As I noted recently, I have had back surgery. It went well, but I missed all the craziness of the past 10 days. Now I’m on the mend and will return soon. But let me point out that the Joe Biden withdrawal and the Kamala Harris coronation followed the path I outlined earlier this month. At least now all the shouting is over and the Democrats can stop sniping at one another and move forward with a robust campaign that focuses on preventing the restoration of Donald Trump.

Here's a rerun of an interview I did with Joy Reid earlier this year about her book on Medgar and Myrlie Evers. I’m also including a repeat of a review of another book that thoroughly engaged me. If you don’t subscribe to the premium version of Our Land, you should know that it includes reviews of films, television series, music, podcasts, and books, as well as other features. You can sign up for it here. I’ll be back soon.

On June 11, 1963, President John Kennedy addressed the nation and proclaimed that every American ought “to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color.” He announced he would ask Congress to enact legislation to end segregation in public facilities and public education and to establish greater protection for the right to vote. He was declaring war on Jim Crow—responding to pressure generated by civil rights activists in the South who were defying white supremacists and encountering horrible violence and repression. Medgar Evers, the NAACP field director in Mississippi, was one of those activists. Hours after the Kennedy speech, he was assassinated at his home. Evers was the first prominent civil rights champion to be murdered. His death shocked the nation and drew greater attention to the cruelty and hatred at the core of Mississippi society.

Yet Evers’ work and his death would be eclipsed by the deaths and deeds of those who came afterward, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Now MSNBC host Joy Reid is trying to revive Evers’ standing with a new book: Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America. It’s a brilliant, well-written account of his short life—he was killed at the age of 37—that chronicles Evers’ courageous and foundational activism, and she centers the narrative within the story of his marriage to Myrlie Evers, who, after his death, became a civil rights icon and champion. This is a book that is full of heart because these two people were full of heart. (Myrlie is still with us at the age of 90.)

Usually when I see Reid, I’m a guest on her show, and she’s the one asking questions. Last week, I turned the tables on her, and we had a chat about her book.

David Corn: Let’s start with the opening lines of the book: “The thing about love is that it has no chill. It takes no prisoners, it makes no exceptions for the times or the environment, or the dangers ahead. It has no situational awareness, particularly when it is true and intense and existential, at best it is fearless. Love is why this book is.” That’s not typically what you first read when you crack open a biography. Those lines knocked me out. Please explain.

Joy Reid: In 2018, I flew to LA to do our show, and this was my first time meeting Myrlie in person. I fell in love with her. She was so stately, gorgeous. Her voice was rich and melodic. After the show was over, we chatted. The way she talked about Medgar Evers you’d think she was a giggly 16-year-old schoolgirl and had just met him a week ago. I told her, “This is the story. It's how much you love this man.” I love my husband. We love our spouses. But I've never met anyone who loves anyone like this woman loves that man. She said, “I've written books.” She has written two amazing books. I said, “But that's the story, though—the love story.”

Time goes by. I did my Trump book (The Man Who Sold America). And my publisher asks what's next. I didn't have it in me to do another Trump book. I thought about what I could be passionate about. I just kept coming back to Myrlie and that love story. I saw the movie Queen & Slim, which I became obsessed with. And I thought, oh my god, Medgar and Myrlie are the Queen and Slim of the civil rights era—that kind of intense love. You've got arguments, you've got disagreements. But you’ve also got this all-encompassing devotional love. The book came from how mesmerized I was by Myrlie Evers and her love for Medgar.

DC: Fix for me where Medgar Evers resides in the civil rights cosmos. In the book, you say he deserves to be in the pantheon with King and Malcolm X. He was not a national figure until his assassination, though important to the movement in Mississippi. What places him at that level?

