President Obama has selected two human rights activists to give the invocation and benediction at his upcoming presidential inaugural, according to Politico:
Myrlie Evers-Williams, former chair of the NAACP and widow of [the famous civil rights activist] Medgar Evers, will deliver the invocation, and the Rev. Louie Giglio of Passion City Church in Atlanta will deliver the benediction, the inaugural committee announced Tuesday.
Evers-Williams fought for justice for 30 years after her husband, the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, was gunned down in his driveway in 1963. She authored three books about their civil rights work.
Evers-Williams is, like her husband was, one of the important activists–in the historic civil rights movement and for her, also for subsequent decades–that helped to press this country’s white elite and acolytes in the direction of implementing its hoary rhetorical “liberty and justice for all” ideals.
Rev. Giglio has worked diligently with organizations working against contemporary slavery and human trafficking.
A revealing movie about the assassination of Evers, starring Whoopie Goldberg as his wife, is Ghosts of Mississippi. I think Ms Goldberg delivers one of her finest performances as the heart broken but determined woman, who had to wait 30 years for justice for her husband.The monster Byron de la Beckwith shot Evers in his own driveway, and his children and wife ran outside only to watch him die.
In the first trial in 1961{that included an all-white jury}murderer Byron de la Beckwith goes free. Beckwith was reported to have bragged about the murder at a Klan rally. His life thereafter reveals a man clearly unbowed (in 1967, Beckwith ran for lieutenant governor of Mississippi, placing fifth among the six candidates) and entrenched in violence (in 1973, he was sentenced to a five-year prison term for possession of dynamite).
In 1990, a series of investigative reports in Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger, a committed prosecutor, and the indefatigability of Evers’s widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, produced new evidence. The case was reopened, and four years later, Beckwith was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He died in Jan. 2001 at age 90.
When Ms Goldberg is on the witness stand during the last trial, where Beckwith is finally convicted, her acting is riveting. Also, real life daughter and son of MLK play her adult children.