action word. And that was after death. You know, "til death" - I'm sure they've had many weddings here, "til death do us part." But when he transitioned this world, she was still determined to find justice for her husband who did not get the recognition and the designations that he should have received. And as we speak of their security, the children couldn't play outside in the wooded lot next door. And this is on page 175 at the bottom for those of you who have your book. "They already lived with safety plans. Never sit or stand by the window. Always exit the car on the front passenger side to be closer to the house's front door and avoid the large wooded lot adjacent to the young's home. Medgar had walked the lot area during the day and had decided it was not safe. He discouraged the children from exploring and playing there." And there's more. Living a life like that in the 1960s when you've got people watching you and you're trying to push for voting rights, you're trying to push for just first class citizenship for Blacks in a racist state, he was a target. And the NAACP made him the first Mississippi -
JOY REID (01:28):
Field secretary.
APRIL RYAN (01:29):
Field secretary, but yet doing all of this work he was not protected. So let's move on.
JOY REID (01:30):
Yeah, and the thing is, just to give you the context, you know, Vernon Jordan is, right? So Vernon Jordan had the same job in Georgia. So they were designating field secretaries to cover the state, and then they had a state president and they had all these other officials. But this creation of this idea of a field secretary, they were an investigator. That was really their job, and they were supposed to also sign up memberships. And so the NAACP said, you have two jobs. You can investigate these crimes, that's fine. Sign up people for memberships, we have three jobs, and register Blacks to vote. And I can remember having a conversation with Vernon Jordan years ago when I did my first book. He used to work upstairs for me in 30 Rock. He was on the 65th floor at the financial firm that he worked in. I remember going up there, I would go up there and sit with Mr. Vernon Jordan. He was an amazing man.
APRIL RYAN (01:31):
He was.
JOY REID (01:32):
He spoke with this deep voice. He was amazing, but I remember him telling me that he would be on the phone with Medgar, and Medgar would be just broken and say, and considered himself a failure because he's like, I can't register these people to vote. They're too scared. I mean, Georgia was bad, but Mississippi was worse. And the number of lynchings per capita in Mississippi was so high. I mean, it was the lynching capital of America. And by the way, I believe number two or three on the list was Florida. People try to act like Florida's not in the south.
APRIL RYAN (01:33):
What state? What? What? What?
JOY REID (01:34):
Florida was bad. Florida was much worse than you think it was. But Miss -
APRIL RYAN (01:35):
It's bad now, ok?
JOY REID (01:36):
Well.
APRIL RYAN (01:37):
The NAACP has a travel ban. Well travel advisory, not a ban.
JOY REID (01:38):
But let me just let y'all know, Florida is waking up, though. Florida might be waking up. Florida, they might've had enough. I think that he might've done too much. Florida, we can table that.
APRIL RYAN (01:39):
Who did too much? Call names.
JOY REID (01:40):
DeSantis. I think DeSantis.
APRIL RYAN (01:41):
DeSantis?
JOY REID (01:42):
He's called it. DeSantis, he keep changing how you say it.
APRIL RYAN (01:43):
DeSantis.
JOY REID (01:44):
DeSantis did too much. And for nothing, cause he's never gonna be president. You wasted your time, buddy. Um, you might have done too much. But, I mean...
APRIL RYAN (01:45):
We getting too spicy for these folks.
JOY REID (01:46):
You can't put us together you can't put us together. Ask your next question.
APRIL RYAN (01:47):
Oh my gosh. You know, but as we talk about this magnificent couple, not just Medgar, but Myrlie, and one of the things, before we go into these questions that people have asked, one thing that I said to you, you know, Medgar Evers died, he was assassinated in the summer of 1963, just months before the March on Washington, and Myrlie Evers loved him so much, ladies and gentlemen, listen to this
JOY REID (01:48):
Yeah. Yeah.
APRIL RYAN (01:49):
She made sure. That it's just, it's, it's, I think Mr. Williams was a dynamic man.
JOY REID (01:50):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (01:51):
You know, to do that. I mean, it's just the whole thing. It just boggles my, I mean, she is an amazing woman.
JOY REID (01:52):
Yeah. Well, and so, and Walt Williams is the second husband, and he was an incredible person as well. And as you said, it takes a big man and a very secure man to marry someone -
APRIL RYAN (01:53):
Gentlemen, did you hear that?
JOY REID (01:54):
Very secure. Well, he was a longshoreman.
APRIL RYAN (01:55):
I'm sorry, I look like I pointed to you, I was just pointing, I'm sorry.
JOY REID (01:56):
You! Do you understand?
APRIL RYAN (01:57):
I'm sorry, no. Sorry, sir, I'm sorry, you are a great man. I can see it all over you. I can see it.
JOY REID (01:58):
So, I mean, and when she married him, he actually saw her speak, you know, she gave speeches after, in order to make money, in order to survive. And so he saw her giving a speech and that's how he actually said, I'm gonna, he said, and he said to himself, "I'm gonna marry that woman and take care of her children." And when she, when they met, she said, seriously. And he was a big. He revered Medgar Evers himself, and when he approached her, he said, "I revered your husband. I got into activism in part because of your husband." He was in California doing the longshoreman piece of the civil rights work. And he said, I want to take care of you and your children. And she said, "OK, good luck with that. I ain't marrying nobody else." Because what she would always, and she said it to me, and I'm going to do my Myrlie Evers voice, she would say to you, "Medgar Evers was the love of my life." And she talks like that. That's how she sounds. That was a pretty good one.
APRIL RYAN (01:59):
It was, it really was, it really was.
JOY REID (02:00):
But that's how she sounds! And so she said, she said that to him, but he said, "I get it, but I love you enough to love you as you continue to love him. All I need is a piece of your love and I want to take care of you." And he did until the day he died, honey, and when she ran... when, listen, and the two people who convinced her to run for NAACP board chair were the great Joe Madison, the Black -
APRIL RYAN (02:01):
Yes! Lift his name!
JOY REID (02:02):
And Walt. And the two of them talked her into running, and Walt was her campaign manager. And sadly enough, he died the day after she won, of cancer. So she's lost two great loves, but what she'll tell you, and what I love about Ms. Myrlie, is she is not a self-pityer. What she says is that, how lucky am I that I had not one but two great loves in my life. She says, I've always been loved. And that's what she'll tell you within her great joy is that she is never gonna date in her life without being loved.
APRIL RYAN (02:03):
Amen.
JOY REID (02:04):
That's power.
APRIL RYAN (02:05):
Ooh, I got something in the pit of my stomach with this. But before -
JOY REID (02:06):
Newlywed.
APRIL RYAN (02:07):
I am a newlywed, I am. I am. I feel like, I feel like Mrs. Evers-Williams. I got a good man, retired naval officer.
JOY REID (02:08):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (02:09):
Who said, I'm gonna take it on. He said -
JOY REID (02:10):
Listen.
APRIL RYAN (02:11):
"Let somebody mess with you." I said praise God! But you know, I mean, seriously, what we've been, I mean, you don't know, you don't know what it feels like -
JOY REID (02:12):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (02:13):
To have people go after you. And your safety is compromised. And for this woman to still stand, "and still I rise."
JOY REID (02:14):
Yeah. And she became so close to Dr. Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King for that same reason, but I always remind people she was the template for them. Because her man died -
APRIL RYAN (02:15):
She was the first.
JOY REID (02:16):
Two years before Malcolm and five years before King. She was the first, and she had nobody to pattern herself. She couldn't pattern herself off of Mamie Till. Mamie was a mother grieving her child. because her man died. She didn't have a Rosebud Lee. She had herself, she walked out of her front door in grief and terror, having watched her husband bleed to death in front of her.
APRIL RYAN (02:17):
And not knowing if she was gonna be shot again.
JOY REID (02:18):
Not knowing if she was gonna be shot again. And Dan Rather and the CBS News crew that next morning is right there in her face. And she had to decide right then and there, what do I do? She had to go back into her Chansonettes training, go back into what she knew as a performer and say, I have to perform because I can't walk out here and be too angry. I can't be too sad. I can't have too much tears on my face. I can't look too pretty. I can't look too ugly. Think about that as a Black woman in 1963, what she had to do in order to survive. And then on top of that, she said she was enraged, but she couldn't show it. But she said, you know what, I'm going to bury my rage and turn it into justice. She said, if it takes 1,000 years, I'm going to get that man into prison. And she surely did. She got him!
APRIL RYAN (02:19):
She did, I remember on the television, I remember her, and I know Whoopi played her, but I remember her. "Medgar!" I remember her putting her hands on her head, crying, I was just, I was so happy for her and for our culture, because justice -
JOY REID (02:20):
Was done.
APRIL RYAN (02:21):
Was done. It took decades, but it happened. And as we speak of that, I want to go to the funeral. You wanted to talk about the funeral of Medgar Evers. And then we're going to go to the questions.
JOY REID (02:22):
So, and I'll be very quick because I know we want to answer your question. So, it was a case very similar to the Till funeral that became a form of activism in and of itself. Dr. King came to the funeral, but he was not allowed to speak because the NAACP did not, was not fond of Dr. King. They were, they didn't like his methods and didn't want him to be prominent. So, he didn't speak, but he marched afterwards. And then the young people who also marched behind him, they started what almost was a riot because they began to sing a song, a freedom song, that Medgar loved. [Singing] "This little light of mine -"
APRIL RYAN (02:23):
"I'm gonna let it shine, oh, this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine."
JOY REID (02:24):
And they've started pointing to the Capitol that they're gonna let it shine on Capitol Street, and the police just lost it and started beating people and hosing people and doing what they do. But that moment really showed that his activism survived him, and that young people were not gonna be deterred. They were determined to have freedom, and ultimately, they got it.
APRIL RYAN (02:25):
And the irony is, King wasn't allowed to speak at the funeral. Myrlie wasn't allowed to speak at the March on Washington.