JR: No less than James Baldwin said these three—Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin—were the great triumvirate of civil rights. He knew all three. What was special about Medgar, he said, was that Medgar was doing civil rights work in the most dangerous state in America. It was a majority Black state and the rage of white Mississippians was intense. It's the state that had the most successful reconstruction, which was ended with absolute brutality. It had a planter class that created a spy agency statewide to spy on Mississippians to keep a slavery-type system in place. It was hell on earth for Black people. If you're operating in Mississippi, by definition, you are as brave as any human being has ever been. That's number one, his bravery. He was working in the Delta, prying out witnesses who could be lynched just for speaking rudely to a white person, let alone testifying against them in a civil rights case, such as the Emmett Till case. The case went to trial with witnesses because of Medgar.

Second, he trained many of the young activists who wind up in the Mississippi leg of the Freedom Rides. He trained young activists, such as James Chaney of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, the civil rights workers killed in 1964. He underpins the entire Mississippi civil rights movement. He made “This Little Light of Mine” the freedom song in Mississippi. And he's kind of forgotten. Because the other stories become so high profile—the attacks on the Freedom Riders, the killing of white activists (Goodman and Schwerner). At the time, he was respected by the national-level civil rights leaders like Dr. King. But his legacy gets diminished because of who dies after he dies. He was the first major civil rights leader to be assassinated.

DC: You say this book is the love story of Myrlie and Medgar Evers. But it is also a compelling compact history of the civil rights movement in the mid-’50s and early ’60s. It covers the bitter factionalism within that world. There was much rivalry and argument over strategies—including between Evers and the NAACP leadership in New York. He was keen to engage in direct action protests against segregation. The national office wanted him to focus on registering people to vote and signing up NAACP members.

JR: In the early civil rights movement, there was just one big civil rights organization: the NAACP. Everything that came after—even the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—was, in a way, an affront to the NAACP. People had to choose factions. Medgar tried to be in both camps. There was this fundamental tension over how to achieve first-class citizenship for Black people. Should that be done in the courts? Or should it be done in the streets? That was the question that the NAACP leadership in New York and the activists in the South could never reconcile. It was a source of constant tension. Medgar’s bosses weren't fans of Dr. King because they didn't like the idea that he's leading people to fight for civil rights to the streets.

The NAACP believed—and they were making headway in the courts—that the Supreme Court would fix segregation and would right these wrongs. That the best thing they could do was to have as large an NAACP membership class as possible, so that they could point to these millions of people, law-abiding members who are simply demanding equality, and then take the best of their cases to the courts and into the Supreme Court. They hated the idea of marching; they thought it was a waste of time. You’re just going to get people killed. They also hated spending money to bail these kids out. So they’re telling Medgar to stop supporting these marches, because every time you do that, a bunch of them get arrested. Then we have to take money we’d rather be using to pay lawyers and use it to bail these kids out.

They ordered him multiple times to stop supporting these actions—marches, sit-ins, demonstration. But he believed that for Black Americans to achieve civil rights, particularly in a place like Mississippi, they had to fight for it themselves. They had to develop the self-dignity to demand it in their own voices, and in their own communities, and take those risks and be brave enough to stand up to white people where they live. No court could order Mississippi to truly treat them as equals. Courts already said they were equals, and they still were in shacks, instead of real schools. The courts ordering Mississippi to do things didn't change anything. Only the valor of the ordinary man and woman in the Delta could bring change. He believed what the kids believed: They should march, they should sit in, they should demand to be let into the library.

DC: The other place where there was tension was in Medgar and Myrlie’s marriage. Tremendous love, as you describe, but also great conflict.

JR: Myrlie Evers was a reluctant civil rights wife. She just wanted to be a 1950s housewife. She was raised in this wonderful prim and proper Vicksburg, Mississippi, family. She just loved her man and wanted him to stay home and sell insurance. She wanted to be married to an insurance salesman, and that was her plan. Then he decides he wants to sell civil rights and insurance. She opposed it from the beginning. But she's a teenager when they get married. He's seven years older; much more worldly. He's been to Europe; he served in the war. She has to go along. Then everything about their life becomes about fear. He has the house designed so there's no front door. People have to enter on the side so they can see anyone coming. They've got guns in every room, and she's constantly living with death threats against him. He's on the Klan’s most-wanted list.

