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Notorious Lives

J. B. Stoner.

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

Byron De La Beckwith

by Kevin G. Buckler

American white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan leader

Major offense: Murder

Active: June 12, 1963

Locale: Jackson, Mississippi

Sentence: Life imprisonment

Early Life

Byron De La Beckwith (BI-ruhn day lah BEHK-wihth) was born in Colusa, California, and moved to Mississippi with his widowed mother at the age of five. Upon entering adulthood, Beckwith joined the armed services and received the Purple Heart for his combat service during World War II. After returning to the United States, Beckwith became a fertilizer salesman in Mississippi.

Beckwith’s early life in Mississippi and his return to the state after his military services appears to have impacted his attitudes about race and ethnicity rather substantially. Many residents of Mississippi and other southern states had clear inclinations toward preserving past racial separation policies. However, the United States was in the midst of a desegregation movement. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 had overruled the prior “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). These changes in society were viewed by Beckwith and many southerners as an attack on their way of life forced upon them by the federal government and civil rights advocates. Upon returning to Mississippi, Beckwith became a member and leader of the white supremacist group known as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The organization had a history of engaging in violence against African Americans. In the 1960’s, this violence escalated in the form of lynchings, church bombings, and assaults against African Americans.

Criminal Career

Beckwith gained his notoriety in the mid-1960’s when he was tried twice for the assassination of Medgar Evers, a popular civil rights leader in Jackson, Mississippi. Myrlie Evers, Evers’s wife, and her three young children were watching President John F. Kennedy’s address to the nation on civil rights when a rifle shot rang out. Medgar Evers was shot in the back while standing in the driveway of his home. He managed to drag himself to the doorway of his home, where he was met by his frantic wife and children. He died less than one hour later.

Legal Action and Outcome

Beckwith was charged with the murder of Evers after his rifle was found at the scene of the crime and his fingerprints were found on the scope of the rifle. In addition, some witnesses came forward to make eyewitness identifications that placed Beckwith at the crime scene. Other witnesses reported seeing Beckwith’s Plymouth Valiant in the vicinity of the Evers residence. Beckwith explained away the direct evidence against him by claiming that his rifle had been stolen. Moreover, Beckwith’s attorney called two police officers from the town of Greenwood, Mississippi, to the witness stand; these two officers testified to seeing Beckwith there at a gas station. Greenwood is about eighty miles from Jackson, the scene of the crime; therefore, if the officer testimony was accurate, it would have been impossible for Beckwith to have committed the murder. On two different occasions, all-white male juries failed to convict Beckwith; instead, they returned hung verdicts, which led to mistrials.

During the civil rights era, it was traditionally very difficult to obtain a conviction in a Mississippi courtroom of a white offender charged with a crime against an African American victim. In many areas of Mississippi, the white-supremacist ideology was so entrenched that it frequently made its way into governmental offices, including local sheriff offices, police departments, and the courts. However, in one of Beckwith’s trials, there was some indication that the powerful ideology of white supremacy had made its way all the way up to the governor’s office. During the first trial, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett walked up to Beckwith and shook his hand in full view of the jury.

In the immediate aftermath of the trials, Beckwith remained in the public spotlight. In 1967, he ran for lieutenant governor of Mississippi, finishing fifth out of six candidates. In 1973, police stopped Beckwith in New Orleans, Louisiana, and found bombs inside his vehicle. He was convicted in state court of transporting explosives without a permit and was sentenced to five years in a Louisiana prison.

Beckwith was not held accountable for the murder of Evers until 1994. Myrlie Evers convinced Hinds County district attorney Bobby DeLaughter to bring Beckwith to court for a third trial in her husband’s death. During his investigation, DeLaughter found several different witnesses to testify that Beckwith had, at various times, bragged both about his shooting death of Evers and about the fact that he had not been held accountable for the offense.

Beckwith had essentially believed that he would never be found guilty by a jury in Mississippi for killing an African American. He therefore apparently saw no harm in telling people about his involvement in the murder. During his third trial, Beckwith remained openly defiant and blatantly proud of is separatist views. He even wore a Confederate flag on his lapel during the trial. His incredible swagger would eventually lead to his downfall: After considering the new evidence, the jury—composed of eight black and four white jurors—convicted Beckwith of Evers’s murder. Beckwith was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Impact

The Byron De La Beckwith case was important for a variety of reasons. Most important, the case served as a historical lens into the deep-seated racial biases and bigotry of the South that existed for most of the twentieth century. However, the case was also important because it served as a mechanism for change and clearly delineated a social shift toward white supremacist accountability for racist actions, even years after supremacist members committed their offenses.

Following Beckwith’s conviction, several other cases of violent crimes committed against African Americans during the 1960’s were reassessed and retried. In 1998, Sam Bowers was tried and convicted of the 1966 murder in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, of local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) president Vernon Dahmer. In 2000 and 2001, Thomas Blanton, Jr., and Bobby Frank Cherry were found guilty for their roles in the Birmingham church bombing that resulted in the deaths of four teenage African American girls in September, 1963.

Further Reading

1 

DeLaughter, Bobby. Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Written by the prosecuting attorney who was instrumental in bringing Beckwith to trial for the third time in 1994, the book highlights the evidence against Beckwith and the difficulties and triumphs in bringing a thirty-year-old case to trial.

2 

Morris, W. Ghosts of Medgar Evers: A Tale of Race, Murder, Mississippi, and Hollywood. New York: Random House, 1998. An account that traces the development of the 1994 trial against Beckwith, as well as the development of the 1996 Ghosts of Mississippi film that chronicled the case.

3 

Wilkie, C. Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Presents a historical look at some of the important race-related events of the 1960’s and their influence on modern issues in the South.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Buckler, Kevin G. "Byron De La Beckwith." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1043.
APA 7th
Buckler, K. G. (2007). Byron De La Beckwith. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Buckler, Kevin G. "Byron De La Beckwith." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed September 17, 2026. online.salempress.com.