The Murder Of Civil Rights Leader Medgar Evers And The 30 Year Wait To Convict His Killer
- Jun 12, 2023
- 10 min read
Shortly after midnight on 12 June 1963, civil rights organiser Medgar Evers pulled into his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. He stepped out of his Oldsmobile carrying shirts printed with the words "Jim Crow Must Go." From about 40 yards away, a sniper fired a single shot from a high-powered rifle. The bullet struck Evers in the back, tore through his chest, passed through the outer wall of the house, travelled through a kitchen partition, ricocheted off a refrigerator, and came to rest inside a kitchen cabinet.
His wife Myrlie and their three children had been waiting up for him. "I opened the door, and there was Medgar at the steps, face down in blood," Myrlie later told People magazine. "The children ran out and were shouting, 'Daddy, get up!'"
Evers was rushed to hospital. Staff initially refused to admit him because of his race. Once his family provided identification and he was finally allowed in, he became the first Black man admitted to an all-white hospital in Mississippi. He died fifty minutes later, aged 37.
Just hours before, President Kennedy had addressed the nation about the civil rights movement on television. Now one of its most important figures was gone. His killer would not be convicted for more than three decades, and the reason it took that long is as damning as the murder itself.
Growing Up in Mississippi
Medgar Wiley Evers was born on 2 July 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi. From childhood, the brutal realities of life for Black Americans in the South were impossible to ignore. He and his brother walked miles each day to their segregated school while white children passed in buses, sometimes throwing things at them from the windows.
"I was born in Decatur here in Mississippi, and when we were walking to school in the first grade white kids in their school buses would throw things at us and yell filthy things," Evers recalled. "This was a mild start. If you're a kid in Mississippi this is the elementary course."
When he was around eleven or twelve, a close family friend was lynched at the Decatur fairgrounds by a group of white men who claimed he had spoken disrespectfully to a white woman. "They just left him dead on the ground," Evers said. "Everyone in town knew it but never said a word in public." You can read more about the long history of racial terror lynchings in America in the article on the lynching of J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith.
Evers was drafted into the army in 1943 at 18, inducted at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and served in the segregated Quartermaster Corps during World War II. When he returned home, he found that fighting for his country had earned him nothing in the way of equal treatment. He registered to vote, and when he and his brother attempted to exercise that right, over 200 white men turned up armed to drive them away.
"All we wanted to be was ordinary citizens," he said. "We fought during the war for America and Mississippi was included. Now after the Germans and the Japanese hadn't killed us, it looked as though the white Mississippians would."
He enrolled at the historically Black Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1948, majoring in business administration. He competed in athletics, sang in the choir, was elected junior class president, and earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1952. On 24 December 1951, he married his classmate Myrlie Beasley.
Building the Movement
After graduating, Evers and Myrlie moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a town founded by African Americans after the Civil War. He worked as a salesman for the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company, run by civil rights activist Dr T.R.M. Howard, who drew him deeper into organised activism. As president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, Evers helped organise a boycott of petrol stations that barred Black customers from their restrooms. He and his brother Charles were regulars at RCNL conferences that drew thousands.
In 1954, following the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was unconstitutional, Evers applied to the University of Mississippi Law School as part of a deliberate NAACP test case. He was rejected solely on the grounds of his race. That same year he became the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, a role that made him one of the most prominent civil rights voices in the state and placed him directly in the crosshairs of white supremacist organisations.
His work was wide-ranging and relentless. He supported the Biloxi wade-ins led by Dr Gilbert Mason from 1959 to 1963, which targeted segregated public beaches. He spearheaded voter registration drives across Mississippi. He backed James Meredith's campaign to integrate the University of Mississippi in the early 1960s. He organised boycotts of white merchants in Jackson and led efforts to desegregate the city's buses, parks, and schools.
He also investigated racially motivated murders, including going undercover in overalls to gather information about the killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till, abducted and murdered in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955, after being accused of whistling at a white woman. That kind of work made Evers exceptionally dangerous to those who wanted the existing order to hold.
