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.
Beckwith was born in California, but raised in
Greenwood, Mississippi from the age of five. He became an ardent supporter of segregation and joined the
Ku Klux Klan.
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. A third trial in
1994, before a jury of eight Blacks and 4 whites, convicted Beckwith of the murder of Evers. The conviction was based, in part, on new evidence that he had boasted of the killing at a
Ku Klux 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, Byron 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.
The
1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi tells the story of the murder and 1994 trial.
James Woods portrayed Beckwith in an
Academy Award-nominated performance.
*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.
