Born in 1933, Myrlie Evers-Williams was the wife of murdered civil rights activist Medgar Evers. While fighting to bring his killer to justice, Evers-Williams also continued her husband’s work with her book, For Us, The Living. She also wrote Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be. Evers-Williams served as chair of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998.Born Myrlie Louise Beasley on March 17, 1933, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Raised by her grandmother, a schoolteacher, Evers-Williams loved learning and music. Growing up in the segregated South, she went to Alcorn A&M College, one of the only colleges in the state that accepted African American students. While at Alcorn, she met Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran several years her senior. The couple fell in love and married in December of 1951.
When her husband became the Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Evers-Williams worked alongside him. She assisted him as he strove to end the unjust practice of racial segregation in schools and other public facilities and campaigned for voting rights as many African Americans were denied this right in the South. Medgar made enemies of those who didn’t want race relations in the South to change. On June 12, 1963, Medger Evers was shot to death in front of his home by a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith.
http://www.biography.com/people/myrlie-evers-williams-205624