Number One on the Kill List
"Medgar became No. 1 on the Mississippi to-kill list," his widow Myrlie Evers-Williams later told NPR. "We never knew from one day to the next what would happen. I lived in fear of losing him. He lived being constantly aware that he could be killed at any time."
Despite this, Evers wrote publicly about his love for Mississippi. In a 1958 magazine piece titled "Why I Live in Mississippi," he wrote: "It may sound funny, but I love the South. I don't choose to live anywhere else. There is room here for my children to play and grow and become good citizens if the white man will let them."
The threats became increasingly concrete in the months before his death. On 28 May 1963, after he organised a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Jackson, his house was firebombed. Five days before the shooting, a car attempted to run him down as he was leaving the NAACP office. He reassured worried colleagues with a line that became part of his legacy: "You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea."
He usually arrived home with an FBI or police escort. On the night of 12 June 1963, no escort came. The FBI and local police never explained the absence. It has been widely noted that many officers in Mississippi at the time had known affiliations with the Ku Klux Klan.
The Killer
Within 24 hours of the shooting, police found the murder weapon, a hunting rifle, in a wooded area across the street from the Evers home. A fingerprint on the telescopic sight matched Byron de la Beckwith, a 42-year-old fertiliser salesman and founding member of Mississippi's White Citizens Council, a white supremacist organisation that sought to resist desegregation through economic and political pressure. Beckwith was also a Ku Klux Klan member.
The FBI investigation further established that Beckwith had been asking cab drivers for directions to Evers's home in the days before the shooting, and that his car had been spotted in the neighbourhood that evening. He was arrested ten days after the murder.
Beckwith denied shooting Evers. He claimed his gun had been stolen before the murder. He produced witnesses, including two police officers, who testified he was approximately 60 miles from Jackson that night.
Two Trials, Two Hung Juries, and a Governor's Handshake
Beckwith was tried twice in 1964. Both juries were all-white and all-male, because Mississippi's systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters meant they were excluded from jury service. Both deadlocked. Both trials ended in mistrials.
During the second trial, Mississippi's sitting governor, Ross Barnett, walked into the courtroom and shook hands with the defendant in full view of the jury. Barnett was a Democrat and a fierce segregationist who had personally tried to block James Meredith's enrolment at the University of Mississippi two years earlier. His appearance in that courtroom was not ambiguous. It was an endorsement.
Beckwith walked free. He returned to the Mississippi Delta as something close to a hero in certain circles. For years afterwards he bragged openly about killing Evers, including at Klan rallies, referring to Evers as a "chicken-stealing dog." His guilt was an open secret among white supremacists. Nobody prosecuted him again for over two decades.
In 1975, Beckwith was convicted of a separate offence: conspiracy to murder a Jewish civil rights leader in New Orleans. He served three years and was released. Still, the Evers case remained closed.
The Spy Agency That Helped Him Walk Free
What broke the case open was investigative journalism, and what it uncovered was worse than simple jury prejudice.
In 1989, Jerry Mitchell, a reporter at the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, began digging through records of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a taxpayer-funded state government agency that had been created to spy on the civil rights movement and suppress desegregation efforts. What he found was extraordinary. At the same time that the state of Mississippi was officially prosecuting Beckwith for murder in 1964, this other arm of the same state government was secretly assisting his defence team, illegally vetting the jury pool to eliminate any prospective juror who might convict him.
Bob Dylan would write the song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" in response to the murder.
Mitchell's story ran on 1 October 1989. The state's own machinery had been used to ensure that the man who killed Medgar Evers went free. The Clarion-Ledger published the findings, and public pressure from Myrlie Evers-Williams and civil rights activists forced the Hinds County District Attorney's office to announce within a month that the case would be reopened. Mitchell's journalism would eventually lead to the conviction of four Ku Klux Klan members across multiple civil rights cold cases.