JOY REID (02:26):
Well, no, she would. She would have been. And that is a misnomer. People think that she wasn't allowed to speak. Myrlie was the only woman designated to speak on the stage as one of the big six. They had no women, something that really bothered Coretta Scott King. She was very annoyed by it and wrote about it in her memoir. But they said the one woman they invited was Myrlie. And the last thing I'll say is that, think about it, the March on Washington was in part a reaction to the assassination and to Kennedy's being slow. When Kennedy finally agrees to do a civil rights bill, the first person he hands a copy of that bill to is Myrlie in the White House as she's standing there with her kids. He promised to redo it, then he started dragging his feet trying to do a tax cut. It was his big plan for reelection was a tax cut. He veers off and doesn't do it. to push him, King and Bayard Rustin, Bayard Rustin, decided we're going to march on him. They weren't marching for Kennedy. They were marching on Kennedy because he was taking too long. The speech that Dr. King gives, the I Have a Dream speech, he gave that speech actually weeks earlier in Detroit. But in that version of the same speech, he says, "I have a dream that one day people like Emmett Till and Medgar Evers can live to adulthood in freedom." He cuts that out of this speech in DC because the Kennedys are freaking out that they're gonna be 200,000 Blacks in DC. DC empties out because they think they're gonna be riots. There are no riots. It's peaceful and it becomes legendary. But Medgar Evers is part of that story. He's just not told as part of that story.
APRIL RYAN (02:27):
Sister, you are walking history. How you feeling?
AUDIENCE (02:28):
Good.
APRIL RYAN (02:29):
Good because I'm like, woo, I got chills. So here's the first question from Alicia Roberts Novak
JOY REID (02:30):
It is. And he was not on the side of saying that court challenges alone can change. That was one of the big tensions between himself and the NAACP, is they wanted to do it all through court challenges. And groups like the NAACP were filing that. And the full-scale fight against Voting Rights Act means that his work is still relevant because it was not just about court challenges from the NAACP. His work was about boycotts. It was about using economic power to try to constrain fascism. And it was about being vocal. He started a newspaper. It was about being loud and not allowing people to commit racism in silence and with the complicity of silence. So his work was not just about court challenges. So what he would say is, this is proof that court challenges are never gonna be enough. You have to have a full-scale plan to combat racial supremacy, because unfortunately, white supremacy and white nationalism, they're always gonna be with us to a certain extent and so we just have to have a strategy that's bigger than just court cases, but yeah, that's very bad news.
APRIL RYAN (02:31):
And for all intents and purposes, we are voting without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It has been gutted.
JOY REID (02:32):
And understand that Ronald Reagan is elected only 12 years after the assassination of Dr. King. And John Roberts worked for Ronald Reagan's administration as a lawyer in the Justice Department. And one of his main things and main causes throughout his life as a lawyer has been to end and get rid of the Voting Rights Act. That has been one of his passions, John Roberts. And that's the least right wing of the six. So that's the reality is that we have six justices and all of that is because of the thing Medgar keeps trying to tell everybody you gotta do. Voting is the only power you have. Voting is determining who's in the Senate, who controls the Senate, controls the Supreme Court. It's all, when people say somebody died for your right to vote, he did, like literally. Literally, and if you don't use your vote, look what you're giving up.
APRIL RYAN (02:33):
Exactly. Please, please, seriously, get your children, you know what, I'm gonna implore you, we are not telling the stories of yesterday, and that's why this book is so important. Please get some young people and tell them the stories, because I don't like to hear what I'm hearing. And you know, we're not gonna get into it.
JOY REID (02:34):
Well, I mean, look, we are here. Trevor Reed's family is now mourning. We have another person mourning another death. All of these cases and who decides them, normally an elected official that people vote for, a prosecutor, in some states, a sheriff. Down to that, down to the school board, what you can read. It's all voting. And the thing is, what Medgar was fighting for was Black access, not even to the general election, to the primaries. How do you think MAGA controls the Republican Party? The primaries. Because they know that Republicans are gonna vote Team Jersey in the general. It doesn't matter who wins the primary. Republicans are gonna line up and vote for them in the general, and so the primary is the election. And so he was essentially, because Democrats were locked out of the Democratic primaries, that's how they locked them out of the voting booth. You couldn't vote in the primary. The primary is the election. Start thinking about what you're doing. If you're not showing up in primaries, you skipped the main part of your power.
APRIL RYAN (02:35):
That's true. People don't wanna vote. Right, but let's say if this beautiful church happened to be located in Kentucky, and they're talking about, say her name Breonna Taylor, Daniel Cameron could wind up being in Mitch McConnell's space.
JOY REID (02:36):
But why is he not? Because when people looked at what Daniel Cameron did, and then his name was on the ballot. And then his name was on the ballot, people said, thank you, but no.
APRIL RYAN (02:37):
Right. But Mitch McConnell, they're trying to set it up for him to take Mitch McConnell's place. They're trying.
JOY REID (02:38):
And all I have to say is, the governor of the state of Kentucky is a D -E -M -O -C -R -A -T, which means that a Democrat can win statewide in Kentucky. A Democrat has been the governor of Louisiana recently. Mr. Presley, Elvis Presley, can, could have won in Mississippi if people voted. Louisiana could have kept the Democratic governor. It's the only way they got Obamacare. And the Republican who tried to take Obamacare in Kentucky got mowed down and defeated by Governor Beshear because Governor Beshear's dad had allowed Obamacare. These people had not had access to healthcare in decades. They finally got it and they were like, we hate Obamacare. And they were like, connect. They called it connect. They don't even know what it is. And so the guy ran and said, I'm going to I'm going to repeal Obamacare. They were like, yeah. They put him in. He was like, now let me repeal connect. They went, don't you take my connect. And he said, but I'm taking away Obamacare. And they realized Obamacare is connect. Get out. And they put Beshear in. Voting is power. They kicked him out. He tried to take away their Obamacare.
APRIL RYAN (02:39):
Civics is important.
JOY REID (02:40):
Civics is important. Civics is important. If any of y'all got your student loans. Did you get your student loans taken care of? You voted. You voted, you only, you voted.
APRIL RYAN (02:41):
I need my daughter to pay my student loan back because I'm her banker, but anyway, but no, but no, but seriously, you guys, seriously, once we leave, we need you to really use critical thinking and look and talk to people because we're in one of the most critical times ever. And this history is today. If you don't believe it, I don't know what to say. We are living proof. So let me go to the next question because we're going to be preaching up here in the pool pit. But don't worry, we will not pass the collection plate. I know, but I'm ready to jump over a pew right now. How does society keep the legacy of people like the Evers alive with so many people trying to erase them from history?
JOY REID (02:42):
The thing is, is that you cannot erase our history because number one, they're trying to ban books in the age of social media. If those kids don't get it from a book, they're gonna get it from an audio book on Audible. If they don't get it from an audio book, they're gonna get it on TikTok. If they don't get it from TikTok, they can get it on "The ReidOut" on MSNBC. They can get it. You're not banning our history. And so -
APRIL RYAN (02:43):
Wait a minute, wait a minute. And if they don't get it from you if they don't get it from you they're gonna get it from APRIL RYAN
JOY REID (02:44):
They gonna get it from APRIL RYAN
APRIL RYAN (02:45):
Don't do that.
JOY REID (02:46):
No, do what you gotta do. The reality is our history is available if you want it. All you need is a desire to know the truth. The truth will not hurt you. The truth will only help you. The truth can be unpleasant. The truth can be negative. It can be harmful and hurtful. And as a white, for my white brothers and sisters here in the audience, this is not Black history. This is American history. American history. American history.
APRIL RYAN (02:47):
And this is not and this is not separation. This is not separation. This is unification for you to understand what we've been through so you can understand how to deal with us today in a time when they're messing with us again.
JOY REID (02:48):
One of my most important interviews that I did is another Reverend King, and his name is Reverend Ed King, who was the closest advisor to Medgar Evers. He was a young white Tougaloo College student. There were, oh, in Tougaloo College, he was the, he was the chaplain at Tougaloo College, but he was a student at a white college. And Medgar would go to these white colleges and speak to them, and he would put these white/Black conversations together between like Tougaloo and these white colleges to get them to talk to each other. And Ed King says when he first met Medgar, he and a group of white students, Medgar took him and drove him through the Black part of Jackson. And they just had no idea how Black Jacksonians live and it was new to them and he gave them data. He said, let me give you the poverty statistics. Let me just explain it to you in straight ahead language, non-judgmental that you will understand. Ed King then becomes super close to Medgar and throughout his life he's the last person that had an in-depth conversation with him before he died. The reality is, they are, you know, what Medgar Evers' father used to tell him, he said, there are three kinds of white people
APRIL RYAN (02:49):
That's true. And that last question came from Jasmine Beale. Thank you, Jasmine. The next question from John Anderson
JOY REID (02:50):
For sure, the most challenging chapter to write was the assassination chapter, because I had now lived with these people for like two years, because it took a while to get the Evers family to feel comfortable making their mom available, the two surviving siblings.
APRIL RYAN (02:51):
They were protective.
JOY REID (02:52):
Very protective, they were very protective of her. And so there was that, then there was the logistical thing of trying to get to her, because she's in California and you had to do a lot of it by phone. And then we went out to California and we tried to do FaceTime, but you know, seasoned citizens really can't FaceTime. So we finally went out there, although I FaceTime her on her birthday.
APRIL RYAN (02:53):
Seasoned citizens. Seasoned citizens can't do FaceTime.
JOY REID (02:54):
They don't FaceTime, they don't FaceTime. But we did end up going out and we had a wonderful day. We spent the day with her. They almost had to evict us from Van's house, the son's house. But I had lived with these people and you know, I just had a relationship with these people at this point. After we did all the research and I just sort of sat with it for a while. Then I went to Paris and did my James Baldwin moment where I went out there and I went -
APRIL RYAN (02:55):
I saw that.
