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Michael Vinson Williams is assistant professor of history and African American studies at Mississippi State University, USA.“A well-written and informative installment in a prolific civil rights scholarship. . . . an accessible volume for a wide range of historians.”-Hayden McDaniel, <em>H-Net</em><br /><br />“The first substantial scholarly biography of Medgar Evers…. Will be the standard reference for some time to come.”-<em>Journal of Southern History</em><br /><br />""An important and readable study of this seminal leader and the history of the civil rights movement.""-<em>Publishers Weekly</em><br /><br />“In this well-grounded inquiry into Mississippi’s heart of darkness, Williams offers an essential reading of the short life and tragic times of Medgar Evers, the modest, heroic freedom fighter who, perhaps more than any other, helped transform the nation’s most fiercely racist state.”-Neil McMillen, Bancroft Prize-winning author of <em>Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow</em><br /><br />""Americans remember Medgar Evers—if they remember him at all—as the black leader gunned down the night President Kennedy made his famous civil rights speech. But Evers was much more than that, as Michael Williams makes clear in this marvelous biography. Long before the TV cameras and newsmen descended on the Magnolia State, Evers was risking his life on the back roads of Mississippi, organizing local people to take charge of their destiny. A hero and a martyr, Evers was also a complicated man torn between his activist impulses and the conservative mandates of his NAACP bosses in New York. Williams captures Medgar Evers in all his complexity in this well written, solidly researched, important book.""- John Dittmer, Bancroft Prize-winning author of <em>Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi</em>
This biography of an important civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers’s widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections, and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provides a detailed account of Evers’s NAACP work and a clearer understanding of the racist environment that ultimately led to his murder.