Myrlie Evers-Williams Collection Fund

Civil Rights pioneer Myrlie Evers-Williams ‘68, widow of NAACP official Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in the driveway of their Mississippi home by a white supremacist, has chosen to donate her personal archive to Pomona College. This collection will inspire future generations of activists, historians, academics, and the public.

A trailblazer for black women in the political arena, Evers-Williams ran for U.S. Congress only two years out of college. A year later, in 1971, she helped launch the bipartisan National Women’s Political Caucus and in time took on prominent civic roles in Los Angeles. All the while, she persisted in seeking the conviction of her husband’s assassin, which finally came in 1994, three decades after the murder, in the case that became the subject of the movie, “Ghosts of Mississippi.” In 1995, she became the first woman to chair the NAACP, and in 2012, President Obama turned to Evers-Williams as the first woman and first layperson to give the invocation at a presidential inauguration. Most recently, Evers-Williams was portrayed by actress Jayme Lawson in the 2022 movie “Till.”  

Consisting of more than 250 linear feet of documents, ephemera and artifacts, the collection donated by Evers-Williams includes photos of her with presidents Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton; transcripts and correspondence from her 2007 testimony before Congress; and correspondence related to her preparation from the 2012 Obama inauguration. The collection also includes personal items, such as her Pomona College ID card, a hardhat from her time as a Los Angeles Public Works Commissioner and the dress she wore while performing piano at Carnegie Hall. 

Pomona College will preserve the collection for both academic and public access through The Claremont Colleges Library, where archivists are organizing and cataloguing the material spanning six decades of activism and a full, engaged life. The goal is to preserve and disseminate the rich history this collection contains. Digitizing this collection will make it available to scholarly study, but we also want broader audiences, and here again especially young audiences, to have access to Myrlie Evers-Williams’ story. Your support will make this possible!