Byron De La Beckwith

Byron De La Beckwith Jr. (November 9, 1920 – January 21, 2001) was an American white supremacist and member of the Ku Klux Klan who murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi.

In 1964, he was tried twice on a murder charge in Mississippi. The all-white male juries each ended in hung juries, and De La Beckwith went free. In 1994, based on new evidence, he was tried again. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001 at the age of 80.

Early life and career

De La Beckwith was born in Colusa, California, the only child of Byron De La Beckwith Sr., a postmaster for the town of Colusa, and Susan Southworth Yerger. One year later, he and his mother settled in Greenwood, Mississippi, to be near her family. His mother died of lung cancer when De La Beckwith was 12 years old, leaving him orphaned. He was raised by his maternal uncle William Greene Yerger and his wife. He was honorably discharged in August 1945.

After his return to the United States, De La Beckwith moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he married Mary Louise Williams.

De La Beckwith had positioned himself across the street from Evers's home. Using a rifle, he shot Evers in the back. Evers died an hour later, aged 37. Myrlie Evers, his wife, and his three children, James, Reena, and Darrell Evers, were home at the time of the assassination.

Darrell, who was nine years old at the time, recalled the night: "We were ready to greet him, because every time he came home it was special for us. He was traveling a lot at that time. All of a sudden, we heard a shot. We knew what it was."

Trials

The state prosecuted De La Beckwith twice for murder in 1964, but both trials ended with hung juries. Mississippi had effectively disenfranchised black voters since 1890. In practice, this also meant they were excluded from serving on juries, whose members were drawn from voter rolls. During the second trial, Ross Barnett, Democratic governor of Mississippi at the time of the assassination, shook hands with De La Beckwith in the courtroom.

In January 1966, De La Beckwith, along with a number of other members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about Klan activities. Although De La Beckwith gave his name when asked by the committee (other witnesses, such as Samuel Bowers, invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to that question), he answered no other substantive questions. Just before entering prison to serve his sentence, De La Beckwith was ordained by Reverend Dewey "Buddy" Tucker as a minister in the Temple Memorial Baptist Church, a Christian Identity congregation in Knoxville, Tennessee. De La Beckwith was an avid follower of Wesley Swift.

In the 1980s, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger published reports on its investigation of De La Beckwith's trials in the 1960s. It found that the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency supported by taxpayers' money to purportedly protect the image of the state, had assisted De La Beckwith's attorneys in his second trial. The commission had worked against the civil rights movement in numerous ways; for this trial, it used state resources to investigate members of the jury pool during voir dire to aid the defense in picking a sympathetic jury. The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled against his motion by a 4–3 vote, and the case was scheduled to be heard in January 1994.

During this third trial, the murder weapon was presented, a “sporterized” Enfield .30-06 caliber rifle, with De La Beckwith's fingerprints. De La Beckwith claimed that the gun was stolen from his house. He listed his health problems, high blood pressure, lack of energy and kidney problems, saying, "I need a list to recite everything I suffer from, and I hate to complain because I'm not the complaining type".

On February 5, 1994, a jury composed of eight African Americans and four whites convicted De La Beckwith of murder for killing Medgar Evers. He was sentenced to life in prison. New evidence included testimony that during the three decades since the crime had occurred, De La Beckwith had boasted on multiple occasions of having committed the murder, including at a KKK rally. The physical evidence was essentially the same as that presented during the first two trials.

On January 21, 2001, De La Beckwith died after he was transferred from prison to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. He was 80 years old. He had suffered from heart disease, high blood pressure, and other ailments for some time.

Representation in other media

Where Is the Voice Coming From? (1963), a short story by Eudora Welty, was published in The New Yorker on July 6, 1963. Welty, who was from Jackson, Mississippi, later said: "Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind. I wrote his story—my fiction—in the first person: about that character's point of view." It was published before De La Beckwith's arrest. So accurate was her portrayal that the magazine changed several details in the story before publication for legal reasons.

Byron De La Beckwith is referenced in the 1963 Bob Dylan song "Only a Pawn in Their Game", which deplores Evers' murder.

In 1991, author William James Royce wrote "Sweet, Sweet Blues", an episode of the NBC television series In the Heat of the Night. It was based on the murder of Evers and first trials of De La Beckwith. Actor James Best plays a character based on De La Beckwith, an aging Klansman who appears to have gotten away with murder.

The feature film Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) tells the story of the murder and 1994 trial. James Woods's performance as De La Beckwith was nominated for an Academy Award.

In 2001, Bobby DeLaughter published his memoir of the case and 1994 trial, Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Trial.

References

External links

Byron De La Beckwith Sr. Letters, Special Collections at The University of Southern Mississippi