JOY REID (02:56):
And did the James Baldwin tour and tried to like get into his vibe so I could write it and try to figure out how to even deal with all the research that we had. I had two researchers so I just had a ton of stuff. And then by the time I, you know, I pushed it back as far as I could, I pushed it into a later chapter because I just didn't want to, I didn't want to kill him. I didn't want to do it. You know what I mean? I really liked these people at this point. So it was really hard to finally write the chapter where he died. I cried through a lot of the book. And then there was another sort of character that to me was a person I became closest to in writing it, which is their oldest son, Darrell Kenyatta. First of all, his name being Kenyatta is kind of epic in 1952 to name your child Kenyatta. And it was a big fight between them because, you know, Medgar was obsessed with Jomo Kenyatta and the Kenyan liberation movement. So he wanted to actually name his first name Kenyatta. And Myrlie was like, that boy will not survive to be 10 years old. You're not going to be a Kenyatta in Mississippi in 1952. It's a no. So she put it in the middle. But Darrell is this sweetheart. He's this sweet boy. He's the oldest. He's only nine when his father dies. He really goes into a deep what would be a depression now. But they didn't have therapy back then. He would go in his room and not talk. Like, it was hard writing about Darrell. Darrell was the sweetest boy, you know? And so when you get to that point and you just see his, they're trained to, like, go on the floor and go into, like, a military position if they heard a gunshot, they do what they're supposed to do. They lay on top of their brother, who's three, he and Rena, she's eight, he's nine, and the baby's three. And so they lay on top, but then they hear their mother scream, and they just instinctively break their training and get up and run to the front and they see the father on the ground in a pool of blood and the police described it and looked like someone had butchered a hog. Just imagine being nine and seeing that and living through that. And he was a traumatized person. He grows up to become an artist, you know, and he just had, you know, he makes this trajectory where he decides not to be an activist, but he looks just like Medgar Evers. Like, he has that face. So he shows up in court, and he's like, I want that demon to see Medgar's face and to see him in this courtroom. And he lives to see the justice, but then he dies not long after of cancer. So it's just like a whole, that stuff is hard to write about when you feel like you've gotten to know these people. And then I'd actually gotten to know Rena and Van, and of course, spending so much time either talking to or being with Miss Myrlie. So it was hard.
APRIL RYAN (02:57):
You know I could talk to you forever, especially about this book, because it's just like, I feel like I'm welling up. I've got tears welling up. But somebody said, mm -hm. Yeah, it's deep. Yeah, it's... Because it's like watching a movie, you know what's gonna happen, but you don't want it to happen.
JOY REID (02:58):
Right, yeah.
APRIL RYAN (02:59):
But I wanna say something and ask you a question about this and then get your your final take because the hour is almost up.
JOY REID (03:00):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (03:01):
But I know, right? So.
JOY REID (03:02):
This is like my TV show. And I'm always like, it's an hour already? I have more things. I had more things!
APRIL RYAN (03:03):
So that means that this was good.
JOY REID (03:04):
Yeah.
APRIL RYAN (03:05):
Yeah. That's mean, it means a lot for you to say that. But one of the most things, because like I said, I followed Medgar Evers and Myrlie Evers for a long time. And one thing when they were trying to go after Byron De La Beckwith, they exhumed the body. And I think God was in this. And I'm serious, you know what I'm talking about. When they exhumed the body, the body was in perfect condition, just slight bruising. And the son that was a baby when he died.
JOY REID (03:06):
Van, yeah.
APRIL RYAN (03:07):
Finally saw his father in real life in that casket that I said if God if I didn't let me tell you I think that was God all in it I think that was God all in it.
JOY REID (03:08):
Oh, for sure.
APRIL RYAN (03:09):
Yeah, people say, people say, oh, it's because of how they embalmed him, or how they sealed the case. I believe -
JOY REID (03:10):
30 years later, yeah.
APRIL RYAN (03:11):
30 years later, 30 years later, the man was in perfect condition. There are photos of this.
JOY REID (03:12):
And Van believes, you know, they're a very spiritual family, and he said that it was as if his father had waited so he could see him, because he was only three, so he really didn't remember him, you know, and when he died he was little, he was running around like, where's daddy, where's daddy, where's daddy, and just didn't understand death, and so yeah, it was, it's pretty poignant.
APRIL RYAN (03:13):
Yeah, this whole story just gets me. And sometimes you have to take off your journalistic hat and put on the humanity.
JOY REID (03:14):
Absolutely.
APRIL RYAN (03:15):
Woo, child.
JOY REID (03:16):
Well, that's the only way to do this job, to be honest with you. You know I'm not a huge believer in objectivity. I think it's kind of a lie. I think if you don't have a human heart in doing journalism, then what you're doing, you're just literally a computer that's spitting out data. And that's not what we're meant to do. We get blessed to have these platforms, because we're human beings. And we care when the Reed family, they spelled their name wrong, but they're still family R -E -E -D, when they're mourning, I'm mourning. You know, and if somebody is killed by police or killed by a fellow citizen like Trayvon Martin was, you know, a family is mourning, I'm mourning. And so it's like, I think if we're not human about it, we can't really do our jobs. [Applause] And I know you are, because I know you.
APRIL RYAN (03:17):
No comment, but people can see you've seen it. And I can't say anymore. I mean, you know, we are, we come into these newsrooms and give our history and our texture because a lot of other people wouldn't do it. End of story. But in the last few seconds, Joy, sum this up. Sum this beautiful book up that you must go buy. And forward, buy Miss Christmas presents now. And forward them, give them to your children, your neighbors. Give them as birthday presents, because we need to know our history. Is there a ban on our books? Hold them up, hold these books up. Is there a ban on our books? This is our history, and this is true. She was embedded with the family. This man was the first one to be killed for our right to be free. [Applause]
JOY REID (03:18):
And what I will say is, I wish he was the first, but he was the first to be on a national level.
APRIL RYAN (03:19):
Yes, yes.
JOY REID (03:20):
And they were killing so many people who are unknown and whose names are not known. And he died for them and for their legacy to live. Just people who not only registered others, but tried to register themselves. the Fannie Lou Hamers who were beaten nearly to death for trying to register. If you think about the sacrifices that were made, not a thousand years ago, you know, not even a hundred years ago, but literally in our lifetimes, like, you know, not that long ago. And again, I say this is 1963. This is, you know, six years before Sesame Street, you know, was what became - and by the way, Sesame Street was banned in the state of Mississippi because it was interracial. The Muppets were different colors and the people on the street were different races. I swear to you.
APRIL RYAN (03:21):
And they created Sesame Street for us, correct?
JOY REID (03:22):
They create Sesame Street for Black kids to get Black kids up to speed. You know, you think about the fact that when Myrlie Evers-Williams finally moves to California as a single mom of three little kids, she couldn't open a bank account because women couldn't open a bank account without a husband until the late 1970s after Roe v. Wade. You think about the fact that her husband was killed 10 years before women got bodily autonomy. They're already trying to take it. Before affirmative action, which Dr. King pushed for, they're already trying to take it. The little gains that we made in the 20th century were made in large part because of World War II and the World War II generation. All these Black men that went overseas and saw the world came back and fought to give the world to their families. And there were World War II heroes on both sides of this story. I mean, there were World War II heroes and villains. Kennedy connected to Medgar Evers because they were both World War II veterans. It's one of their connections. It's one of the reasons he respected him and put him in Arlington National Cemetery. So what I, as I say, is to say the reason we need our history is that these are the building blocks of our democracy. Our history is how we got here, for wherever we are, and if we want to go further, we need knowledge of the past so that we can step on those steps and keep moving forward. Without that knowledge, we're going to fall into disrepair as a country. We're barely hanging on to our democracy, and voting is the key to continuing to be one. And so what I implore you to do is just... Don't roll your eyes the next time someone says people died for your right to vote. Because literally, Medgar Evers died for your right to vote. And Myrlie Evers-Williams became a widow for your right to vote. And so let's, in honor of the people who all died younger than Kobe Bryant was when he died, kids, young people, did all this for us. So the least we can do is save our democracy and go into that ballot in the primary and the general from the rooter to the tooter, school board to president, please vote. [Applause]
APRIL RYAN (03:23):
I'm inspired. I hope you are inspired. The book by Joy Reid, the book by Joy Reid, New York Times bestselling author. It went to number one, and you know why. The book is "Medgar and Myrlie
JOY REID (03:24):
My sister, April Ryan, everybody, homegirl, hometown girl. I'm so proud of you.
APRIL RYAN (03:25):
I'm so proud of you.
JOY REID (03:26):
Thank you.
APRIL RYAN (03:27):
And the incredible Joy Reid, thank you.
[Applause]
ALISA ROSENTHAL (03:29):
To learn more about Joy Reid, head to the show notes or chicagohumanities.org.
Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with help from the hardworking staff over at Chicago Humanities who are producing the live events and making them sound great. If you’ve been enjoying our programming, the best way to support the podcast is to leave a rating and review, click subscribe to be notified about new episodes, and scroll through previous episodes for a gem you might’ve missed. And hey we want to hear what you think! Fill out the short survey in the show notes to help shape the future of the podcast. We’ll be back in two weeks with another new episode for you. Thanks for listening, and as always, stay human.
[Theme music plays]
[Cassette tape player clicks closed]
[Theme music plays]
JOY REID (00:01):
Both Coretta Scott King and Myrlie Evers-Williams, they could have been famous on their own without ever meeting these men. They were both brilliant singers and Ms. Myrlie is a brilliant piano player. And Coretta had a whole career as a singer, so did Myrlie. Myrlie was in a group called The Chansonettes. And they were a very popular girl singing group in Vicksburg, Mississippi. They would tour around the city, around like this little Black circuit. And so she had her own thing. And her grandmother and her aunt told her, even as she's growing up, they had no money, they didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had dignity. And the grandma and the aunt said, you are so talented, one day you're gonna play Carnegie Hall. Which seemed like an improbable thing to say to a little girl in the 19, a little Black girl in the 1940s, but that's the way they raised her, with that level of dignity. Coretta, similarly, she was a singer. Very talented, beautiful, glamorous. And so these men, in a way, you know, are the ones who got lucky marrying these incredible women.
APRIL RYAN (00:02):
Yes. Yes.
