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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross.

How to be a civil rights widow is a chapter title in a new book by my guest Joy Ann Reed

host of the MS NBC evening show The Read Out. The widow is Merle Evers. Her husband was Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist who served as the

N-A-C-P's Mississippi Field Secretary,

and risked his life to push for voting rights, desegregation, and freedom.

Medgar and Merley were both from Mississippi.

Merley constantly worried about our husbands and children's safety,

with good reason.

Their house was fire-bombed.

Later in June 1963, Medgar Evers was assassinated

just outside the door of their home. She heard the gunshot and found her husband bleeding out.

He was the first in a series of high-profile assassinations.

Next came President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy.

Joy Reed describes her new book Medger and Murley as a love story between two black people in Mississippi, their love for their children, and the higher

love it took for black Americans to love America and to fight for it, even in the state that

butchered more black bodies via lynching than any other.

The love story between Merley and Medgar Evers is also fraught with tension, with Merley objecting

to how much he was away from home,

leaving her wondering if he loved his work more than he loved his family,

...