Byron De La Beckwith (November 9, 1920 – January 21, 2001) was an American white supremacist and Klansman who was convicted of killing civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
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De La Beckwith was born in Colusa, California to Susan Southworth Yerger. When he was five years old, his father died of pneumonia and De La Beckwith subsequently moved to the Sacramento area. He later moved with his mother to Greenwood, Mississippi to be near relatives. Beckwith's mother died of lung cancer when he was 12,[1] and he was placed in the care of his maternal uncle, William Greene Yerger.[1]
De La Beckwith enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in January 1942, and served as a machine gunner in the Pacific theater. He saw action at the Battle of Guadalcanal and was wounded during the Battle of Tarawa. For his service, Beckwith was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation (twice), Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with three bronze service stars, Good Conduct Medal, World War II Victory Medal, and also received the Purple Heart. Later claims that Beckwith was awarded the Silver Star are unfounded, according to official Marine Corps records. He was discharged in January 1946.
After serving in the Marine Corps, Beckwith moved to Rhode Island, where he married Mary Louise Williams.[1] Beckwith then settled in Greenwood with his wife, and worked as a tobacco and fertilizer salesman for 10 years. He attended the Greenwood Episcopal Church of the Nativity and became a member of the Ku Klux Klan.[2]
During the 1960s, the Klan was involved in numerous acts of violence and terrorism. The assassination of Medgar Evers, 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 second trial, former Governor Ross Barnett interrupted the proceedings—while Myrlie Evers was testifying—to shake hands with Beckwith.[3]
In the following years, a cause known for its espousing of hostility towards not only blacks, but also Jews, Catholics, and foreign-born American citizens specifically, as well as the United States Federal Government. According to Delmar Dennis (key witness for the prosecution at his 1994 trial), De La Beckwith boasted of his role in the death of Medgar Evers at several Ku Klux Klan rallies and other similar gatherings in the years following his mistrials. In 1967, he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party's nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi.
In 1973, informants alerted the FBI of Beckwith's plans to murder A.I. Botnick, director of the New Orleans based B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, for comments Botnick had made about southerners and race relations. Following several days of surveillance, De La Beckwith's car was stopped by New Orleans police as he crossed over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway Bridge. Among the contents of his vehicle were several loaded firearms, a map with directions to Botnick's house highlighted, and a dynamite time bomb.
On August 1, 1975 Beckwith was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, serving three years in Angola Prison which he served from May 1977 until January 1980.
A third trial in 1994, before a jury of eight African-American and four white jurors, ended with Beckwith being convicted of first-degree murder, for killing Medgar Evers. The conviction was based on new evidence proving that he had boasted of the murder 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. The guilty verdict was subsequently appealed, but the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1997. The court said the 31-year lapse between the murder and De La Beckwith's conviction did not deny him a fair trial. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder.
He died on January 21, 2001 at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. He had suffered from heart disease, high blood pressure and other ailments. [3]
The most important fictional portrayal of Evers' murderer was written immediately after the event, before De La Beckwith was captured, by the Jackson, Mississippi native Eudora Welty: "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" (1963). As Welty said later, she said to herself, "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" (Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, xi). Welty's story was published in The New Yorker soon after de la Beckwith's arrest. So accurate was her portrayal that several details in the fiction had to be changed before publication for legal reasons. Welty casts her dramatic monologue of white hate, fear, and confusion--ironically--as a sort of blues song sung by the murderer as he tries to use violence to keep blacks from rising: "sing a-down, down, down, down. Down." are the story's last words. Welty was the first living writer honored by inclusion in the Library of America series collecting the works of great American writers.
Byron De La Beckwith was the subject of the 1963 Bob Dylan song "Only a Pawn in Their Game", which deplores Evers' murder and the racist element in "The South" of that time, while dismissing De La Beckwith himself as merely a product of his environment.
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. The prosecution lawyer Robert DeLaughter wrote a first person narrative article titled "Mississippi Justice" published in Reader's Digest.
In the episode of Mr. Show, "Show Me Your Weenis," there's a fictional TV series named "Byron De La Beckwith VII: Racist in the Year 3000." The character is presumably a descendent of Byron De La Beckwith.
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