The National Park Service has removed visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument. Among the anticipated changes? No longer calling his murderer a “racist.”

Edits to the brochure have removed that reference to Byron De La Beckwith, according to Park Service officials, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Other edits include eliminating the reference to Medgar Evers lying in a pool of blood after being shot.

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.”

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.

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.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s attempts to dramatically slash funding for the U.S. Department of Education amid a broader push to dismantle the agency hit a major roadblock this week in the form of bipartisan approval of a spending law that gives the department a small raise.

The president signed a measure that funds the department at $79 billion this fiscal year — roughly $217 million more than the agency’s fiscal year 2025 funding levels and a whopping $12 billion above what Trump wanted.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, wrote in a social media post after the signing that the law was a direct rebuke of several Trump priorities, including eliminating the department.

“Our funding bills send a message to Trump,” she wrote. “Congress will NOT abolish the Department of Education.”

The measure also rejects efforts to dramatically reduce or fully slash funding for a host of programs administered by the department for low-income and disadvantaged students.

Trump and his administration have sought over the past year to take an axe to the 46-year-old agency as part of a quest to send education “back to the states.” Much of the funding and oversight of schools already occurs at the state and local levels.

Those dismantling efforts included six interagency agreements with four other departments in November that would shift several Education responsibilities to those Cabinet-level agencies.

The department also saw mass layoffs initiated in March 2025 and a plan to dramatically downsize the agency ordered that same month — efforts that the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily greenlit in July.

The spending package also holds full-year funding for the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, State and Treasury. The measure includes a two-week stopgap measure for the Department of Homeland Security.

‘Inefficiencies’

The measure does not offer ironclad language to prevent the outsourcing of the Education Department’s responsibilities to other agencies — despite efforts from Senate Democrats to block such transfers.

However, in a joint explanatory statement alongside the measure, lawmakers expressed alarm over the “assignment of such programmatic responsibilities to agencies that do not have experience, expertise, or capacity to carry out these programs and activities and lack developed relationships and communications with relevant stakeholders, including States.”

Lawmakers added they were “concerned that fragmenting responsibilities for education programs across multiple agencies will create inefficiencies, result in additional costs to the American taxpayer, and cause delays and administrative challenges in Federal funding reaching States, school districts, and schools.”

Due to those concerns, the funding measure directs the Education Department and the agencies that are part of the transfers to provide biweekly briefings to lawmakers on the implementation of any interagency agreements.

The briefings are supposed to include information on “staffing transfers, implementation costs, metrics on the delivery of services” and the “availability of technical support for programs to grantees,” among other matters.

The Education Department clarified when announcing the interagency agreements in November with the departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services and State that it would “maintain all statutory responsibilities and will continue its oversight of these programs.”

‘Necessary’ staffing levels

The funding agreement also mandates that the department “support staffing levels necessary to fulfill its statutory responsibilities including carrying out programs, projects, and activities funded in (the law) in a timely manner.”

The department took heat last summer when it froze $6.8 billion in funds for K-12 schools and informed states just a day before the money is typically sent out.

The funds were eventually unfrozen, following bipartisan pushback in Congress.

Pell Grant spared

The measure also maintains the total maximum annual award for the Pell Grant from the prior fiscal year at $7,395, according to a summary from Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee. The government subsidy helps low-income students pay for college.

Trump’s budget request called for cutting nearly $1,700 from the maximum award for the 2026-2027 award year, a proposal that stoked alarm last year from leading House and Senate appropriators in both parties overseeing Education Department funding.

Funding levels maintained for TRIO, GEAR UP

The administration also called for defunding the Federal TRIO programs and the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, or GEAR UP, in fiscal 2026 — a move rejected in the measure.

The Federal TRIO Programs include federal outreach and student services programs to help support students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and GEAR UP aims to prepare low-income students for college.

Appropriators maintained funding for the programs at fiscal 2025 levels — with $1.191 billion for TRIO and $388 million for GEAR UP, per the Senate Democrats’ summary.

The administration also sought to axe funding for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program, which, according to the Education Department, “supports the participation of low-income parents in postsecondary education through the provision of campus-based child care services.”

Instead, the measure allocates $75 million for the program.

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment on the funding package.

The administration expressed its support for the entire, multi-bill package, in a Jan. 29 statement of administration policy that barely mentioned the education provisions.