Reena Evers-Everette, daughter of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, speaks of her father's life and legacy during a memorial tribute held at their former home Saturday, June 12, 2021, in Jackson.Reena Evers-Everette, executive director of the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute and daughter of the couple, said the family has been told the matter is under review, “but the final product has not been put out yet.”
In 1963, Beckwith shot the civil rights leader in the back on the driveway of the Evers family home in northwest Jackson. It would take 31 more years before a Mississippi jury would convict Beckwith.
Jeff Steinberg, founder of Sojourn to the Past, which regularly takes students and police officers on civil rights tours to the home, questioned the change to the Park Service material. “You can’t call Beckwith a racist?” he said. “If you opened a picture dictionary and turned to the definition for ‘racist,’ you’d probably find a picture of Byron De La Beckwith.”
The original brochures pulled from the home called Beckwith “a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.”
Stephanie Rolph, author of “Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council 1954-1989,” said the council “believed in the natural superiority of the Aryan race. They even went so far as to say that civilizations failed because of racial amalgamation.”
Beckwith also belonged to the nation’s most violent white supremacist group, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, responsible for at least 10 killings in Mississippi.
A Park Service spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
The Park Service’s decision comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused the previous administration of rewriting history. Under Trump's order, the interior secretary must revise or replace signs that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”
Two months later, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed with his own order, calling for changes to monuments and memorials that “inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures; or include any other improper partisan ideology.”
The secretary’s order calls for the removal of “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
The Washington Post has reported that the administration has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, including an 1863 photo that Christian abolitionists used to prove the horrors of slavery. The picture depicts a Black man whose back was covered in scars from beatings while enslaved.
According to the Post, National Park Service officials are “broadly interpreting that directive to apply to information on racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights or persecution of Indigenous people.”
President Donald Trump gets a tour of the newly-opened Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2017. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, left, joins the president on the tour.At the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in 2017, Trump hailed Evers, a World War II veteran, as a “great American hero.” But in the wake of his 2025 executive order, the U.S. Army removed Evers and others from a section on the Arlington National Cemetery website that honored Black Americans who fought in the nation’s wars.
The Army public affairs office responded that people from prior categories such as “African American History, Hispanic American History, and Women’s History” could be found in other categories such as “Prominent Military Figures” or “Science, Technology & Engineering,” based on the person’s historical contribution to the nation.
Alan Spears, senior director for cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, said the current administration wants to erase anything that deals with race, racism, civil rights, gay rights and slavery.
“You can talk about Martin Luther King Jr. overcoming,” Spears said. “You just can’t talk about what he overcame.”
As the nation’s 250th birthday approaches, it’s important for America to tell the truth about its history so that we don’t repeat past mistakes, he said. “It’s not to be avoided.”
The administration wants to sanitize these stories, Spears said. “It’s turning the assassination of Medgar Evers into something that is bloodless and had no impact. We can talk about him being a wonderful veteran, but not about what it cost him. He gave the last full measure of devotion, and now we want to ignore that.”
During Beckwith’s two 1964 trials, the Citizens’ Council provided him with three top criminal defense lawyers free of charge. Former Gov. Ross Barnett, who attended the trial and shook hands with Beckwith, was the law partner of one of the attorneys.
Those two trials ended when the all-male, all-white juries deadlocked, and many in Greenwood welcomed Beckwith as a hero.
Byron De La Beckwith at his house in Tennessee in June 1990, nearly four years before he was convicted in the 1963 killing of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers.Afterward, the assassin tried to ride his infamy into public office when he ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 1967, telling crowds that he believed in “absolute white supremacy under white Christian rule.”
His violent ways continued afterward. In 1973, New Orleans police caught him with a ticking time bomb that he planned to use to blow up a Jewish leader’s home, and he went to prison. He blamed his conviction on the “little Jewish prosecutor” and “n—- women” on the jury.
In the years that followed, Beckwith made no secret of his racism. In a 1990 interview, he called the white Citizens’ Council, created to preserve Jim Crow ways, “the first ray of light Dixie had seen since we fought through Reconstruction and captured the right to vote, the right of white people to run the South.”
He pointed to his Bible and said, “N—-s are beasts. It says so in here in the book of Adam.”
He bragged about Mississippi having more churches per capita than any other state.
“That’s a fact — till the n—-s started having all those holy roller meetings and NAACP meetings in those churches. Then they began to burn down.”
Then he said, “You know, n—-s are careless with matches,” before erupting in laughter.
As for the NAACP leader he killed, Beckwith called him a “mongrel” and said, “God hates mongrels.”
Beckwith bragged that God was on his side. He said he served as a minister in the Christian Identity Movement, a white supremacist religion that teaches Adam and Eve were white people and that those who aren’t white are “mud people” without souls.
He made no secret either of his hatred of Jews, calling them the offspring of Satan and claiming they had satanic powers. One day, white people, whom he called the “true Israelites,” would destroy these Jews, he said. “We Israelites have more firepower.”
Jackson Mayor John Horhn called Beckwith “a self-described racist. If the National Park Service is taking exception to that, just listen to the man’s own words.”
Mississippi authorities reopened the case against Beckwith in 1989 after it was revealed that the Sovereignty Commission, the state’s now-defunct segregationist spy agency, had secretly assisted his defense, trying to get him acquitted.
In 1994, a jury convicted Beckwith of Evers’ murder and he was sentenced to life in prison, where he died seven years later.
In 2023, Evers was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Rolph said she never thought she’d see the day when anyone would question whether Beckwith or the white Citizens’ Council had racist beliefs. Even those who supported segregation in Greenwood in 1963 believed Beckwith was “too extreme,” she said. “Give me a break. This is nuts.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
