Can Myrlie Evers-Williams save the NAACP?

Ebony, Oct, 1995 by Richette L. Haywood

MYRLIE Evers-Williams doesn't make snap decisions. Quite the contrary. But if you know her, you know that already. The chairperson of the NAACP's National Board of Directors isn't the kind of person who allows herself to be rushed into important decisions. Never has been.

That's why it took her several months to decide that she would run for board chair of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization last February.

"There were board members who asked me if I would consider running for the position even a year before the election," says Evers-Williams. Her answer then? "An emphatic no." True, she was more than a little concerned about the organization's financial troubles. And she knew in her heart that a change had to be made, and that change had to be made at the top. Still, she was not interested in succeeding Dr. William Gibson, who had led the board for nearly a decade.

"My main reason was my husband's [Walter Williams] deteriorating health," she says. "I needed very much to be there for him when he needed me. I could not see anything taking me away from him and I knew that the demands on my time would be extremely heavy if I were to run, and certainly if I were to win."

Ironically, the very reason she chose not to seek the office a year ago became her driving force to run this year: Walter Williams. He was the one who became upset with her, she recalls, saying he just could not understand why she kept on "procrastinating" about her decision. "The entire future of our people is wrapped up in the NAACP's survival," he told her. But he didn't have to tell her that. As a longtime board member, she had watched the tarnish nearly overtake the sparkle of the organization, had seen it diminish from one of Black America's greatest treasures--a gem in our crown--to near ruin. "The board realized over the last two years that the NAACP had financial problems," explains Evers-Williams, whose first husband, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, was shot down outside their home in Mississippi during the summer of '63. "l, as well as many other board members, had started asking pointed questions."

But those efforts to dig deeper into the NAACP's situation, to have the books audited, to see where changes could and should be made, were met with disapproval by some board members. Nevertheless, Evers-Williams couldn't let it go, just as she could not let her husband's assassin go unpunished. "The NAACP has been a part of my life for 42 years," she says. "It's my family. I don't know what my life would be like without the NAACP ... I lost Medgar to the struggle and for the NAACP I just could not imagine us, as a people, as a country, not having the NAACP as a strong and viable organization."

Evers-Williams' dedication to the organization is beyond reproach. She has given up too much for it to be otherwise. Whether by design or divine intervention, her life and the life of the association have been inextricably intertwined.

Some people, even friends, are amazed that this woman made it out of Mississippi after Medgar Evers' death and went on to become more than just another widow of a slain civil rights icon. In fact, after Evers' murder, she recalls, friends implored her to let the state take care of her and her three children. They owed that much to her, they insisted. But she is not the kind to sit around waiting for the millennium. She wanted justice and she knew that if justice was ever to be done, it was up to her to make it happen.

After witnessing two trials for the murder of her husband, in which the juries could not agree on a verdict, she made the agonizing decision one year after her husband's murder to move her family to Claremont, Calif. There, she earned a college degree and became a successful corporate executive. Throughout, she remained the consummate activist. She lectured extensively to civil rights groups, participated in voter registration campaigns as as authored the book For Us, The Living, which chronicles her life with Evers and the movement.

But throughout those early years without Medgar, she felt there was more she should be doing for her people. That's way, in 1970, she decided to run for a seat in Congress, for what was then the 24th Congressional District in California. It served as a turning point for her. An awakening. "The people who had initially asked me to run printed on all of my materials `Mrs. Medgar Evers." They told me all that I would have to do to win was attend teas and be a presence," she says. While that may have been their strategy, Evers-Williams bad different ideas. "I said, No!"' she recalls. "I'm in this race and we're going to have a campaign." And by the way, she wanted them to know that her name was "Myrlie Evers," not "Mrs. Medgar Evers." It was a calculated risk. And even though it didn't win her a seat in Congress, it began to move her out of Medgar's shadow. "I felt I had to throw off that very safe cloak of being Mrs. Medgar Evers, the widow, of," she says, her voice trailing off. "i had to strike off on my own. had to establish my own identity.