Byron De La Beckwith
Byron De La Beckwith | |
---|---|
Deceased | |
Conviction(s) | Murder |
Criminal penalty | Life imprisonment |
Byron De La Beckwith Jr. (November 9, 1920 – January 21, 2001) was an American from
Byron De La Beckwith was a white supremacist and a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1964, he was tried twice on a murder charge in Mississippi. The
Early life and career
De La Beckwith was born in Sacramento, California, the only child of Byron De La Beckwith Sr., a postmaster for the town of Colusa, and Susan Southworth Yerger.[1] His father died of pneumonia when the boy was 5.[2]: 24 One year later, he and his mother settled in Greenwood, Mississippi, to be near her family. His mother died of lung cancer when La Beckwith was 12 years old,[3] leaving him orphaned. He was raised by his maternal uncle William Greene Yerger and his wife.[3] They supported De La Beckwith in his studies at the prestigious southern prep school, The Webb School, located in Bell Buckle, Tennessee.
Military service
In January 1942, soon after the United States entered World War II, De La Beckwith enlisted in the
After his return to the United States, De La Beckwith moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he married Mary Louise Williams.[3] The couple relocated to Mississippi, where they settled in his hometown of Greenwood. They had a son together, Delay De La Beckwith. De La Beckwith and Williams divorced. He later married Thelma Lindsay Neff.[1]
Career
De La Beckwith worked as a salesman for most of his life, selling tobacco, fertilizer, wood stoves, and other goods.
Murder of Medgar Evers
On June 12, 1963, at age 42, De La Beckwith murdered NAACP and civil rights leader Medgar Evers shortly after the activist arrived home in Jackson. Evers was the first NAACP field secretary in the state.
De La Beckwith had positioned himself across the street from Evers's home. Using a rifle, he shot Evers in the back.
Their son Darrell recalled the night: "We were ready to greet him, because every time he came home it was special for us. He was traveling a lot at that time. All of a sudden, we heard a shot. We knew what it was."[6]
Trials
The state prosecuted De La Beckwith twice for murder in 1964, but both trials ended with
In January 1966, De La Beckwith, along with a number of other members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about Klan activities. Although De La Beckwith gave his name when asked by the committee (other witnesses, such as Samuel Bowers, invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to that question), he answered no other substantive questions.[2][page needed] In the following years, De La Beckwith became a leader in the segregationist Phineas Priesthood, an offshoot of the white supremacist Christian Identity movement.[citation needed] The group was known for its hostility toward African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and foreigners.
According to Delmar Dennis, who acted as a key witness for the prosecution at the 1994 trial, De La Beckwith boasted of his role in the death of Medgar Evers at several Ku Klux Klan rallies and similar gatherings in the years following his mistrials. In 1967, he unsuccessfully sought the
]In 1969, De La Beckwith's previous charges were dismissed. In 1973, informants alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation that he planned to murder A.I. Botnick, director of the New Orleans-based B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League. The attack was a racially motivated retaliation for comments that Botnick had made about white Southerners and race relations.
Following several days of surveillance,
After losing his appeal, De La Beckwith was detained in Washington, D.C. for failing to report to prison. He served nearly three years of his five-year sentence at Angola Prison in Louisiana from May 1977 until he was paroled in January 1980.[2][8] Just before entering prison to serve his sentence, De La Beckwith was ordained by Reverend Dewey "Buddy" Tucker as a minister in the Temple Memorial Baptist Church, a Christian Identity congregation in Knoxville, Tennessee.[9]
In the 1980s, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger published reports on its investigation of De La Beckwith's trials in the 1960s. It found that the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency supported by taxpayers' money to purportedly protect the image of the state, had assisted De La Beckwith's attorneys in his second trial. The commission had worked against the civil rights movement in numerous ways; for this trial, it used state resources to investigate members of the jury pool during voir dire to aid the defense in picking a sympathetic jury.[1][2][page needed] These findings of illegality contributed to the state conducting a new trial of De La Beckwith in 1994.
1994 trial for Evers murder
Myrlie Evers, who later became the third woman to chair the NAACP, refused to abandon her husband's case. When new documents showed that jurors in the previous case were investigated illegally and screened by a state agency, she pressed authorities to reopen the case. In the 1980s, reporting by Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger about the earlier De La Beckwith trials resulted in the state's mounting a new investigation. It ultimately initiated a third prosecution, based on this and other new evidence.[1]
By this time, De La Beckwith was living in
During this third trial, the murder weapon was presented, an
On February 5, 1994, a jury composed of eight African Americans and four whites, convicted De La Beckwith of murder for killing Medgar Evers. He was sentenced to life in prison.[12][13][14] New evidence included testimony that during the three decades since the crime had occurred, De La Beckwith had boasted on multiple occasions of having committed the murder, including at a KKK rally. The physical evidence was essentially the same as that presented during the first two trials.[1]
De La Beckwith appealed the guilty verdict, but the
On January 21, 2001, De La Beckwith died after he was transferred from prison to the
Representation in other media
- Where Is the Voice Coming From?[16] (1963), a short story by Eudora Welty, was published in The New Yorker on July 6, 1963. Welty, who was from Jackson, Mississippi, later said: "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."[17] It was published before De La Beckwith's arrest. So accurate was her portrayal that the magazine changed several details in the story before publication for legal reasons.[18]
- Byron De La Beckwith was the subject of the 1963 Bob Dylan song "Only a Pawn in Their Game", which deplores Evers' murder and attempts to suggest De La Beckwith was "only a pawn in the game", a poor white man manipulated by Southern politicians.
