TELEVISION : She’s Kept Her...

It was supposed to be the end of the road.

Myrlie Evers’ determined fight to help convict the accused murderer of her husband, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, ended in February, won in the same Mississippi courtroom where it had first been lost 30 years earlier.

Newscasts showed a joyous and tearful Myrlie Evers jumping in the air after the guilty verdict, letting out a celebratory shout and looking toward the heavens as she proclaimed: “Medgar, I’ve gone the last mile of the way.”

With that pronouncement, Myrlie Evers declared herself free from the ghosts of injustice. The agonizing emotional pain would evaporate.

Or so she thought.

In early June--little more than four months after aging white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith was found guilty of assassinating Medgar Evers outside his Jackson, Miss., home on June 12, 1963--Myrlie Evers; her daughter, Reena Evers-Everett, and her second husband, Walter Williams, were the guests of honor at a gala screening of the HBO documentary “Southern Justice: The Murder of Medgar Evers.”

The screening of the film, which chronicles Medgar Evers’ bold crusades against segregation in the South and the frustrating efforts to bring Beckwith to justice, was held at the National Press Club in Washington to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

It was to have been an evening of somber recollection and jubilant celebration.

And then Myrlie Evers saw the black-and-white images of Medgar, the quiet-spoken field secretary of the Mississippi division of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, on the screen. She noticed clips she had never seen before--glimpses of her late husband giving instructions, talking with fellow civil rights advocate Roy Wilkins, sitting alone on a stool. A rare clip of him smiling.

And all of the emotion, the hurt, the volatile mixture of love, anguish and anger, came crashing back into her heart and mind.

“It was so terribly emotional for me, I had to quickly shift from just looking at the film to becoming a critic of the production, analyzing the film,” Evers said recently at a Beverly Hills hotel. “All these years, I had to develop survival tactics, and I found myself doing that again to keep myself from breaking down. My daughter was crying and my husband was wiping away tears, and all I could think was, ‘I can’t cry, I can’t cry, I can’t cry.’

“I knew then that it will never really be over,” Evers, 61, added quietly. “I’m free, but nothing removes the pain of losing Medgar and the manner in which he was lost. The wound is so deep that it doesn’t heal.”

Now Evers and others find themselves embroiled in another struggle on behalf on Medgar Evers. They feel that his accomplishments and actions have too long been overshadowed by the deeds and dramatic demeanors of more widely known civil rights pioneers such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

While they greatly respect those leaders and don’t want to take anything away from them, they said it is time that young and old realize that Medgar Evers should also be placed among the key figures who fought overwhelming forces in the struggle to win equality for African Americans during the 1950s and 1960s.

“It has been a thorn in my side, but not in the sense of not wanting Martin and Malcolm to have their due,” Evers said. “It just strikes a bad-sounding chord within me to see that period written about or portrayed on television and in movies and not see Medgar mentioned at all.”

“Southern Justice: The Murder of Medgar Evers” is the first step to reverse the oversight. The co-production of HBO and the British Broadcasting Corp., narrated by civil rights activist Julian Bond, premieres Monday on HBO at 10:05 p.m. under its “America Undercover” documentary banner and will air several times this month.

Myrlie Evers is also overseeing efforts by Tougaloo College in Mississippi to turn Evers’ former Jackson home into a cultural and social change center. She hopes to write how she fought to see justice done in her late husband’s murder. The NAACP at its upcoming convention in Chicago will also introduce an annual Medgar Evers Award that will be given to three young people who draw a picture or write a poem or essay about his achievements and philosophies.

“The NAACP certainly recognizes the contributions of Medgar Evers, that he gave his life in the fight to get equal rights for blacks,” said Terhea Washington, national public relations director for the NAACP. “African Americans have the right to vote because of him. We will make sure that his legacy is not lost.”

