Byron De La Beckwith

Byron De La Beckwith (b. November 9 1920, Colusa, California – d. January 21 2001, Jackson, Mississippi) was an American white supremacist and the convicted murderer of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

Early life

Beckwith was born in California, but orphaned and raised in Greenwood, Mississippi from the age of five. He became an ardent supporter of segregation and joined the Ku Klux Klan. De La Beckwith was a Marine Corps veteran of World War II, and was awarded the Silver Star. He had three turbulent marriages to the same woman and was diagonosed as a schizophrenic.

Assassination of Medger Evers

During the 1960s the Klan was involved in numerous acts of violence and terrorism. Megdar Evers' assassination, on June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, was another episode in the Klan's violent campaign against racial integration and civil rights for African-Americans.

De La Beckwith was twice tried for murder in 1964. Both trials ended in mistrials with the all-white jury unable to reach a verdict. In the following years, he became a leader in the Phineas Priesthood, a branch of the Christian Identity movement known for espousing extreme white supremacist, anti-government, anti-gay, and anti-abortion ideologies.

Imprisonment

A third trial in 1994, before a jury of eight blacks and four whites, ended with Beckwith being convicted of the murder of Evers. The conviction was based, in part, on new evidence proving that he had boasted of the killing at a Klan rally and to others over the three decades after the crime. The physical evidence was essentially the same as was used during the first two trials.

Sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, De La Beckwith died at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in 2001 in Jackson, Mississippi, aged 80. He had suffered from heart disease, high blood pressure and other ailments.

Fictional portrayals

The 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi tells the story of the murder and 1994 trial. James Woods portrayed De La Beckwith in an Academy Award-nominated performance.

References

• David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, T.R.M. Howard: Pragmatism over Strict Integrationist Ideology in the Mississippi Delta, 1942-1954 in Glenn Feldman, ed., Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South (2004 book), 68-95.
• Brown, Jennie. Medgar Evers. Los Angeles: Melrose Square Pub. Co., 1994.
• John Dittmer, Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994 book).
• Evers, Myrlie B., and William Peters. For Us, the Living. 1st ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
• Jackson, James E. At the funeral of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi: A Tribute in Tears and a Thrust for Freedom. New York: Publisher’s New Press, 1963.
• Massengill, Reed. Portrait of a Racist: The Man Who Killed Medgar Evers? New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
• Nossiter, Adam. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994; Da Capo Press, 2002.
• Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995 book).
• Salter, John R. Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism. Foreword by R. Edwin King, Jr. Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1979.
• Scott, R. W. Glory in Conflict: A Saga of Byron De La Beckwith. Camden, Arkansas: Camark Press, 1991.
• Remembering Medgar Evers—For a New Generation: A Commemoration. Developed by the Civil Rights Research and Documentation Project, Afro-American Studies Program, The University of Mississippi. Oxford, MS: distributed by Heritage Publications in cooperation with the Mississippi Network for Black History and Heritage, 1988.
• Vollers, Maryanne. Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, The Trials of Byron de la Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

See also

• List of assassins
• List of famous prison deaths