The Assassination of Medgar Evers

Medgar Evers was a World War II veteran and the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, an organizer and civil rights activist who investigated racial murders, coordinated voter registration drives, and led boycotts against segregated businesses in Jackson. On June 12, 1963, just hours after President Kennedy delivered his historic civil rights address to the nation, Evers was shot in the back in his own driveway as he returned home from an NAACP meeting. He died at the hospital within an hour. His wife and children were inside the house. A high-powered rifle and scope were recovered in nearby bushes, and fingerprints led investigators to Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and fertilizer salesman from Greenwood, Mississippi. Beckwith was tried twice for the murder in 1964, with all-white juries deadlocking both times without a conviction. He remained free and openly boastful about the killing for decades, even running for lieutenant governor of Mississippi. In the early 1990s, Hinds County District Attorney Ed Peters and investigator Bobby DeLaughter reopened the case after new witnesses came forward, including people who had heard Beckwith openly brag about the killing. Beckwith was retried in 1994, thirty-one years after the murder, and this time a racially mixed jury convicted him of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison and died there in January 2001. The case became a landmark in the reopening of civil rights era cold cases, demonstrating that prosecutions for decades-old racial murders were possible and laying groundwork for subsequent reopened cases across the South. The 1996 film "Ghosts of Mississippi" brought the case to a national audience. Medgar Evers is buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.