This is not a way she wants to live. She fears for him. She is sure he's going to die. She fights it almost every single day. She constantly says to him, you need to choose between me, your family, and this. He keeps saying I am choosing you by choosing civil rights and you need to understand it. There are times when they come close to divorce. They get into physical fights. In the book I want to humanize these people. The civil rights figures who we put on a pedestal—we forget these are people and they’re young. They are in their 20s and 30s. They're trying to make marriage and career and life and household and civil rights work at the same time.

DC: It can be hard enough to sustain family relationships and spousal relationships in the best of times. But to maintain these relationships within an environment of terror, when you’re surrounded by fear, hatred, and cruelty and living within a segregationist, apartheid state that devalues your worth—these are incredible psychological burdens to bear while you're trying to figure out life.

JR: When you meet Myrlie, the shocking thing is how normal she is. They lived in Jackson, Mississippi, on a block that was home for Black middle-class families. But even walking off your block to go to the store was a life-threatening situation. If by chance the shop owner thought you were rude, they could lynch you. You have to remember that in this country it was functionally legal to kill Black people all the way through the 1960s. Your house could be burned down or firebombed, and they can kill your whole family. That is the way Black folks were living in Mississippi and throughout the South. You can be kidnapped at any moment, and your state is spying on you. You’re being terrorized every day. In that world, try having a normal marriage, a normal life.

DC: How did Medgar’s assassination change Myrlie? You mentioned she just wanted to be a housewife. After Medgar was murdered, she became a national symbol. Life magazine had a photojournalist follow her around. She was the first nationally known civil rights widow. Nothing could have prepared her for that role.

JR: Myrlie grew up dainty. Her family raised her to be this very prissy, proper young lady. One of the things about being proper is that you're never supposed to be angry. You're supposed to always be gracious. But when Medgar was killed, she was angry, she was mad as hell, she was an angry lady. She was determined that that man who killed her husband would go to prison. She didn't care that this was an impossible task in Mississippi. He was tried twice, and each time there was a hung jury. That was sort of a victory for the prosecutor because back then you don't even get a hung jury. They just acquit after 10 minutes. She stayed mad for 30 years and never gave up on this goal of getting justice for her husband and her family. She embraced her inner rage. At the same time, she also did the Life magazine thing and everything else she needed to secure her husband’s legacy. She wrote the playbook for how to be a civil rights widow.

DC: She did get him. In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith, Evers’ assassin, who had been connected to the Klan, was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. Why is this book relevant now?

JR: I told you that I did not want to write a Trump book. But I kind of did. You and I have had this conversation on-air. We live in an era of tremendous and profound cowardice. Just shocking cowardice. We’re facing the potential loss of our democracy. And there are so few people, particularly in the former president’s party, who are willing to do the minimum, let alone take real risks. This book, in a way, is a tribute to the brave. If Medgar Evers, as a thirtysomething-year-old guy, and his twentysomething wife could stand up to Mississippi, the Klan, and the governmental powers of an apartheid state, you can stand up to the current golf-playing 91-count former president, right? Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger—I deeply oppose everything they believe politically. But I’ll give them credit for being brave. But the acts of bravery now required to save our democracy are quite minimal compared to the threats that Medgar and Myrlie faced. So I hope people read this book as an inspiration to courage. If you love America, if you love this country, if you love being in a free country, in a democracy, you need to show the courage to stand up to the forces trying to take it from you. If they could do it in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, for God’s sakes, we can stand up to a Twitter barrage.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, Tricia Romano. When I was in high school, on many Wednesdays I would trek the mile or so from my house to the local stationery store that had a newsstand loaded with papers and magazines. The prize I sought was the new issue of the Village Voice. I lived in a New York City suburb, but a world away from the grit and hipness of the Big Apple. Still, I was entranced with the Voice. It was a chronicler of cool, for music, movies, theater, and art; it was a source for crusading journalism that could not be found elsewhere. It was boho, high-brow, obsessed with pop culture, and kickass—and full of, uh, voice, with columnists, reporters, and contributors pursuing and expressing their devotions with guts and literary flair (and, occasionally, with nearly incomprehensible prose). I relished the investigative reporting by Jack Newfield and others that tore the hide off the corruptions of NYC politics and government. I pored over the music reviews and received a graduate-level education in criticism. This was the world I wanted to live in.