[Theme music plays]
[Cassette tape player clicks open]
ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:05):
Hey all, thanks for checking out Chicago Humanities Tapes – the audio extension of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m your host Alisa Rosenthal, here to help you find the answers to humanity’s biggest questions by bringing you the best of the best of the live festivals. If you’re in Chicago, check out some of our upcoming live events this spring 2025. Tickets are on sale now for Chris Hayes, Ezra Klein, Jon Batiste, Heather Cox Richardson, Eve Ewing, and more.
Head to chicagohumanities.org for ticket information and to sign up for our email list.
Today (00:07):
political commentator and New York Times best-selling author Joy Reid, joined by veteran reporter April Ryan in front of a full house at the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple to discuss Reid’s book "Medgar and Myrlie
Recorded in April 2024, nearly a year before Reid was fired from MSNBC and her show The ReidOut was removed from the lineup, please enjoy this celebration of Reid and Ryan, two sorority sisters sharing and making history.
[Theme music plays]
[Audience applause]
APRIL RYAN (00:11):
Woo! Up high! Up high! Hello! That's what I'm saying, up top.
JOY REID (00:12):
Yes, hello, up top.
APRIL RYAN (00:13):
And down below. Come on soros. First, hold on, hold on. Good morning, Chicago. And down below.
JOY REID (00:14):
Good morning April!
APRIL RYAN (00:15):
What a welcome.
JOY REID (00:16):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (00:17):
If I wasn't awake, I'm awake now.
JOY REID (00:18):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (00:19):
If I wasn't awake, I'm awake now.
JOY REID (00:20):
Hallelujah. We're in church. We can say hallelujah.
APRIL RYAN (00:21):
Praise him, praise him. We're gonna let you know, whatever you hear, keep it clean because earthly and up there are listening. Come on.
JOY REID (00:22):
Come on choir.
APRIL RYAN (00:23):
Oh yes.
JOY REID (00:24):
It's so good to see you and be with you. In soror. Soror.
APRIL RYAN (00:25):
Soror, come on, all my deltas. Delta Sigma Theta. Yes, Incorporated. For those of you who don't know, if you don't know about DST, Google it. But we -
JOY REID (00:26):
And the whole D9, because wherever our Delta Sigma Theta soros are, we know there's AKAs.
APRIL RYAN (00:27):
Yes!
JOY REID (00:28):
We there's Sigmas. We know everybody, we know the brothers are out here. You know there's always some Qs, there's some, okay, where they at? You know they always there. Sigmas. Zetas, yes. The Alphas is always here, too. Let's not be getting by the Kappas, OK? OK, we're just making sure we name check everybody.
APRIL RYAN (00:29):
All right, all right, all right. It's all love, it's all love. First of all, let me say it is an honor to be in Chicago, but to be here with you, my sister. You hold it down at seven o 'clock at night Eastern.
JOY REID (00:30):
6 pm Chicago time.
APRIL RYAN (00:31):
6 pm Chicago time. I watch you, and I'm amazed. I'm amazed at your thoughts. I'm amazed at your wit and how quick you can fire back. And then you could write about anything, but you choose to come and tell us about our history in a time when they're banning our books and telling us we don't belong. Sister, and this not only is a book. It is the number-one New York Times bestseller, "Medgar and Myrlie," and this is a special moment for me because you have taken attacks from those who don't want the truth to be told. And I thank you for standing strong.
JOY REID (00:32):
Thank you, Soro.
APRIL RYAN (00:33):
I thank you for standing strong. So this is a love story, Medgar and Myrlie. And one of the reasons why I said I wanted to do this, and I don't think you know this
JOY REID (00:34):
Well, and I first want to say I want to thank the team in this beautiful church for having us here, the pastor of the church. Thank you all for having us here and thanks Chicago Humanities Festival. It's very exciting to be here with my fellow book nerds. We love that. And of course, to be with my soro - we normally text. So now we can actually see each other in person, because both our schedules are so crazy that we're normally on text message. So it's just good to see you in person. And happy One Day Past Harold Washington Day. April 12, 1983, I was in middle school, or I should say I was in middle school, I was one year old, I was a toddler. No, right, 1983, and I wanted to mention that because him becoming, you know, the first Black mayor of Chicago, happening in the 1980s, occurs because we have the movements that were led by people like Medgar Evers in the 1960s. And so there was a precursor to being able to elect Black leadership even in a northern city like Chicago. And you and I both know that there are incredible links, not just that railroad train station, between Chicago and Mississippi. They're inextricably linked. If you are a Black Chicagoan, your people are probably from Mississippi. There's a connection.
APRIL RYAN (00:35):
Yeah, and as we say the connection, let's talk about the connection with... a boy, who lived here in Chicago, and his mother sent him.
JOY REID (00:36):
Home. Right. To her mother's home. Where she came from.
APRIL RYAN (00:37):
And Medgar Evers was involved in that. We're talking about none other than the Emmett Till story. And during that time, and before we came out, Joy and I were talking. You know, we knew the state was racist. But it became known as the most racist state in the nation, not just because of Emmett Till, but then on top of that, the murder, the assassination of Medgar Evers. So talk to me about the movement with Medgar and Myrlie, the love story, and the tie, the Chicago and Mississippi through, starting with Emmett Till.
JOY REID (00:38):
So to go back, so just to wrap it all together, the reason I wanted to write about the Everses, not just Medgar Evers, I wanted to write about Medgar Evers because it kind of shocks me and saddens me that so many people don't know who he is.
APRIL RYAN (00:39):
I can't believe that.
JOY REID (00:40):
Which is wild, right? James Baldwin said the three greats in the civil rights movement were, you know, Malcolm, Martin, and Medgar. And so I listened to whatever whatever he says, James Baldwin, our greatest American writer, in my opinion. And so I always felt that the Medgar part of that trio was underwritten about and underknown. The second reason I wrote the book is because I just fell in love with Myrlie Evers-Williams. She is just such a dear and wonderful human being. I got a chance to interview her. I'd interviewed her before, but interviewed her in person in 2018. And we just had this conversation, and I knew that she was herself a civil rights icon. She'd become the leader of the NAACP. But when you just talk to her, what she gives you is this love story. She, to this day, is still madly in love with Medgar Evers, as if it was yesterday. And so you couldn't tell his story without telling their story together. And the third piece I'll say is that there's a connection because of the Emmett Till case, which was the first case that Medgar Evers investigated for the NAACP. He was field secretary for the NAACP in the state of Mississippi.
APRIL RYAN (00:41):
The first ever.
JOY REID (00:42):
The first ever. They actually created the job for him because what he really wanted to do was to go to law school. He wanted to go to Ole Miss so that he could become Thurgood Marshall. That was his original plan was to become a lawyer and to be Thurgood Marshall. But he was dissuaded from doing that. An NAACP leadership who had sort of had an eye on him for years said, we have a better idea. They flew him to New York and said, we're going to create a job for you, field secretary for Statewide for the NAACP. The first big case he did was the Emmett Till case. Now, Medgar and Myrlie had a history in Chicago because like most Mississippians, they had a connection, they had family here. And Medgar Evers and his brother Charles summered almost every summer in Chicago. They did the reverse of what Emmett Till did. They would come up here and they would spend time with an aunt. And one of the pieces of the love story that really connects Medgar and Myrlie, they were in college together at Alcorn State in Mississippi. But one -
APRIL RYAN (00:43):
Where she pledged Delta.
JOY REID (00:44):
Where she pledged Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated! Wise, wise young woman, even at 17. And so, but when she started dating Medgar, her grandmother and her aunt, they were appalled, because he was seven years older than her. He was older than her.
APRIL RYAN (00:45):
25 with attitude.
JOY REID (00:46):
With attitude.
APRIL RYAN (00:47):
In the South.
JOY REID (00:48):
And a veteran.
APRIL RYAN (00:49):
Yes.
JOY REID (00:50):
Which they were like, stay away from them upperclassmen and football players, and the veterans, he was all three.
APRIL RYAN (00:51):
But wait a minute, and a Black man in the south at that time with attitude, what they call attitude. Today we call it swag.
JOY REID (00:52):
Swag. And that was dangerous at that time, but he had grown up in the family reading the Chicago Defender. And so they were a family that gave their kids affirmation. And as a matter of fact, Medgar and his brother Charles used to sell the Chicago Defender because they were a very sort of activist family in a way. Not real activists, but just they didn't bow down to white people. That's the way that their father raised them. And so they would sell the Chicago Defender until the white locals like stopped them from selling it. So there was a whole story in the book about that. But the final sort of crystallization of their romance was when they convinced Myrlie's grandma and aunt to let them both spend the summer in Chicago, not staying together, she stayed with her aunt, he stayed with his aunt, but they spent the summer here and that's where they really crystallized their romance and their love and decided to get married.
APRIL RYAN (00:53):
So let's say this, so he was, she was 17, he was 25, and at one point they had not kissed, and he said, I'm gonna make you into the woman I want you to be. I was like, what?
JOY REID (00:54):
That's what she said. She said, what?
APRIL RYAN (00:55):
I was like, wait a minute. But yeah, I mean, think about that. 50s and 60s and men were looking for a certain type of woman. And Myrlie Evers, for those of you who understand, thank you for your wisdom. For those of you who don't, read the book. So, but she had her own, she reminds me of Coretta Scott King in a lot of ways. She was a singer, she had her own, she was moving, she wanted to be an educator. And she had her own, but then here comes this man up and changed her life, literally.
JOY REID (00:56):
And I love the connection to Coretta. They actually ended up being dear friends along with Dr. Betty Shabazz because they shared this horrible experience. But what she shared with Coretta, both Coretta Scott King and Myrlie Evers-Williams, they could have been famous on their own without ever meeting these men. They were both brilliant singers and Ms. Myrlie is a brilliant piano player. And Coretta had a whole career as a singer, so did Myrlie. Myrlie was in a group called The Chansonettes. And they were a very popular girl singing group in Vicksburg, Mississippi. They would tour around the city, around like this little Black circuit. And so she had her own thing. And her grandmother and her aunt told her, even as she's growing up, they had no money, they didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had dignity. And the grandma and the aunt said, you are so talented, one day you're gonna play Carnegie Hall. Which seemed like an improbable thing to say to a little girl in the 19, a little Black girl in the 1940s, but that's the way they raised her, with that level of dignity. Coretta, similarly, she was a singer. Very talented, beautiful, glamorous. And so these men, in a way, you know, are the ones who got lucky marrying these incredible women.
