Synopsis
"Have No Fear reminds us what it meant to live under a system where segregation was important enough to kill for and where being treated with dignity and respect was a whites-only entitlement." —The New York Times Book Review
"A gutsy, American patriot and treasure . . . an important slice of American history."—Dan Rather
"Charles Evers has given us one of the most extraordinary memoirs about race in America that I know. This holy sinner of the civil rights era, who kept company with mobsters, bootleggers, call girls, Kings, Kennedys, and Rockefellers has produced, with Andrew Szanton, a salient one-man's history of Mississippi and the United States before and after Brown v. Board of Education. The fascinating interplay of racial nihilism and political sagacity is reminiscent of the early Malcolm X and the mature Frederick Douglass." —David Levering Lewis
"Truly spellbinding . . . relives the fear, desperation, and confrontation that marked the civil rights struggle." —The seattle times
Publishers Weekly
After his youngest brother, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, was murdered in 1963, outspoken, flamboyant Charles Evers carried the torch, running the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, integrating schools and hotels, organizing voter registration drives and boycotts, facing down the Ku Klux Klan. In 1969 he became the first black mayor in a century of the biracial Mississippi town of Fayette. A gripping autobiography, assembled by freelance writer Szanton from dozens of interviews with Evers, this first-person narrative brings to light an unsung, politically incorrect civil rights hero. Evers offers a searing account of growing up in Mississippi, "lynching capital of the country," in the 1920s and '30s. During WWII he fought in the invasion of the Philippines. Disc jockey, caf proprietor, mortician, shopping center owner, he was also a numbers runner for the Chicago mob, a whorehouse owner and a bootlegger in the 1950s and early '60s. Father of eight daughters by four mothers, twice-divorced Evers has been a friend of Martin Luther King, Nelson Rockefeller, bluesmen Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Alabama's segregationist governor George Wallace (with whom he sought common ground), and informal adviser to JFK, LBJ, Robert Kennedy, Nixon. In 1980 he endorsed Reagan and later became a Republican. Today, as blunt and unpredictable as ever, he ridicules "hustler" Jesse Jackson, Jimmy Carter, Afrocentrism, Louis Farrakhan and blacks who blame their economic problems on whites. Author tour. (Jan.) FYI: Publication coincidentally ties in with the opening of Ghosts of Mississippi, a film about Medgar Evers and his family starring Whoopi Goldberg, Alec Baldwin and James Woods.