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British filmmaker Christopher Olgiati, who wrote, produced and directed the one-hour, six-minute documentary, gave one reason for Medgar Evers’ relatively low profile: “He was quiet, modest and did not want to draw attention to himself. Medgar operated in the shadows, and was motivated by the awful things that he saw. He did not want personal glory, and that’s why he was eclipsed by history. But he showed more imagination in coping with the situation than most other civil rights leaders, and he did incredible things. He never got the attention he deserved.”

Evers’ accomplishments were given little national coverage. The exposure of blacks at the time, especially those fighting against the system, was already limited. And the white-controlled media in Mississippi did not want news of Evers’ triumphs to get beyond the “cotton curtain,” Olgiati said.

Advance screenings of the documentary to groups and media around the country have been marked by tears from audience members, as well as outraged shouts at some of Beckwith’s racist statements. Myrlie Evers and Olgiati said they have already received a surprising response from teen-agers and young adults who said they had never known about Medgar Evers and want to learn more.

“It’s a classic story of good versus evil,” Olgiati said. “It’s a story that illustrates the blind inhumanity of hatred and racism as well as anything.”

Myrlie Evers has also been approached by a Hollywood producer about a possible television film on Medgar and the long legal battle, but, she added, no deals have been officially announced.

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Medgar Evers was shot in the back as he returned home from a civil rights rally. Myrlie Evers and her three small children were inside the house when the shot rang out. After crouching on the floor for a few minutes, the family emerged from the house to find him bleeding on the front porch.

Beckwith was immediately fingered as the suspect. A committed member of the racist White Citizen’s Council, the outspoken tobacco and fertilizer salesman had made no secret of his hatred of Jews, blacks and, particularly, the integrationist tactics of Medgar Evers. His gun, an Enfield 30.06 rifle, was discovered in a honeysuckle thicket nearby. One of his fresh fingerprints was on the scope. Prosecutors also said that a bruise around one of his eyes could have been caused by the recoiling weapon. And witnesses testified that they had seen a car that looked like Beckwith’s near the Evers home around the time of the murder.

But Beckwith argued that his gun had been stolen and that he was 90 miles away in Greenwood, Miss., at the time of the shooting. The testimony of three police officers--including one who said he strongly believed in segregation--corroborated Beckwith’s story. Two all-white juries failed to reach verdicts, and Beckwith was set free.

Considering the atmosphere in Mississippi during the 1950s and 1960s, the outcome was not surprising. As Bond says in the HBO documentary, “Entering Mississippi at that time was like leaving America behind.” It was a time not only of rampant segregation but also violence, when a white man who killed a black man could get away with murder. Lynchings, death threats in the night, burning crosses, twilight visits by the Ku Klux Klan were a way of life.

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It was also a time when a 14-year-old boy, Emmett Till, was murdered for asking out a white woman, when a man named Mack Charles Parker, who was accused of raping a white woman, was taken from his jail cell by a white mob and lynched.

The soft-spoken Evers took it upon himself to become the conscience for racial justice in Mississippi. By night, he disguised himself as a poor sharecropper and investigated the murders of Till and other slain blacks. By day, he spearheaded voter-registration drives for black people, urged boycotts of stores that would not hire blacks and campaigned to end segregation of schools and public facilities.

His activities brought attention to Till’s death and made him a hero with Mississippi blacks. It also made him a target among angry whites, a certainty that he seemed resigned to accept.

In “Southern Justice,” Olgiati uses vintage film clips of Ku Klux Klan rallies, Citizen’s Council programs and interviews with residents to bring the era of the sweaty South to life. One of the clips showed then-Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett strolling into the courtroom during Beckwith’s first trial and shaking his hand in front of the all-white jury in a show of support.

“I remember going to the Delta, wondering how could I make this hatred and suppression into a film,” Olgiati said. “I drove around endlessly, and suddenly it all just came alive to me, the whole air of how it must have been.”

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Frustrated with Beckwith’s release and the stifling conditions of the South, Myrlie Evers packed up her children and moved to Claremont, Calif. In 1967 she wrote a book, “For Us the Living,” about her and Medgar’s involvement in the civil rights struggle; she later became director of planning and development at the Claremont Colleges, helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus and was appointed in 1987 as a commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.

