Byron De La Beckwith (November 9, 1920 – January 21, 2001) was an American white supremacist and the assassin of civil rights leader Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi. He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

His first trial ended with an all-white jury unable to reach a verdict. Beckwith was retried and convicted in 1994, based on new evidence that he had boasted about the killing at a Ku Klux Klan rally. He was given a life sentence for murder and died in prison in 2001 of heart problems.

The 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi tells the story of the 1994 trial; James Woods portrayed De La Beckwith in an Academy Award-nominated performance.

References

• David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, T.R.M. Howard: Pragmatism over Strict Integrationist Ideology in the Mississippi Delta, 1942-1954 in Glenn E. Feldman, ed., Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South (2004 book), 68-95.
• Brown, Jennie. Medgar Evers. Los Angeles: Melrose Square Pub. Co., 1994.
• John Dittmer, Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994 book).
• Evers, Myrlie B., and William Peters. For Us, the Living. 1st ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
• Jackson, James E. At the funeral of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi: A Tribute in Tears and a Thrust for Freedom. New York: Publisher’s New Press, 1963.
• Massengill, Reed. Portrait of a Racist: The Man Who Killed Medgar Evers? New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
• Nossiter, Adam. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994; Da Capo Press, 2002.
• Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995 book).
• Salter, John R. Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism. Foreword by R. Edwin King, Jr. Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1979.
• Scott, R. W. Glory in Conflict: A Saga of Byron De La Beckwith. Camden, Arkansas: Camark Press, 1991.
• Remembering Medgar Evers—For a New Generation: A Commemoration. Developed by the Civil Rights Research and Documentation Project, Afro-American Studies Program, The University of Mississippi. Oxford, MS: distributed by Heritage Publications in cooperation with the Mississippi Network for Black History and Heritage, 1988.
• Vollers, Maryanne. Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, The Trials of Byron de la Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

See also

• List of assassins
• List of famous prison deaths

1921 births | 2001 deaths | American murderers | Assassins | American terrorists | Ku Klux Klan members

Byron De La Beckwith