The Third Trial
In December 1990, a Hinds County grand jury indicted Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers for the third time. He was living in Walden, Tennessee, by then, and had to be extradited back to Mississippi. He was 71 years old.
The prosecution was led by Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter, who had worked with Myrlie Evers-Williams for years building the new case. This time there was additional physical evidence. New witnesses were prepared to testify that Beckwith had bragged directly to them about committing the murder. And crucially, when Evers's body was exhumed for a second autopsy, forensic pathologist Dr Michael Baden retrieved approximately 20 bullet fragments from the remains. X-rays of those fragments were shown to the jury.
The third jury was also fundamentally different from the two that had deadlocked in 1964. It contained eight African Americans, and several women. The composition that had been systematically prevented for three decades was now, at last, present.
In his closing argument, DeLaughter addressed what Evers had actually been fighting for: "What he did was have the gall, the 'uppityness,' to want for his people, what? To be called by a name instead of 'Boy'? To go into a restaurant? To go into a department store, to vote, and for your children to get a decent education in a decent school?"
On 5 February 1994, thirty years and eight months after the murder, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He challenged the conviction in 1997; the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld it, and the US Supreme Court refused to review it. He died in prison on 21 January 2001, aged 80.
When the verdict was announced, Myrlie Evers-Williams said: "God, I have done the best I can do."
What Came After
Myrlie Evers-Williams had never stopped fighting. After her husband's murder she moved the family to Claremont, California, earned a degree from Pomona College, and spent the following decades pressing for justice while raising three children alone. In 1995, the year after the conviction, she became the third woman to chair the NAACP, a role that completed a journey that had begun in that driveway in Jackson more than thirty years earlier.
The Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home in Jackson, where he was shot, was designated a National Monument by President Biden in 2023. The rifle sight used to kill Evers is now on display at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
Rob Reiner's 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi, starring Alec Baldwin as Bobby DeLaughter and James Woods as Beckwith, brought the story of the third trial to a wider audience and introduced a new generation to the case.
Evers's brother Charles succeeded him as Mississippi field secretary of the NAACP immediately after the assassination. The NAACP honoured Medgar Evers posthumously with the Spingarn Medal in 1963, its highest honour.
Medgar Evers knew he was going to be killed. He said so, more than once, in more than one form. He kept going anyway. He was 37 years old when Byron de la Beckwith shot him in the back from the shadow of a honeysuckle bush. The state of Mississippi made sure he got away with it for as long as it possibly could. In the end, it was a widow's refusal to accept that, and a journalist's refusal to stop looking, that finally made it matter.
For more on the civil rights figures who paid the highest price for their beliefs, read about Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader whose murder was ordered by the FBI, and the full timeline of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King.
SOURCES
1. FBI: Famous Cases: Medgar Evers — https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/medgar-evers
2. History.com: White Supremacist Convicted of Killing Medgar Evers — https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/february-5/beckwith-convicted-of-killing-medgar-evers
3. Democracy Now!: Interview with Jerry Mitchell and Myrlie Evers-Williams — https://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/25/part_2_interview_with_spies_of
4. All That's Interesting: Byron De La Beckwith, The Klansman Who Nearly Got Away With Killing Medgar Evers — https://allthatsinteresting.com/byron-de-la-beckwith
5. Medgar Evers College, CUNY: Justice for Medgar Evers — https://www.mec.cuny.edu/about/history/justice-for-medgar-evers/
6. The Annals of Thoracic Surgery: The Assassination of Medgar Evers — https://www.annalsthoracicsurgery.org/article/S0003-4975(21)01306-0/fulltext
7. Mississippi Department of Archives and History: Medgar Wiley and Myrlie Beasley Evers Papers — https://finding.mdah.ms.gov/manuscripts/z2231000
8. National WWII Museum: Medgar Evers, US Army Veteran and Civil Rights Leader — https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/medgar-evers-us-army-veteran-and-civil-rights-leader