APRIL RYAN (00:57):
Yes. Yes.
JOY REID (00:58):
Right? And but because it was the 1950s no matter how talented and accomplished you were as a woman once you were married you were the chief cook bottle washer you know laundress you know that's what you became and that's what both of these women became but you also became the sounding board when they're giving a speech or the person that they're practicing it with the person who's advising them on style and presentation because it was the women who knew how to do that. And so they were a key partner in the movement, we just don't often hear about their role.
APRIL RYAN (00:59):
And for those of you who have the book on the last two graphs of page 43, listen to them opening the book. "He seemed to get a kick out of challenging Myrlie, frequently, leaving her both annoyed and enraged. He surprised her one day when out of the blue he said, 'You're going to be the mother of my children.' When she objected, considering that they had never kissed, his reply was equally blunt
JOY REID (01:00):
So read her response, she said, "You got a whole job ahead of you if you think that's what you're going to do." So she was tough. She did not put up with his stuff. But yeah, their relationship was, it kind of reminded me a little bit of "Moonlighting." I don't know if y 'all are old enough to remember "Moonlighting." They were like the Bickersons. They would like bigger. They were like Ralph Cramden and his wife on "The Honeymooners." So they would constantly be at each other because he was constantly challenging her. First of all, the age difference. So he was much more worldly and just knew more. But she wanted to be up to his level. I mean, she would study and try to get up on world affairs just to talk to him, because she was like, I'm not going to be unequal in this conversation. I'm going to be able to bring my own opinions to bear. And honey, when I tell you she brought her opinions to bear.
APRIL RYAN (01:01):
She to this day is a force. She's 91, right?
JOY REID (01:02):
She is 91 years young and fresh.
APRIL RYAN (01:03):
Fresh. She is a force to be reckoned with.
JOY REID (01:04):
Yeah.
APRIL RYAN (01:05):
And she was a force throughout this whole time. But let's get to the point there. Let's talk about the Emmett Till trial. Let's talk about all of that, how it helped form her and shape them as a couple to move higher and give more recognition to Medgar, also making the NAACP say, "Hmm."
JOY REID (01:06):
I mean, this was one of the instances in which Myrlie was super proud of Medgar, but really terrified. Because what he had to do in order to investigate this murder of this Chicago boy who was staying with his uncle in Mississippi when he was kidnapped and lynched, the state of Mississippi tried to bury it and cover it up. Because it was an illustration of how bold the Klan had become that they would kill a northern boy. Normally, they would kill scores of Black men, women, and children, but no one ever said anything about it. These cases never went anywhere because people need to understand that it was essentially legal for white people to kill Black people in the United States really up until maybe the 1970s or 80s like there was -
APRIL RYAN (01:07):
Wait a minute wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on.
JOY REID (01:08):
It was legal.
APRIL RYAN (01:09):
Let's just talk about just, was it last year? We just got the federal anti-lynching act.
JOY REID (01:10):
We just got that.
APRIL RYAN (01:11):
We just got it, it just became a law.
JOY REID (01:12):
Yeah, and Ida B. Wells was fighting for that from the early 20th century and they couldn't get it because what happened was you had an oligarchy in the South and you had at the top of it the planter class who had been the enslavers. After slavery, they lost a lot of money and they lost a lot of workers. but they tried to reassemble as best they could the same situation where they had cheap access to cheap Black labor. And so subordinating Black people was job one, two, three, four, and five, making sure they didn't get educated, making sure they didn't leave and couldn't leave the plantation and keeping them down so they could still make money. And so one of the ways they did that is they constructed what they called the Mississippi Way. And it was a class system that the top class were them, the planner class. Below them is sort of a merchant class, the people who ran the banks, the people who owned the stores, the people whose stores served white people. They were that sort of next upper class. They formed these things called the White Citizens Councils. So they could foreclose on your mortgage if you joined the NAACP. They could fire you from your teaching job if you joined the NAACP or registered to vote. Then below them, you had the white merchant class whose stores served Black people. That's like the people who killed Emmett Till. They were that class which, and I can't say the word, I guess, in church, they call it a P -E -C -K -E -R -W -O -O -D. That's what the white people called that next class of white people because their shop served Black people. Those are people like the World War II veteran and his brother who killed Emmett Till. Their shop, they were considered a lower class of white, but what they did to keep that class of white people on the side of the rich white people is basically the purge. They freed them who would be the people in the Klan. They were the cops, the store owners, the working class whites. They were essentially free to kill any Black person they wanted, knowing they would never go to jail. Even if they were prosecuted, which was rare, the juries were all white male. Women could not serve on juries in Mississippi until 1968. And the Blacks could not get on the jury because what they would do is it wouldn't let you register to vote. If you can't register to vote, you're not in the jury pool. And if you try to register to vote, they just kill you or get you fired or do whatever they needed to do. So you essentially were guaranteed legal, the purge. And so that class of people were the enforcers of the system. And then at the bottom were the Blacks. And so, you know, when this investigation happens, you've got Medgar Evers having to try to find Black people who are terrorized. They are a terrorized group of Mississippians. And he gets three of them to testify against these two men who, again, knew they could legally kill this boy. They go to trial and he gets not only the uncle to testify and then puts him immediately on the $11.50 train to Chicago to get him out of town with his family.
APRIL RYAN (01:13):
$11.50 train.
JOY REID (01:14):
It was an $11.50 one-way ticket. And people would do it to get out of Mississippi. It's how the Great Migration happened. People just got on that train and came here. And so he got them out, and then you had two people who worked on neighboring plantations, one who heard the screams of the boy as he was being beaten to death, and another who knew and worked for one of the Milam, one of the two killers, and knew that he'd done it. Those two also, he got them to testify. It's incredibly brave for them to do that, and then he got them out of town. But it was because there were witnesses that they had to go through with a real trial, and because the whole world knew about it because of Jet Magazine. Because Mamie Till said, if you're gonna kill my boy, you're going to see it, everyone's gonna see it. And she was inspired to do that by a woman named Rosebud Lee. Rosebud Lee's husband, Reverend George Lee, was killed for trying to register Blacks to vote. He went up to the voter registration place with a batch of applications from Black people. And the Klan pulled up beside his car, shot his jaw off. And then the sheriffs declared it was just a car accident that killed him. And the reason his jaw was off is that his fillings flew out of his mouth, and it was just an accident. And that's what caused his death. But Reverend Rosebud Lee said, it ain't going down like that. And she actually originated the open casket funeral, the horror of an open casket funeral, to make sure that people understood what the Klan had done. And Mamie Till got that idea of doing that for Emmett from her. So there are all these connections between people you don't know and the people you do. But for Medgar, it was publicizing those lynchings and not letting them go unremarked on that was just as important as getting justice.
APRIL RYAN (01:15):
And as the lynchings and Emmett Till, everything was being publicized, people were, white people in the racist state of Mississippi had their eye on Medgar Evers.
JOY REID (01:16):
Yeah.
APRIL RYAN (01:17):
Let's talk about this Lena Horne concert. Lena Horne and Dick Gregory came down to Mississippi in support of the movement. And there were 3,000 - first of all, when just two Black folks come together in some spaces, it's considered a conspiracy. And back then, there were laws that Black people could not congregate like that. You, in your book, said 3,000 Black folks were there. 3,000. But then they had some spies in the midst. Talk about that.
JOY REID (01:18):
So, right, and this is one of the reasons, and one of the tensions in the book, you know, Miss Myrlie was, she did like to speak up, and one of the things that she constantly communicated to Medgar was just terror. You know, when he was investigating the Emmett Till case, she was terrified. He would spend 12 hours a day driving into the Mississippi Delta dressed as a sharecropper to investigate these killings. She was scared the whole time. And as you build up to that concert, it was more of a speech. It was like a whole rally in the Masonic Temple in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963. The build-up to that was just constant terrorism even into their home. People calling day and night, threatening to blow up the home, kill the children, you know, shoot Medgar, shoot her or shoot the kids. It was just constant. And she was a very reluctant civil rights wife. She didn't want him in this business because she wanted him to be alive. But by the time you get to Dick Gregory and Lena Horne coming down, Medgar had built up what he really wanted was a King-style movement in Jackson. He wanted boycotts, he wanted the same kind of things that were happening in Birmingham to happen in Mississippi. His bosses did not agree, but the young people did.
APRIL RYAN (01:19):
His bosses, name names.
JOY REID (01:20):
The NAACP, Roy Wilkins and the NAACP were very much against what he was doing. So this is a man who was being constantly threatened with being fired by his NAACP leadership, constantly facing death threats, had no personal security. The NAACP notoriously told him they had better things to do with their money than to protect him. And he was at odds with his wife because she was scared and wanted him to just not do it. So into all of that you get this sort of big final rally where Dick Gregory and Lena Horne come to town. Now, when these celebrities come, they have to stay with the Everses or stay with another Black family because they couldn't stay in hotels. And so, you know, Myrlie is figuring out, how do I feed these celebrities? What do we have in our budget? Because I don't have extra money to do this. They're fighting about that. But the other thing that happens at this big meeting is that there are interlopers in the room. And Medgar's secretary, who used to be Myrlie, Myrlie used to be the secretary, but when she has her third child, she stops working and is a stay at home mom. The secretary says she notices this man who comes into this meeting, he's smoking a cigarette, he's scowling, he's sitting in the front, but he's not engaging in any way. So she sends one of the other NAACP workers down to engage him, he doesn't engage, he eventually leaves. She later testifies that she believes that that man was Byron De La Beckwith.
