Former NAACP Chair Myrlie Evers-Williams poses for photographers at the 36th NAACP Image Awards in Los Angeles March 19, 2005.
As a civil rights activist and former chairwoman of the NAACP, Myrlie Evers-Williams will deliver the invocation at Obama’s second inauguration, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. She will be the first laywoman to ever give the inaugural invocation, the opening prayer over the president and the ceremony. Evers-Williams is the widow of Medgar Evers, a prominent civil rights organizer who was assassinated 50 years ago in the driveway of the couple’s Mississippi home. In an interview with the Washington Post, she said that she had been scheduled to speak at the 1963 March on Washington, but wasn’t able to make it: “That was one thing that has haunted me over the years. Fifty years later, I receive an invitation to deliver the invocation.”