It was as if her tragically famous father, from his Mississippi grave, was summoning Reena Evers-Everette, coaxing her to answer a soul-deepcall and mandate. So, in 2012, after spending the bulk of her adult life on the East and West Coasts, Evers-Everette re-established a permanent address in the same southern city where, as an 8-year-old, she saw her father — bullet-ravaged and bloodied — dying on the family’s carport.
The 1963 memory of Medgar Evers, who was the NAACP’s lead organizer in Mississippi, still haunts. It is an excruciating, endless pain for the 62-year-old Evers-Everette. Still, returning to the South wasn’t up for negotiation. “… Frankly, I was saying, in my head, ‘God, what are you doing to me? And I felt the spirit of my father coming through me: ‘You need to be home. Mississippi is home. And we’ve got some stuff to do,’” says Evers-Everette, executive director of the Jackson, Mississippi-based Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute that her mother, Myrlie Evers-Williams, founded.
What compelled the daughter to return to the state’s capital and site of Medgar Evers’ killing was a determination to restructure what, in 2012, was a partly dormant equity- and justice-focused Evers Institute for civic engagement and training. (It’s in full-fledged expansion mode these days.)
There, too, were the tasks of spearheading 2013’s 50th anniversary commemoration of Evers’ death at the hands of Byron De La Beckwith, a White supremacist convicted of killing Medgar Evers in 1994, and of ensuring the care of her 83-year-old mom, Myrlie Evers-Williams, an activist and retired Alcorn State University distinguished scholar-in-residence still lecturing nationwide and serving the institute.
Lessons for the future
For Evers-Everette and other off spring of heralded civil and human rights leaders — slain for their particular brand of human service — building up their parents’ legacy is a conscious, if unavoidable, choice. Chief among their essential duties, they say, is telling the fuller stories of those leaders’ lives and works and displaying, in ways practical and ephemeral, how the messages of Malcolm X, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Jr. and Medgar Evers resonate and prove instructive in tackling some present societal challenges.
The children of these civil rights icons run name-sake organizations devoted to preserving their parents’ activist history, training youth and other up-and-comers, and serving as community meeting places where hard issues get meted out. These adult off spring write books. They address national and international audiences. They launch and moderate conversations such as the Beloved Community Talks that the Rev. Dr. Bernice King, Dr. King’s daughter — an author, preacher, trained lawyer and CEO of The King Center in Atlanta — kicked off on the national holiday to commemorate her father’s birthday. The talks aim to bridge a racial divide across cities, suburbs and rural America, which the 2017 U.S. presidential election has ushered glaringly into view.