APRIL RYAN (01:21):
And what's happened to Byron De La Beckwith?
JOY REID (01:22):
Well, it's interesting, because you mentioned living in that town in Tennessee, where he's from.
APRIL RYAN (01:23):
Chattanooga.
JOY REID (01:24):
Chattanooga, Tennessee.
APRIL RYAN (01:25):
Ten months and I was out.
JOY REID (01:26):
Ten months and you were out. Well, three years after that intersection of the two of you in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that man was starting life imprisonment in prison because Myrlie vowed when he killed her husband, and he was also a World War II veteran. This is a story about World War II veterans on both sides of the fascist line, because some of them fought fascism overseas and then came home and were fascists at home, because he was a veteran too. But Myrlie vowed to get him. It took her 30 years, but in 1994, partly because of evidence she still had in her possession and some new evidence uncovered by a brilliant reporter named Mr. Mitchell, he got incarcerated and spent the rest of his miserable life in prison.
APRIL RYAN (01:27):
Now when we say love, love is an action word. And that was after death. You know, "til death" - I'm sure they've had many weddings here, "til death do us part." But when he transitioned this world, she was still determined to find justice for her husband who did not get the recognition and the designations that he should have received. And as we speak of their security, the children couldn't play outside in the wooded lot next door. And this is on page 175 at the bottom for those of you who have your book. "They already lived with safety plans. Never sit or stand by the window. Always exit the car on the front passenger side to be closer to the house's front door and avoid the large wooded lot adjacent to the young's home. Medgar had walked the lot area during the day and had decided it was not safe. He discouraged the children from exploring and playing there." And there's more. Living a life like that in the 1960s when you've got people watching you and you're trying to push for voting rights, you're trying to push for just first class citizenship for Blacks in a racist state, he was a target. And the NAACP made him the first Mississippi -
JOY REID (01:28):
Field secretary.
APRIL RYAN (01:29):
Field secretary, but yet doing all of this work he was not protected. So let's move on.
JOY REID (01:30):
Yeah, and the thing is, just to give you the context, you know, Vernon Jordan is, right? So Vernon Jordan had the same job in Georgia. So they were designating field secretaries to cover the state, and then they had a state president and they had all these other officials. But this creation of this idea of a field secretary, they were an investigator. That was really their job, and they were supposed to also sign up memberships. And so the NAACP said, you have two jobs. You can investigate these crimes, that's fine. Sign up people for memberships, we have three jobs, and register Blacks to vote. And I can remember having a conversation with Vernon Jordan years ago when I did my first book. He used to work upstairs for me in 30 Rock. He was on the 65th floor at the financial firm that he worked in. I remember going up there, I would go up there and sit with Mr. Vernon Jordan. He was an amazing man.
APRIL RYAN (01:31):
He was.
JOY REID (01:32):
He spoke with this deep voice. He was amazing, but I remember him telling me that he would be on the phone with Medgar, and Medgar would be just broken and say, and considered himself a failure because he's like, I can't register these people to vote. They're too scared. I mean, Georgia was bad, but Mississippi was worse. And the number of lynchings per capita in Mississippi was so high. I mean, it was the lynching capital of America. And by the way, I believe number two or three on the list was Florida. People try to act like Florida's not in the south.
APRIL RYAN (01:33):
What state? What? What? What?
JOY REID (01:34):
Florida was bad. Florida was much worse than you think it was. But Miss -
APRIL RYAN (01:35):
It's bad now, ok?
JOY REID (01:36):
Well.
APRIL RYAN (01:37):
The NAACP has a travel ban. Well travel advisory, not a ban.
JOY REID (01:38):
But let me just let y'all know, Florida is waking up, though. Florida might be waking up. Florida, they might've had enough. I think that he might've done too much. Florida, we can table that.
APRIL RYAN (01:39):
Who did too much? Call names.
JOY REID (01:40):
DeSantis. I think DeSantis.
APRIL RYAN (01:41):
DeSantis?
JOY REID (01:42):
He's called it. DeSantis, he keep changing how you say it.
APRIL RYAN (01:43):
DeSantis.
JOY REID (01:44):
DeSantis did too much. And for nothing, cause he's never gonna be president. You wasted your time, buddy. Um, you might have done too much. But, I mean...
APRIL RYAN (01:45):
We getting too spicy for these folks.
JOY REID (01:46):
You can't put us together you can't put us together. Ask your next question.
APRIL RYAN (01:47):
Oh my gosh. You know, but as we talk about this magnificent couple, not just Medgar, but Myrlie, and one of the things, before we go into these questions that people have asked, one thing that I said to you, you know, Medgar Evers died, he was assassinated in the summer of 1963, just months before the March on Washington, and Myrlie Evers loved him so much, ladies and gentlemen, listen to this
JOY REID (01:48):
Yeah. Yeah.
APRIL RYAN (01:49):
She made sure. That it's just, it's, it's, I think Mr. Williams was a dynamic man.
JOY REID (01:50):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (01:51):
You know, to do that. I mean, it's just the whole thing. It just boggles my, I mean, she is an amazing woman.
JOY REID (01:52):
Yeah. Well, and so, and Walt Williams is the second husband, and he was an incredible person as well. And as you said, it takes a big man and a very secure man to marry someone -
APRIL RYAN (01:53):
Gentlemen, did you hear that?
JOY REID (01:54):
Very secure. Well, he was a longshoreman.
APRIL RYAN (01:55):
I'm sorry, I look like I pointed to you, I was just pointing, I'm sorry.
JOY REID (01:56):
You! Do you understand?
APRIL RYAN (01:57):
I'm sorry, no. Sorry, sir, I'm sorry, you are a great man. I can see it all over you. I can see it.
JOY REID (01:58):
So, I mean, and when she married him, he actually saw her speak, you know, she gave speeches after, in order to make money, in order to survive. And so he saw her giving a speech and that's how he actually said, I'm gonna, he said, and he said to himself, "I'm gonna marry that woman and take care of her children." And when she, when they met, she said, seriously. And he was a big. He revered Medgar Evers himself, and when he approached her, he said, "I revered your husband. I got into activism in part because of your husband." He was in California doing the longshoreman piece of the civil rights work. And he said, I want to take care of you and your children. And she said, "OK, good luck with that. I ain't marrying nobody else." Because what she would always, and she said it to me, and I'm going to do my Myrlie Evers voice, she would say to you, "Medgar Evers was the love of my life." And she talks like that. That's how she sounds. That was a pretty good one.
APRIL RYAN (01:59):
It was, it really was, it really was.
JOY REID (02:00):
But that's how she sounds! And so she said, she said that to him, but he said, "I get it, but I love you enough to love you as you continue to love him. All I need is a piece of your love and I want to take care of you." And he did until the day he died, honey, and when she ran... when, listen, and the two people who convinced her to run for NAACP board chair were the great Joe Madison, the Black -
APRIL RYAN (02:01):
Yes! Lift his name!
JOY REID (02:02):
And Walt. And the two of them talked her into running, and Walt was her campaign manager. And sadly enough, he died the day after she won, of cancer. So she's lost two great loves, but what she'll tell you, and what I love about Ms. Myrlie, is she is not a self-pityer. What she says is that, how lucky am I that I had not one but two great loves in my life. She says, I've always been loved. And that's what she'll tell you within her great joy is that she is never gonna date in her life without being loved.
APRIL RYAN (02:03):
Amen.
JOY REID (02:04):
That's power.
APRIL RYAN (02:05):
Ooh, I got something in the pit of my stomach with this. But before -
JOY REID (02:06):
Newlywed.
APRIL RYAN (02:07):
I am a newlywed, I am. I am. I feel like, I feel like Mrs. Evers-Williams. I got a good man, retired naval officer.
JOY REID (02:08):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (02:09):
Who said, I'm gonna take it on. He said -
JOY REID (02:10):
Listen.
APRIL RYAN (02:11):
"Let somebody mess with you." I said praise God! But you know, I mean, seriously, what we've been, I mean, you don't know, you don't know what it feels like -
JOY REID (02:12):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (02:13):
To have people go after you. And your safety is compromised. And for this woman to still stand, "and still I rise."
JOY REID (02:14):
Yeah. And she became so close to Dr. Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King for that same reason, but I always remind people she was the template for them. Because her man died -
APRIL RYAN (02:15):
She was the first.
JOY REID (02:16):
Two years before Malcolm and five years before King. She was the first, and she had nobody to pattern herself. She couldn't pattern herself off of Mamie Till. Mamie was a mother grieving her child. because her man died. She didn't have a Rosebud Lee. She had herself, she walked out of her front door in grief and terror, having watched her husband bleed to death in front of her.
APRIL RYAN (02:17):
And not knowing if she was gonna be shot again.
JOY REID (02:18):
Not knowing if she was gonna be shot again. And Dan Rather and the CBS News crew that next morning is right there in her face. And she had to decide right then and there, what do I do? She had to go back into her Chansonettes training, go back into what she knew as a performer and say, I have to perform because I can't walk out here and be too angry. I can't be too sad. I can't have too much tears on my face. I can't look too pretty. I can't look too ugly. Think about that as a Black woman in 1963, what she had to do in order to survive. And then on top of that, she said she was enraged, but she couldn't show it. But she said, you know what, I'm going to bury my rage and turn it into justice. She said, if it takes 1,000 years, I'm going to get that man into prison. And she surely did. She got him!
APRIL RYAN (02:19):
She did, I remember on the television, I remember her, and I know Whoopi played her, but I remember her. "Medgar!" I remember her putting her hands on her head, crying, I was just, I was so happy for her and for our culture, because justice -
JOY REID (02:20):
Was done.
APRIL RYAN (02:21):
Was done. It took decades, but it happened. And as we speak of that, I want to go to the funeral. You wanted to talk about the funeral of Medgar Evers. And then we're going to go to the questions.
