Myrlie Evers-Williams stepping down from NAACP board

Myrlie Evers-Williams. PHOTO/Tyler Cleveland

Civil rights leader Myrlie Evers-Williams is stepping down from the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), marking an end to her 30 years as an official of the civil rights organization.

Evers-Williams, will retain have the honorary title as chair emeritus of the NAACP. She has been deeply involved in the organization and in civil rights issues over the course of the last 50 years.

“I was called. I delivered, and it’s time for me to step aside and let someone else come in and I hope it will be a more youthful person to take that particular spot,” she said in a phone interview from her home on the campus of Alcorn State University, a black land-grant university not far from Vicksburg where she is a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence. It is also where she met her late husband, Medgar Evers.

Evers-Williams has spent much of the last year honoring the memory of Medgar, NAACP’s first field director in Mississippi. In 1963, he was felled by an assassin’s bullet. For a half hour she spoke about her plans to build on her husband’s legacy, the NAACP’s future and the memoir she is writing.

Read more: The Washington Post