Let's talk about justice that was over 30 years in the making.
Medgar Evers was a dude who was doing it back in the day. Grad from Alcorn State University. Fought in the battle of Normandy in 1944, and honorably discharged as an Army sergeant. A Mississippi civil rights activist. Field secretary for the NAACP. Worked to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi, end the segregation of public facilities, and expand opportunities for black folk, which included the enforcement of voting rights.
This dude was challenging the system in profound ways. Some folks didn't take kindly to that.
Byron De La Beckwith was a white supremacist, and a member of the
White Citizens' Council. This group was formed in 1954 in Mississippi to resist the integration of schools and civil rights activism. Byron decided that steps needed to be taken against Evers.
On June 12, 1963, Beckwith was positioned across the street with a Enfield .30-06 caliber rifle, and he shot Evers in the back. Evers died an hour later, aged 37 years.
Myrlie Evers, his wife, and his three children, James, Reena, and Darrell Evers, were home at the time of the assassination.
After Evers' murder, an estimated 5,000 people marched from the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street to the Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street in Jackson. Allen Johnson, Reverend Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders led the procession. This was big. REAL big.
Beckwith was tried twice in 1964. BOTH times, he was let go, because of a hung jury. Both times, the jury was all white. He would get into other trouble with the law, including an assassination attempt to kill A.I. Botnick, director of the New Orleans-based B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, in retaliation for comments that Botnick had made about white Southerners and race relations. But it seemed Evers would never receive justice.
So you'd think.
Myrlie Evers, who would later become the third woman to chair the NAACP, refused to abandon her husband's case. When new documents showed that jurors in the previous case were illegally investigated and screened by a state agency, she pressed authorities to re-open the case.
They did.
De La Beckwith was convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after having lived as a free man for much of the three decades following the killing of Medgar Evers. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for first-degree murder without the possibility of parole. Byron died in prison in 2001.