- In 1991, author William James Royce wrote "Sweet, Sweet Blues", an episode of the NBC television series In the Heat of the Night. It was based on the murder of Evers and first trials of De La Beckwith . Actor James Best plays a character based on De La Beckwith, an aging Klansman who appears to have gotten away with murder.
- The feature film Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) tells the story of the murder and 1994 trial. James Woods's performance as De La Beckwith was nominated for an Academy Award.
- In 2001, Bobby DeLaughter published his memoir of the case and 1994 trial, Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Trial.[19]
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h Stout, David (January 23, 2001). "Byron De La Beckwith Dies; Killer of Medgar Evers Was 80". The New York Times. Retrieved April 28, 2010.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-316-91485-7. Retrieved September 9, 2011.
- ^ a b c "A Little Abnormal: The Life of Byron De La Beckwith". Time. July 5, 1963. Archived from the original on April 5, 2008. Retrieved September 10, 2011.
- ISBN 978-0-385-09669-0. Retrieved September 9, 2011.
- ^ "Medgar Evers". Federal Bureau of Investigation.
- ^ Hansen, Mark. ABA Journal, March 1993, Vol.79, p.26(1); Justice, Glen. "'The Word Is Free': For the Three Children of Civil Rights Martyr Medgar Evers, the Conviction of Their Father's Murderer after 30 Years Has Finally Ended a Lifetime in Limbo. Quietly, Each Is Fulfilling Their Father's Dreams by Living out Their Own", Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1994. Web. May 16, 2017.
- S2CID 144120696.
- ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved October 13, 2023.
- ^ Lloyd, James B. (January 11, 1995). "Tennessee, Racism, and the New Right: The Second Beckwith Collection," The Library Development Review 1994-95: 3.
- ^ "Third trial allowed; white supremacist loses appeal: Byron De La Beckwith". Hansen, Mark. ABA Journal, March 1993, Vol.79, p.26(1)
- ^ "Sentenced, Byron De La Beckwith", Time, February 14, 1994, Vol. 143(7), p.18(1)
- ^ Harrist, Ron (February 5, 1994). "White supremacist convicted of killing Medgar Evers". Associated Press. Retrieved May 24, 2021.
- ^ "White supremacist convicted of killing Medgar Evers". History.com. Retrieved May 24, 2021.
- ^ "De La Beckwith v. State, 707 So. 2d 547 | Casetext Search + Citator". casetext.com. Retrieved January 26, 2023.
- ^ De La Beckwith v. State, 707 So. 2d 547 (Miss. 1997), cert. denied, 525 U.S. 880 (1998).
- ^ "Where Is The Voice Coming From?". web.mit.edu.
- ISBN 978-0-15-618921-7. Retrieved September 9, 2011.
- ^ Eudora Welty, "Preface", The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980).
- ISBN 9780743223393. Retrieved June 13, 2013.
Further reading
- ISBN 978-0-942373-00-4. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- David T. Beito; Linda Royster Beito (2004). "T.R.M. Howard: Pragmatism over Strict Integrationist Ideology in the Mississippi Delta, 1942–1954". In Glenn Feldman (ed.). Before Brown: civil rights and white backlash in the modern South. University of Alabama Press. pp. 68–95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1431-6. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- Jennie Brown (June 1, 1994). Medgar Evers. Holloway House Publishing. ISBN 978-0-87067-594-2. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- ISBN 978-0-252-06507-1. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- ISBN 978-0-87805-841-9. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- James E. Jackson (1963). At the funeral of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi: a tribute in tears and a thrust for freedom. Publisher's New Press. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- ISBN 978-0-553-56351-1. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- Reed Massengill (January 1997). Portrait of a Racist: The Real Life of Byron De La Beckwith. St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 978-0-312-16725-7. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- Adam Nossiter (June 19, 2002). Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-81162-3. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- ISBN 978-0-520-25176-2. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- Randy Radic (December 14, 2009). "For God's Sake: The Assassination of Medgar Evers". CrimeMagazine.com. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- John R. Salter (November 1, 2011). Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism. UNP – Bison Books. ]
- R. W. Scott (1991). Glory in Conflict: A Saga of Byron De La Beckwith. Camark Press. Retrieved September 12, 2011.
- Never Too Late: A Prosecutor's Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2001-09-16. ISBN 9780743223393. Retrieved June 13, 2013.
External links
- Byron De La Beckwith at IMDb
- "Byron De La Beckwith". Find a Grave. Retrieved August 10, 2010.
- Byron De La Beckwith Sr. Letters, Special Collections at The University of Southern Mississippi