Byron De La Beckwith.
That singsong, six-syllable name bounced around in my brain. It didn’t take much reading to learn that two all-white juries had failed to agree on a verdict for Beckwith in 1964. It didn’t take much more reading to learn that, by all appearances, he had gotten away with murder.
Old newspaper stories and magazine articles portrayed him as the lone, obsessed assassin, determined to kill the NAACP’s number one man in Mississippi. The case against Beckwith had certainly been convincing. His high-powered rifle had been found near the murder scene, complete with his fingerprint. Witnesses placed his white Valiant, with his law enforcement–like whip antenna, near the scene. Two taxi drivers testified that he had asked directions to the NAACP leader’s home a few days earlier.
When FBI agents arrested him, they found a circled cut around his right eye, and Beckwith admitted it had come from firing his rifle. If all that weren’t enough, his words provided a motive. “The NAACP, under the direction of its leadership,” he wrote in a letter to the Jackson Daily News, “is doing a first-class job of getting itself in a position to be exterminated!” In his defense, Beckwith offered an alibi. Two policemen testified he was more than 30 miles away, in Greenwood, a half hour from the time Medgar Evers was killed in Jackson. Beckwith maintained his .30-06 Enfield rifle had been stolen days earlier.
Jurors deadlocked 7–5 in favor of finding Beckwith not guilty. At his second trial, jurors deadlocked again, this time even closer to acquittal. After that, prosecutors dropped the case.
Beckwith went free from jail and returned to the Mississippi Delta a hero. A sign across a Delta bridge proclaimed, “Welcome Home, Delay,” a sight that brought him “tears of joy.”
After he arrived home, his best friend, Gordon Lackey, swore Beckwith into the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, according to FBI records. The pair were so tight that Jackson police had investigated the possibility that Lackey, a crop duster, had flown Beckwith down to Jackson for the assassination.
In 1967, Beckwith made an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor, telling voters he was “a straight shooter”—a line he delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. His over-the-top campaign, promising “absolute white supremacy under white Christian rule,” finished with 5 percent of the vote.
When the trial took place, he said Beckwith had made a show of it. After a defense lawyer handed him the murder weapon, he took aim, causing one juror to duck. Beckwith relished the attention and greeted visitors such as former major general Edwin Walker, who had been arrested for helping lead the 1962 insurrection at Ole Miss that ended in two deaths. Minor also said that Beckwith didn’t pay a dime for his defense. The white Citizens’ Council picked up their charter member’s entire tab, hiring three council members as lawyers: Hardy Lott, Hugh Cunningham, and Stanney Sanders, who happened to have been the same district attorney who failed to get a Greenwood, Mississippi, grand jury to indict two of Emmett Till’s killers for his 1955 abduction, despite their confession to the crime.
Possible jury tampering? Now that was a story. And it could call into question the legitimacy of Mississippi’s handling of the Medgar Evers murder.