JOY REID (02:22):
So, and I'll be very quick because I know we want to answer your question. So, it was a case very similar to the Till funeral that became a form of activism in and of itself. Dr. King came to the funeral, but he was not allowed to speak because the NAACP did not, was not fond of Dr. King. They were, they didn't like his methods and didn't want him to be prominent. So, he didn't speak, but he marched afterwards. And then the young people who also marched behind him, they started what almost was a riot because they began to sing a song, a freedom song, that Medgar loved. [Singing] "This little light of mine -"
APRIL RYAN (02:23):
"I'm gonna let it shine, oh, this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine."
JOY REID (02:24):
And they've started pointing to the Capitol that they're gonna let it shine on Capitol Street, and the police just lost it and started beating people and hosing people and doing what they do. But that moment really showed that his activism survived him, and that young people were not gonna be deterred. They were determined to have freedom, and ultimately, they got it.
APRIL RYAN (02:25):
And the irony is, King wasn't allowed to speak at the funeral. Myrlie wasn't allowed to speak at the March on Washington.
JOY REID (02:26):
Well, no, she would. She would have been. And that is a misnomer. People think that she wasn't allowed to speak. Myrlie was the only woman designated to speak on the stage as one of the big six. They had no women, something that really bothered Coretta Scott King. She was very annoyed by it and wrote about it in her memoir. But they said the one woman they invited was Myrlie. And the last thing I'll say is that, think about it, the March on Washington was in part a reaction to the assassination and to Kennedy's being slow. When Kennedy finally agrees to do a civil rights bill, the first person he hands a copy of that bill to is Myrlie in the White House as she's standing there with her kids. He promised to redo it, then he started dragging his feet trying to do a tax cut. It was his big plan for reelection was a tax cut. He veers off and doesn't do it. to push him, King and Bayard Rustin, Bayard Rustin, decided we're going to march on him. They weren't marching for Kennedy. They were marching on Kennedy because he was taking too long. The speech that Dr. King gives, the I Have a Dream speech, he gave that speech actually weeks earlier in Detroit. But in that version of the same speech, he says, "I have a dream that one day people like Emmett Till and Medgar Evers can live to adulthood in freedom." He cuts that out of this speech in DC because the Kennedys are freaking out that they're gonna be 200,000 Blacks in DC. DC empties out because they think they're gonna be riots. There are no riots. It's peaceful and it becomes legendary. But Medgar Evers is part of that story. He's just not told as part of that story.
APRIL RYAN (02:27):
Sister, you are walking history. How you feeling?
AUDIENCE (02:28):
Good.
APRIL RYAN (02:29):
Good because I'm like, woo, I got chills. So here's the first question from Alicia Roberts Novak
JOY REID (02:30):
It is. And he was not on the side of saying that court challenges alone can change. That was one of the big tensions between himself and the NAACP, is they wanted to do it all through court challenges. And groups like the NAACP were filing that. And the full-scale fight against Voting Rights Act means that his work is still relevant because it was not just about court challenges from the NAACP. His work was about boycotts. It was about using economic power to try to constrain fascism. And it was about being vocal. He started a newspaper. It was about being loud and not allowing people to commit racism in silence and with the complicity of silence. So his work was not just about court challenges. So what he would say is, this is proof that court challenges are never gonna be enough. You have to have a full-scale plan to combat racial supremacy, because unfortunately, white supremacy and white nationalism, they're always gonna be with us to a certain extent and so we just have to have a strategy that's bigger than just court cases, but yeah, that's very bad news.
APRIL RYAN (02:31):
And for all intents and purposes, we are voting without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It has been gutted.
JOY REID (02:32):
And understand that Ronald Reagan is elected only 12 years after the assassination of Dr. King. And John Roberts worked for Ronald Reagan's administration as a lawyer in the Justice Department. And one of his main things and main causes throughout his life as a lawyer has been to end and get rid of the Voting Rights Act. That has been one of his passions, John Roberts. And that's the least right wing of the six. So that's the reality is that we have six justices and all of that is because of the thing Medgar keeps trying to tell everybody you gotta do. Voting is the only power you have. Voting is determining who's in the Senate, who controls the Senate, controls the Supreme Court. It's all, when people say somebody died for your right to vote, he did, like literally. Literally, and if you don't use your vote, look what you're giving up.
APRIL RYAN (02:33):
Exactly. Please, please, seriously, get your children, you know what, I'm gonna implore you, we are not telling the stories of yesterday, and that's why this book is so important. Please get some young people and tell them the stories, because I don't like to hear what I'm hearing. And you know, we're not gonna get into it.
JOY REID (02:34):
Well, I mean, look, we are here. Trevor Reed's family is now mourning. We have another person mourning another death. All of these cases and who decides them, normally an elected official that people vote for, a prosecutor, in some states, a sheriff. Down to that, down to the school board, what you can read. It's all voting. And the thing is, what Medgar was fighting for was Black access, not even to the general election, to the primaries. How do you think MAGA controls the Republican Party? The primaries. Because they know that Republicans are gonna vote Team Jersey in the general. It doesn't matter who wins the primary. Republicans are gonna line up and vote for them in the general, and so the primary is the election. And so he was essentially, because Democrats were locked out of the Democratic primaries, that's how they locked them out of the voting booth. You couldn't vote in the primary. The primary is the election. Start thinking about what you're doing. If you're not showing up in primaries, you skipped the main part of your power.
APRIL RYAN (02:35):
That's true. People don't wanna vote. Right, but let's say if this beautiful church happened to be located in Kentucky, and they're talking about, say her name Breonna Taylor, Daniel Cameron could wind up being in Mitch McConnell's space.
JOY REID (02:36):
But why is he not? Because when people looked at what Daniel Cameron did, and then his name was on the ballot. And then his name was on the ballot, people said, thank you, but no.
APRIL RYAN (02:37):
Right. But Mitch McConnell, they're trying to set it up for him to take Mitch McConnell's place. They're trying.
JOY REID (02:38):
And all I have to say is, the governor of the state of Kentucky is a D -E -M -O -C -R -A -T, which means that a Democrat can win statewide in Kentucky. A Democrat has been the governor of Louisiana recently. Mr. Presley, Elvis Presley, can, could have won in Mississippi if people voted. Louisiana could have kept the Democratic governor. It's the only way they got Obamacare. And the Republican who tried to take Obamacare in Kentucky got mowed down and defeated by Governor Beshear because Governor Beshear's dad had allowed Obamacare. These people had not had access to healthcare in decades. They finally got it and they were like, we hate Obamacare. And they were like, connect. They called it connect. They don't even know what it is. And so the guy ran and said, I'm going to I'm going to repeal Obamacare. They were like, yeah. They put him in. He was like, now let me repeal connect. They went, don't you take my connect. And he said, but I'm taking away Obamacare. And they realized Obamacare is connect. Get out. And they put Beshear in. Voting is power. They kicked him out. He tried to take away their Obamacare.
APRIL RYAN (02:39):
Civics is important.
JOY REID (02:40):
Civics is important. Civics is important. If any of y'all got your student loans. Did you get your student loans taken care of? You voted. You voted, you only, you voted.
APRIL RYAN (02:41):
I need my daughter to pay my student loan back because I'm her banker, but anyway, but no, but no, but seriously, you guys, seriously, once we leave, we need you to really use critical thinking and look and talk to people because we're in one of the most critical times ever. And this history is today. If you don't believe it, I don't know what to say. We are living proof. So let me go to the next question because we're going to be preaching up here in the pool pit. But don't worry, we will not pass the collection plate. I know, but I'm ready to jump over a pew right now. How does society keep the legacy of people like the Evers alive with so many people trying to erase them from history?
JOY REID (02:42):
The thing is, is that you cannot erase our history because number one, they're trying to ban books in the age of social media. If those kids don't get it from a book, they're gonna get it from an audio book on Audible. If they don't get it from an audio book, they're gonna get it on TikTok. If they don't get it from TikTok, they can get it on "The ReidOut" on MSNBC. They can get it. You're not banning our history. And so -
APRIL RYAN (02:43):
Wait a minute, wait a minute. And if they don't get it from you if they don't get it from you they're gonna get it from APRIL RYAN
JOY REID (02:44):
They gonna get it from APRIL RYAN
APRIL RYAN (02:45):
Don't do that.
JOY REID (02:46):
No, do what you gotta do. The reality is our history is available if you want it. All you need is a desire to know the truth. The truth will not hurt you. The truth will only help you. The truth can be unpleasant. The truth can be negative. It can be harmful and hurtful. And as a white, for my white brothers and sisters here in the audience, this is not Black history. This is American history. American history. American history.
APRIL RYAN (02:47):
And this is not and this is not separation. This is not separation. This is unification for you to understand what we've been through so you can understand how to deal with us today in a time when they're messing with us again.
JOY REID (02:48):
One of my most important interviews that I did is another Reverend King, and his name is Reverend Ed King, who was the closest advisor to Medgar Evers. He was a young white Tougaloo College student. There were, oh, in Tougaloo College, he was the, he was the chaplain at Tougaloo College, but he was a student at a white college. And Medgar would go to these white colleges and speak to them, and he would put these white/Black conversations together between like Tougaloo and these white colleges to get them to talk to each other. And Ed King says when he first met Medgar, he and a group of white students, Medgar took him and drove him through the Black part of Jackson. And they just had no idea how Black Jacksonians live and it was new to them and he gave them data. He said, let me give you the poverty statistics. Let me just explain it to you in straight ahead language, non-judgmental that you will understand. Ed King then becomes super close to Medgar and throughout his life he's the last person that had an in-depth conversation with him before he died. The reality is, they are, you know, what Medgar Evers' father used to tell him, he said, there are three kinds of white people
APRIL RYAN (02:49):
That's true. And that last question came from Jasmine Beale. Thank you, Jasmine. The next question from John Anderson
JOY REID (02:50):
For sure, the most challenging chapter to write was the assassination chapter, because I had now lived with these people for like two years, because it took a while to get the Evers family to feel comfortable making their mom available, the two surviving siblings.
APRIL RYAN (02:51):
They were protective.
