Myrlie Evers-Williams (born
March 17, 1933, nee Myrlie Beasley in
Vicksburg, Mississippi) is an
African American activist. She was the first full-time chairman of the
NAACP and is the widow of murdered civil rights leader
Medgar Evers. She met him when they were students at
Alcorn A&M College in 1950. They married in
December 24, 1951 and she left school before finishing her degree.
They moved to Mound Bayou where her husband sold insurance for Dr.
T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights activist. She worked for Howard as a typist until the couple moved to Jackson in 1954.
She and Evers had three children before his murder. In 2001, their oldest son, Darrell Kenyatta Evers, died of
colon cancer.http://www.naacp.org/news/2001/2001-02-21-print.html Their two surviving children are Reena Denise and James Van.
Evers-Williams went back to school after Evers' death and graduated from
Pomona College, in 1968, with a degree in sociology. She served as director of consumer affairs for
Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), where she developed the concept for the first corporate booklet on women in non-traditional jobs. This booklet,
Women at ARCO, was in great demand throughout many printings and revisions.
In 1975, Evers-Williams married her second husband, Walter Williams. He died in 1995 of prostate cancer.
In 1987, Evers-Williams was the first African-American woman appointed to serve as commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works. Evers-Williams was chairman of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998. She is credited with spearheading the operations that restored the association to its original status as the premier civil rights organization in America. She is the author of
For Us, the Living (1967) and
Watch Me Fly: What I Learned On the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be (1999). In the best seller,
I Dream A World: Black Women Who Changed America, Evers-Williams states that she "greets today and the future with open arms."
