Myrlie Evers: I still believe in Mississippi

This is my Mississippi, the land of my birth.

In a few months, I will reach my 92nd birthday. I am thankful for my life. And I am thankful for all of the challenges, hardships and sorrows that life has brought me.

Since 1963, the person who has been much on my heart and mind is my late husband, Medgar Evers, who empowered Black Mississippians to fight back against the Jim Crow system that tried to make them second-class citizens. He also spent his days and nights on the backroads, investigating the deaths of Emmett Till and so many others whose names have been forgotten.

But Medgar never forgot, and he kept on fighting. I remember white men would angrily call him, threatening to hurt or kill him. Even when they cursed him or called him the “N” word, he would never respond in anger. And sometimes the same ones who cursed would eventually listen to what he had to say.

I could not understand how he embraced goodwill and love over hatred. Once, after he received one of these calls, I told him, “I hate those people.”

He gave me a look I still remember. It was not pleasant. He told me to never stoop to their level, to never lose my humanity. I’ll never forget that.

That was one of the few times we didn’t talk to each other for a while because I was livid at him for telling me that.

My husband believed that Mississippi could be a wonderful place if we handled the problems of race, justice and inequality, and I agree with him.

When I first toured the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, I wept because I felt the blows. I felt the bullets. I felt the tears. As I saw the photographs of violence against activists, I heard their cries, but I also sensed their faith, and it filled me with hope — hope not only in Mississippi, not only in America, but across this world.

There is still so much work to be done, so much work to be done in the areas of justice and equality. Of building good communities. Of training our children about our history and the roles they should play.

Our hopes and our future lie in these young people. I hope they will heed the words of my grandmother, which I find myself saying — and I am a believer — “Here I am. Lord, send me.”

This is why my family and I started the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute — to carry on my husband’s vision for a better, more humane world. And we can do it if we all come together.

Yes, there are those who wish to keep it down. I hope, I trust, and I pray they are in a minority.

I want to thank all of you who have walked hand in hand with me through the stress, through the turmoil, through my period of hatred of my native state, of coming out of that dark veil into one of light and sunshine, warmth and belief that Mississippi is not all that people think it is. The truth is that Mississippi is better because of people like you.

On the same night I heard President Kennedy deliver his first civil rights speech on television, declaring that “the grandsons of slaves were still not free,” my husband was shot in the back as he arrived at our family home. He was carrying T-shirts that read, “Jim Crow Must Go.”

He had survived Nazi fire on the beaches of Normandy, only to become a casualty in the war against hate in Mississippi. When my children and I heard the gunfire, we rushed outside and saw him dying on the driveway.

Days later, thousands of young people marched after his funeral, yelling out, “After Medgar, no more fear!” That slogan inspired more protests, and the walls of Jim Crow began to crash down.

When my husband was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, remarked, “Medgar Evers believed in his country; it remains to be seen if his country believes in him.”

Like Medgar, I still believe in Mississippi, the land of my birth.

I still believe in understanding.

I still believe in empathy.

I still believe in love.

I still believe.

Myrlie Evers is the chairman emeritus of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute. From 1995 to 1998, she chaired the national NAACP, helping rescue it from bankruptcy. She is the co-author of two books, “To Us, the Living” and “Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be.” She served as editor on the book, “The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches.”