Beckwith Convicted: Justice Served for Medgar Evers

Thirty-one years after Medgar Evers was shot in the back in his own driveway, his killer was finally convicted. Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist from Greenwood, Mississippi, was found guilty of murder on February 5, 1994, in Jackson, after two all-white juries in the 1960s had deadlocked, allowing him to walk free for three decades. The third jury, this time racially mixed, deliberated for six hours before delivering the verdict. Beckwith, seventy-three, was sentenced to life in prison. Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary in Mississippi, had been leading voter registration drives and investigating the murder of Emmett Till when a bullet from an Enfield rifle struck him in the back on June 12, 1963, just hours after President Kennedy’s televised address on civil rights. He crawled thirty feet to his front door and died at a Jackson hospital within the hour. His wife Myrlie and their three children heard the shot. Beckwith’s fingerprint was found on the rifle abandoned in nearby honeysuckle bushes. The first two trials, in 1964, ended in hung juries despite the physical evidence. The courtroom atmosphere told the story: Governor Ross Barnett walked in during the first trial and shook Beckwith’s hand in front of the jury. Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council and the Ku Klux Klan, boasted publicly about the killing. He ran for lieutenant governor in 1967 and was feted at white supremacist events. Mississippi’s power structure had no interest in convicting him. The case was reopened in 1989 after journalist Jerry Mitchell and Myrlie Evers-Williams, who had never stopped pressing for justice, uncovered new evidence, including testimony from witnesses who had heard Beckwith brag about the murder. Bobby DeLaughter, an assistant district attorney in Hinds County, rebuilt the case from scratch. The original murder weapon was found in a courthouse closet. Mississippi had changed enough by 1994 to produce a jury willing to deliver the verdict the evidence had always supported.