JOY REID (02:52):
Very protective, they were very protective of her. And so there was that, then there was the logistical thing of trying to get to her, because she's in California and you had to do a lot of it by phone. And then we went out to California and we tried to do FaceTime, but you know, seasoned citizens really can't FaceTime. So we finally went out there, although I FaceTime her on her birthday.
APRIL RYAN (02:53):
Seasoned citizens. Seasoned citizens can't do FaceTime.
JOY REID (02:54):
They don't FaceTime, they don't FaceTime. But we did end up going out and we had a wonderful day. We spent the day with her. They almost had to evict us from Van's house, the son's house. But I had lived with these people and you know, I just had a relationship with these people at this point. After we did all the research and I just sort of sat with it for a while. Then I went to Paris and did my James Baldwin moment where I went out there and I went -
APRIL RYAN (02:55):
I saw that.
JOY REID (02:56):
And did the James Baldwin tour and tried to like get into his vibe so I could write it and try to figure out how to even deal with all the research that we had. I had two researchers so I just had a ton of stuff. And then by the time I, you know, I pushed it back as far as I could, I pushed it into a later chapter because I just didn't want to, I didn't want to kill him. I didn't want to do it. You know what I mean? I really liked these people at this point. So it was really hard to finally write the chapter where he died. I cried through a lot of the book. And then there was another sort of character that to me was a person I became closest to in writing it, which is their oldest son, Darrell Kenyatta. First of all, his name being Kenyatta is kind of epic in 1952 to name your child Kenyatta. And it was a big fight between them because, you know, Medgar was obsessed with Jomo Kenyatta and the Kenyan liberation movement. So he wanted to actually name his first name Kenyatta. And Myrlie was like, that boy will not survive to be 10 years old. You're not going to be a Kenyatta in Mississippi in 1952. It's a no. So she put it in the middle. But Darrell is this sweetheart. He's this sweet boy. He's the oldest. He's only nine when his father dies. He really goes into a deep what would be a depression now. But they didn't have therapy back then. He would go in his room and not talk. Like, it was hard writing about Darrell. Darrell was the sweetest boy, you know? And so when you get to that point and you just see his, they're trained to, like, go on the floor and go into, like, a military position if they heard a gunshot, they do what they're supposed to do. They lay on top of their brother, who's three, he and Rena, she's eight, he's nine, and the baby's three. And so they lay on top, but then they hear their mother scream, and they just instinctively break their training and get up and run to the front and they see the father on the ground in a pool of blood and the police described it and looked like someone had butchered a hog. Just imagine being nine and seeing that and living through that. And he was a traumatized person. He grows up to become an artist, you know, and he just had, you know, he makes this trajectory where he decides not to be an activist, but he looks just like Medgar Evers. Like, he has that face. So he shows up in court, and he's like, I want that demon to see Medgar's face and to see him in this courtroom. And he lives to see the justice, but then he dies not long after of cancer. So it's just like a whole, that stuff is hard to write about when you feel like you've gotten to know these people. And then I'd actually gotten to know Rena and Van, and of course, spending so much time either talking to or being with Miss Myrlie. So it was hard.
APRIL RYAN (02:57):
You know I could talk to you forever, especially about this book, because it's just like, I feel like I'm welling up. I've got tears welling up. But somebody said, mm -hm. Yeah, it's deep. Yeah, it's... Because it's like watching a movie, you know what's gonna happen, but you don't want it to happen.
JOY REID (02:58):
Right, yeah.
APRIL RYAN (02:59):
But I wanna say something and ask you a question about this and then get your your final take because the hour is almost up.
JOY REID (03:00):
Yes.
APRIL RYAN (03:01):
But I know, right? So.
JOY REID (03:02):
This is like my TV show. And I'm always like, it's an hour already? I have more things. I had more things!
APRIL RYAN (03:03):
So that means that this was good.
JOY REID (03:04):
Yeah.
APRIL RYAN (03:05):
Yeah. That's mean, it means a lot for you to say that. But one of the most things, because like I said, I followed Medgar Evers and Myrlie Evers for a long time. And one thing when they were trying to go after Byron De La Beckwith, they exhumed the body. And I think God was in this. And I'm serious, you know what I'm talking about. When they exhumed the body, the body was in perfect condition, just slight bruising. And the son that was a baby when he died.
JOY REID (03:06):
Van, yeah.
APRIL RYAN (03:07):
Finally saw his father in real life in that casket that I said if God if I didn't let me tell you I think that was God all in it I think that was God all in it.
JOY REID (03:08):
Oh, for sure.
APRIL RYAN (03:09):
Yeah, people say, people say, oh, it's because of how they embalmed him, or how they sealed the case. I believe -
JOY REID (03:10):
30 years later, yeah.
APRIL RYAN (03:11):
30 years later, 30 years later, the man was in perfect condition. There are photos of this.
JOY REID (03:12):
And Van believes, you know, they're a very spiritual family, and he said that it was as if his father had waited so he could see him, because he was only three, so he really didn't remember him, you know, and when he died he was little, he was running around like, where's daddy, where's daddy, where's daddy, and just didn't understand death, and so yeah, it was, it's pretty poignant.
APRIL RYAN (03:13):
Yeah, this whole story just gets me. And sometimes you have to take off your journalistic hat and put on the humanity.
JOY REID (03:14):
Absolutely.
APRIL RYAN (03:15):
Woo, child.
JOY REID (03:16):
Well, that's the only way to do this job, to be honest with you. You know I'm not a huge believer in objectivity. I think it's kind of a lie. I think if you don't have a human heart in doing journalism, then what you're doing, you're just literally a computer that's spitting out data. And that's not what we're meant to do. We get blessed to have these platforms, because we're human beings. And we care when the Reed family, they spelled their name wrong, but they're still family R -E -E -D, when they're mourning, I'm mourning. You know, and if somebody is killed by police or killed by a fellow citizen like Trayvon Martin was, you know, a family is mourning, I'm mourning. And so it's like, I think if we're not human about it, we can't really do our jobs. [Applause] And I know you are, because I know you.
APRIL RYAN (03:17):
No comment, but people can see you've seen it. And I can't say anymore. I mean, you know, we are, we come into these newsrooms and give our history and our texture because a lot of other people wouldn't do it. End of story. But in the last few seconds, Joy, sum this up. Sum this beautiful book up that you must go buy. And forward, buy Miss Christmas presents now. And forward them, give them to your children, your neighbors. Give them as birthday presents, because we need to know our history. Is there a ban on our books? Hold them up, hold these books up. Is there a ban on our books? This is our history, and this is true. She was embedded with the family. This man was the first one to be killed for our right to be free. [Applause]
JOY REID (03:18):
And what I will say is, I wish he was the first, but he was the first to be on a national level.
APRIL RYAN (03:19):
Yes, yes.
JOY REID (03:20):
And they were killing so many people who are unknown and whose names are not known. And he died for them and for their legacy to live. Just people who not only registered others, but tried to register themselves. the Fannie Lou Hamers who were beaten nearly to death for trying to register. If you think about the sacrifices that were made, not a thousand years ago, you know, not even a hundred years ago, but literally in our lifetimes, like, you know, not that long ago. And again, I say this is 1963. This is, you know, six years before Sesame Street, you know, was what became - and by the way, Sesame Street was banned in the state of Mississippi because it was interracial. The Muppets were different colors and the people on the street were different races. I swear to you.
APRIL RYAN (03:21):
And they created Sesame Street for us, correct?
JOY REID (03:22):
They create Sesame Street for Black kids to get Black kids up to speed. You know, you think about the fact that when Myrlie Evers-Williams finally moves to California as a single mom of three little kids, she couldn't open a bank account because women couldn't open a bank account without a husband until the late 1970s after Roe v. Wade. You think about the fact that her husband was killed 10 years before women got bodily autonomy. They're already trying to take it. Before affirmative action, which Dr. King pushed for, they're already trying to take it. The little gains that we made in the 20th century were made in large part because of World War II and the World War II generation. All these Black men that went overseas and saw the world came back and fought to give the world to their families. And there were World War II heroes on both sides of this story. I mean, there were World War II heroes and villains. Kennedy connected to Medgar Evers because they were both World War II veterans. It's one of their connections. It's one of the reasons he respected him and put him in Arlington National Cemetery. So what I, as I say, is to say the reason we need our history is that these are the building blocks of our democracy. Our history is how we got here, for wherever we are, and if we want to go further, we need knowledge of the past so that we can step on those steps and keep moving forward. Without that knowledge, we're going to fall into disrepair as a country. We're barely hanging on to our democracy, and voting is the key to continuing to be one. And so what I implore you to do is just... Don't roll your eyes the next time someone says people died for your right to vote. Because literally, Medgar Evers died for your right to vote. And Myrlie Evers-Williams became a widow for your right to vote. And so let's, in honor of the people who all died younger than Kobe Bryant was when he died, kids, young people, did all this for us. So the least we can do is save our democracy and go into that ballot in the primary and the general from the rooter to the tooter, school board to president, please vote. [Applause]
APRIL RYAN (03:23):
I'm inspired. I hope you are inspired. The book by Joy Reid, the book by Joy Reid, New York Times bestselling author. It went to number one, and you know why. The book is "Medgar and Myrlie
JOY REID (03:24):
My sister, April Ryan, everybody, homegirl, hometown girl. I'm so proud of you.
APRIL RYAN (03:25):
I'm so proud of you.
JOY REID (03:26):
Thank you.
APRIL RYAN (03:27):
And the incredible Joy Reid, thank you.
[Applause]
ALISA ROSENTHAL (03:29):
To learn more about Joy Reid, head to the show notes or chicagohumanities.org.
Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with help from the hardworking staff over at Chicago Humanities who are producing the live events and making them sound great. If you’ve been enjoying our programming, the best way to support the podcast is to leave a rating and review, click subscribe to be notified about new episodes, and scroll through previous episodes for a gem you might’ve missed. And hey we want to hear what you think! Fill out the short survey in the show notes to help shape the future of the podcast. We’ll be back in two weeks with another new episode for you. Thanks for listening, and as always, stay human.
[Theme music plays]
[Cassette tape player clicks closed]
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.