Shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was killed in Jackson, Mississippi. Within days the police had a suspect, a fertilizer salesman from Greenwood named Byron De La Beckwith, a longtime member of the White Citizens' Council. He was indicted for murder that July and tried twice in 1964. Both juries were all white, and both told the judge they could not agree. Each trial ended in a mistrial, and after the second he was released on bail.
He remained free for most of the next three decades. A Hinds County grand jury indicted him again in December 1990, and after a long fight against extradition from Tennessee and more than two years of pretrial motions, he went on trial a third time in the same county in January 1994. On February 5, 1994, a jury of eight Black and four white citizens found him guilty as charged. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the conviction on December 22, 1997, by a vote of four to two, and he died in state custody in 2001 at the age of 80.
The man killed in Jackson that night had been born in Decatur, Mississippi, on July 2, 1925. He went to segregated schools in Decatur and Newton, left school to join the United States Army in 1943, and served in segregated units in England, Belgium and France during the Second World War. After the war he finished high school at the laboratory school of Alcorn College and went on to Alcorn A&M, where he took part in sports, debate and campus publications.
He began organizing chapters of the NAACP in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1950s. After the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision he applied to the law school of the University of Mississippi and was refused admission. In January 1955 he moved to Jackson to become the NAACP's first salaried field secretary in the state. In that post he pressed voter registration, documented discrimination and violence against Black Mississippians, worked with local youth councils and used press releases, interviews and speeches to carry the state's civil rights struggle to a national audience. The same public work made him a target of threats and harassment for years before his death.
His death was the first murder of a nationally significant leader of the American civil rights movement.
Byron De La Beckwith was born on November 9, 1920, in Colusa, California. He grew up in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he graduated from high school in 1940 after spells at military-style boarding schools in Tennessee, and he left Mississippi State University after a short stay. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1942, fought at Guadalcanal and Tarawa, and received an honorable discharge in January 1946. His decorations included two Presidential Unit Citations and a Purple Heart.
Back in Mississippi he made his living as a salesman. He joined the White Citizens' Council in 1954, and in 1956 he applied for a post with the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency. He was not hired. By the early 1960s he was working as a fertilizer salesman.
The Jackson police reached the scene within minutes. The case they assembled over the following days rested on physical evidence recovered nearby, which the state linked to Beckwith, and on witnesses. Neighbors and patrons of a diner described what they had seen that night. Two Jackson cab drivers later testified about conversations with him in the days before the killing, and his public segregationist views and his Council membership formed part of the state's case.
The police arrested him in late June 1963, about ten days after the killing, and charged him with murder. A Hinds County grand jury returned an indictment in July 1963.
The first trial opened in Jackson on January 27, 1964, before an all-male, all-white jury of Mississippians. It lasted eleven days. The district attorney called 36 witnesses, and the defense, led by a former president of Greenwood's Citizens' Council, called 20. The heart of the defense was an alibi. Two Greenwood police officers testified that they had seen Beckwith in Greenwood shortly before and shortly after the killing, roughly 90 miles from the scene. The state could not prove every link in its chain of physical evidence.
The jury took the case and deliberated for about 22 hours before reporting that it could not agree. It stood seven to five for acquittal. The circuit judge declared a mistrial in early February 1964.
The state tried him again about two months later, once more before an all-white jury, and the second jury also deadlocked. The judge declared another mistrial. Beckwith posted bail and went free. Prosecutors chose not to try him a third time unless stronger evidence emerged or conditions allowed for an impartial jury. Murder in Mississippi carries no statute of limitations, so the charge could in principle be brought again at any time.
The White Citizens' Council paid his legal fees.
Beckwith remained in public life. In 1967 he ran for lieutenant governor of Mississippi and finished fifth of six candidates. He became involved with the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1960s.
In a separate case arising from his 1973 arrest in New Orleans, he was acquitted of federal charges and convicted in a Louisiana state court of a further offense, for which he served a term in Louisiana from 1977 to 1980.
In 1983 he moved to Signal Mountain, Tennessee.
In 1989 a Jackson newspaper reported that the sealed files of the state Sovereignty Commission showed it had secretly helped Beckwith's defense in 1964. In late 1989 an assistant district attorney in Hinds County began rebuilding the case. He started with little: the physical evidence was not in the state's hands and there was no transcript of either 1964 trial.
