On this day in 1994, Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist, was convicted of murdering African-American civil rights leader Medgar Evers, more than 30 years after the crime took place.
On June 12, 1963, Evers was shot in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi, while his wife, Myrlie, and their three young children were present inside.
Born on July 2, 1925, near Decatur, Mississippi, Medgar Wiley Evers served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After returning home from the war, he encountered the harsh realities of discrimination in the segregated South, characterized by separate public facilities and services for whites and blacks.
Evers completed his education at Alcorn College in 1952 and subsequently began organizing local NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) chapters.
In 1954, after facing rejection from the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School, he joined an NAACP campaign aimed at desegregating the institution. That same year, he was appointed as the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi. He relocated to Jackson with his family and dedicated his efforts to eradicating segregation through peaceful rallies, economic boycotts, and voter registration drives across the state.
His assistance in helping James Meredith become the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962 marked a significant milestone in the civil rights movement. Due to his activism, Evers received multiple threats, and there were several assassination attempts on his life before he was killed in 1963 at age 37.
Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the Ku Klux Klan, was widely regarded as the perpetrator of the murder and faced prosecution in 1964. However, both all-white, all-male juries remained deadlocked and did not convict him. A subsequent trial in the same year also resulted in a hung jury, leading authorities to abandon the case due to the challenges of achieving a conviction.
Myrlie Evers, who later became the first woman to lead the NAACP, persistently urged officials to re-investigate the case. In 1989, evidence emerged that jurors had been improperly screened.
With the help of Prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter, Myrlie Evers aimed to initiate a new prosecution of Beckwith. After four years of legal battles, they finally succeeded. During the third trial, they presented a riflescope from the murder weapon that bore Beckwith’s fingerprints and introduced new witnesses who testified that Beckwith had boasted about the crime.
Justice was ultimately served when a racially diverse jury found Beckwith guilty, resulting in a life sentence in 1994. He passed away in prison in 2001 at the age of 80.