But Myrlie Evers never lost sight of Beckwith and was determined to bring him back into court for her husband’s murder. That opportunity came in 1989, when the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that high-level Mississippi officials had played an influential role in Beckwith’s defense. The Sovereignty Commission, a group led by the governor, attorney general and other government officials that was dedicated to the preservation of segregation, had screened jurors in the second trial to find Beckwith supporters.

A Clarion-Ledger story in 1990 reported that a book written in 1965, “Klandestine,” quoted a former Klan officer as saying that Beckwith told him after the second trial that he had killed Evers.

“Killing that nigger gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children,” Beckwith was reported as saying. He was arrested in December, 1990, at his Signal Mountain, Tenn., home and a third trial was eventually set. An appeal of his conviction is pending.

Olgiati’s 1990 jailhouse interview with Beckwith is a key element of the documentary and has provoked some of the most vocal responses from audiences. During the interview, Beckwith refers to blacks as “beasts” and is unrepentant about his views.

“Anything that is against the right white Christian side is evil, and we won’t tolerate it,” he says at one point. “We’re going to get the white man out of the closet.”

When Myrlie Evers viewed the documentary and heard Beckwith’s statements, it brought back a strong clash of emotions. She had felt the same clash when she saw Beckwith at the third trial.

“Rage and hatred have been unwanted partners in my life ever since Medgar’s death,” she said. “My parents had always told me not to hate, that I would become a lesser being by hating. But that first year after Medgar was shot, rage and hatred was the main force that kept me going day to day. Then I saw that there were three children who were looking at me to be a role model, and I had to learn to change the negative to a positive.

“Still, when I have seen interviews with Beckwith over the last five years, there would be times when that rage would come back. I saw that he was the strong motivating force in my life. His hatred and sickness made me realize that something had to happen to show that he was wrong. I felt pity for him at a brief moment, but then I just wished he had never existed.”

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But it was the footage of Medgar in “Southern Justice” that brought back her personal pain of the wrenching human and domestic drama behind the civil rights struggle.

“I would be very jealous of the time that Medgar was spending on the job,” she said. “He would tell me, ‘I want to make a better life for you, make this a better place for you and our children.’ I told him, ‘I would rather have you than freedom.’ He would look at me sternly and say, ‘Don’t you understand what I’m doing?’ ”

Evers recalled one of the more heated arguments she and Medgar had during his first year at NAACP headquarters: “I really got on him, saying, ‘How much time are going to spend on your job? We need you here too.’ I was really, really upset, and he said, ‘Myrlie, I cannot fight white folks 24 hours a day, struggle to pull our people along and come home and fight you here. Either you’re with me or you aren’t.’ Well, I was just incensed at this. How dare he try to make me choose!

“Then I realized that he really did not belong to me, and that ours was not a typical marriage. The movement had first claim on him, and I had to accept that I came third, after the movement and the children.”

She said Medgar Evers’ achievements should have a special resonance for young black people, especially rappers who talk about how hard it is to grow up in the inner city.

“There are times when I feel like saying to this generation, ‘You don’t know how good you have it,’ ” she said. “We lived in homes where windows were broken, where dresses were made out of flour sacks, there were no paved streets, we had to walk for miles and pass by the good white schools to get to the poor black schools.

“But back then, we didn’t have drugs like there are now, and the family unit was much stronger. I just hope that young people find out this part of history that might make them feel better about themselves.”

Evers currently runs a speakers bureau, Evers and Associates, and has residences in California and Oregon. She and Williams, a retired longshoreman and former union organizer, recently celebrated their 18th wedding anniversary.

As for her struggle on behalf of her first husband, it continues. But she has a renewed strength.

“I have kept my promise,” she said. “The wound may be deep, but I know I will not let anything take away the victory of that verdict.”*

* “Southern Justice: The Murder of Medgar Evers” airs Monday at 10:05 p.m. on HBO.