New witnesses came forward. Several were prepared to testify that Beckwith had boasted of the killing and of having escaped punishment. In December 1990 a Hinds County grand jury indicted him for murder for the third time.
Officers arrested Beckwith in Signal Mountain on December 17, 1990, on the strength of the Mississippi indictment. The governor of Tennessee issued a warrant for his extradition, and Beckwith contested it in the courts of Hamilton County. The trial judge denied him relief, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals in Knoxville affirmed, and the Tennessee Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal. The contest took about ten months. He was then returned to Mississippi to face the indictment.
The central legal question in the case was whether Mississippi could try a man in the 1990s for a killing it had failed to convict him of in 1964. Beckwith's lawyers argued that it could not. They filed motions claiming that the decades of delay violated his constitutional rights to due process and to a speedy trial. The motions failed, and in December 1992 the Mississippi Supreme Court cleared the way for a third trial. He was 72.
The motions held the trial back for more than two years. When the case was finally called, the defense asked again for a mistrial, pointing to evidence lost over the years and to the thirty-year gap between the killing and the trial. The trial went on, and the delay became the main ground of his appeal.
The trial opened in Jackson in late January 1994 and ran from January 27 to February 5. Beckwith was 73. The proceedings took place in the same wood-paneled Hinds County courtroom in which he had been tried in 1964. The jury of twelve, drawn from Hinds County, was racially mixed: eight Black and four white jurors, seven women and five men.
Many of the witnesses from 1964 testified again. Where a witness from the earlier trials had died or could not be found, a stand-in read the earlier testimony to the jury. The prosecution also introduced photographs from 1963 and called six witnesses who said Beckwith had bragged to them about the killing. Among them was a former Klansman who told the jury that Beckwith had often spoken about it. Some of the physical evidence from 1964 was no longer available.
The jury first deliberated for about five hours one afternoon and stood at eight to four, and the jurors were sequestered overnight in a Jackson hotel. They returned the next morning, deliberated for a little more than an hour and returned its verdict on February 5, 1994: guilty as charged. Beckwith was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Beckwith appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which decided the case on December 22, 1997.
By a vote of four to two the court affirmed the conviction. The majority rejected the claim that Beckwith had been denied his constitutional right to a speedy trial. It held that his own part in the Sovereignty Commission's involvement in the 1964 trials had contributed to the delay he complained of. Two justices dissented, and the ruling kept him in custody.
Beckwith served his sentence in Mississippi. On January 21, 2001, he was taken from custody to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, where he died at the age of 80. He had served almost seven years of the life sentence, and his death came nearly 38 years after the killing.
Beckwith denied the murder. He maintained that he had been in Greenwood, about 90 miles away, when the killing took place, and in 1964 two Greenwood police officers supported that account under oath. In 1994 his lawyers contested the state's case again and argued that lost evidence and the thirty-year delay had made a fair trial impossible. The 1994 jury rejected the alibi, and the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the verdict.
November 9, 1920: Byron De La Beckwith is born in Colusa, California.
1942 to January 1946: He serves in the United States Marine Corps.
1954: He joins the White Citizens' Council.
June 12, 1963: The civil rights leader is killed in Jackson, Mississippi.
Late June 1963: Beckwith is arrested and charged with murder.
July 1963: A Hinds County grand jury indicts him.
January 27, 1964: The first trial opens in Jackson.
February 1964: The jury deadlocks seven to five for acquittal; the judge declares a mistrial.
1964: A second all-white jury deadlocks; a second mistrial; he is released on bail.
1967: He finishes fifth of six candidates for lieutenant governor.
1977 to 1980: He serves a term in Louisiana in a separate case.
1983: He moves to Signal Mountain, Tennessee.
1989: A Hinds County assistant district attorney begins rebuilding the case.
December 1990: A Hinds County grand jury indicts him for murder a third time.
December 17, 1990: He is arrested in Signal Mountain.
1991: He contests extradition in Tennessee for about ten months and is returned to Mississippi.
December 1992: The Mississippi Supreme Court clears the way for a third trial.
January 27, 1994: The third trial opens in Jackson.
February 5, 1994: The jury finds him guilty as charged; he is sentenced to life imprisonment.
December 22, 1997: The Mississippi Supreme Court affirms the conviction, four to two.
January 21, 2001: He dies in Jackson, Mississippi, at 80.