Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual violence, death, and racism, including racist violence, the Jim Crow era, and enslavement.

“This book is first and foremost, a love story. It is not just about the love between two Black people in Mississippi, and their love for their children. It is also about 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, and that ripped apart the promise of Reconstruction with a ferocity unmatched by any other place in this fragile and fractured nation.”

In the Prologue, Reid highlights love as the central idea in the book. Through Evers’s and Williams’s life stories, she argues that love has defined the African American experience, reinforcing Black people’s will to survive and fight for justice. Love thus has both personal and political dimensions, as it refers to the bonds among individuals, to those individuals’ lives as American citizens, and to the intersection of the two. Ultimately, Reid stresses that love of their country motivated Black Americans’ endeavor to create social change, establishing the theme of The Power of Love and the Struggle for Social Justice.

“The fundamental argument of this book is that Medgar’s activism, from his role in investigating the Emmett Till lynching and other racist murders of Black Mississippians to the boycott movement he orchestrated in Jackson, was the foundation upon which the later efforts by SNCC, CORE, and other organizations were built.”

As a historical account, Reid’s book aims to contribute to the literature on the civil rights movement by demonstrating Evers’s significance as a civil rights activist. While Evers’s work has been obscured in the historical memory, Reid argues that his grassroots activism defined the civil rights movement’s strategies and trajectory. Throughout the book, she highlights how Evers led the movement in the South; even his assassination was the first of a major civil rights leader.

“He was an American, who had seen more of the world than the vast majority of white Americans. He was a World War II veteran and a human being. Yet the moment he returned to Mississippi he was nothing but a n*****.”

The experience of Black veterans was key in the emergence of the modern civil rights movement. As Reid illustrates, Black men’s military service in World War II contributed to their understanding of their dehumanization.