A few years later—while still in college—I got my first freelance political journalism gig: being a leg man for Joe Conason and Jim Ridgeway, two Voice reporters covering the 1980 Democratic convention in New York City. I ran around town hitting various convention-related events and phoned in or dropped off my notes—and was thrilled to see a few sentences in their reporting that were the result of my labors. Bigtime: I was—in a way—in the Voice. (Years later, I would work with Ridgeway at Mother Jones, and recently Conason asked me to blurb his forthcoming book on the long history of right-wing grift.)

Not long after that, I had my first job in journalism at the Nation, which was located a couple of blocks from the offices of the Village Voice. As a member of the NYC journalism club—as lowly as I was—I got to hobnob with legendary Voice writers. Going to lunch at the Cedar Tavern, once a popular hangout for abstract expressionists and beat writers (including Jack Kerouac), and witnessing Nat Hentoff, the civil liberties columnist at the Voice, compose his latest article at the bar in longhand was thrilling. (This was before the ever-cranky Hentoff became an opponent of abortion.) Eventually, I would even freelance for the Voice, but I never ended up on its payroll.

This is a very long way of saying that I am enjoying the hell out of a new oral history of the Voice—The Freaks Came Out to Write—by Tricia Romano, a Voice veteran. She covers its storied history from the paper’s founding in 1955 by Norman Mailer, Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and John Wilcock to its shut-down in 2017. (The Voice now exists in a limited online version.) The book is jammed with feuds and conflicts—between writers and management, between writers and owners (one of them for a while was Rupert Murdoch), and between writers and writers.

Frequently blows were almost thrown (or, more than once, actually thrown) and on a regular basis contributors would assault other contributors in their columns or the letters section, as staffers battled over the cultural and political currents of the day. Culture writer Stanley Crouch, an influential jazz critic, would brawl with younger writers who celebrated hip-hop. During the Great Yam Controversy, investigative and political reporters on the staff—derided by other VVers as “the whiteboys”—decried the decision to front-page an article by C. Carr on performance artist Karen Finley, whose art included smearing food (such as yams) on herself (and perhaps into her privates) while reciting profane monologues. They argued this devalued the serious journalism the Voice featured on its venerable cover. The back-of-the-book culture gang saw it differently. It seemed a cataclysmic clash at the time, but the Voice survived.

The history of the Voice is the history of New York politics and arts. With its mission-propelled and muscular journalism—such as Newfield’s annual features highlighting the 10 worst landlords and the 10 worst judges—it offered a role model for alternative weeklies across the country. It created a platform for pioneering feminist writers and LGBT writers (though it was late, like much media, to the AIDS epidemic). It placed Off-Broadway theater, punk music, rap, avant-garde film, street art, and much more on a wider cultural map. It provided a platform for a new style of raw and edgy photojournalism and pioneered media criticism with Alexander Cockburn’s acerbic “Pressclips” column. (Years later, I would feud with Cockburn at the Nation.) Via the never-stop-digging reporting of Wayne Barrett, the Voice was on to Donald Trump’s sleazy ways long before the rest of the world. Music critic Robert Christgau became the dean of rock music journalism.

Romano chronicles it all in the voices (pun intended) of dozens of writers and editors who were part of this glorious and often chaotic circus. There’s some score-settling and much exposing of dirty laundry. And some of the romance of the VV is stripped bare. But that’s all in keeping with the rambunctious spirit of the Voice. As an oral history, the book meanders at times through this long narrative, and my hunch is that a few of the episodes, as described in these first-person accounts, might befuddle an uninitiated reader. Yes, you had to be there. But Romano deftly captures the tempestuous life of one of the more important media outlets in American history. A former Voice writer, Mark Jacobson, told her, “It could have gone on forever if it weren’t for the internet.” The nostalgist in me wishes the old Voice had lasted forever. But what this book illustrates most is that the Voice was of its time—across more than half a century. And there may be no better epitaph for its band of passion-driven journalists.