HISTORY

Why Some Want to Hide the Racist Motivation of Medgar Evers’ Killers

Whitewashing his motivations avoids a critical conversation

There are some Americans who want to strip the story of racism from the country, but it’s too ingrained in our society. Consider, for instance, how the National Park Service temporarily removed brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument. Administrators planned to remove the portion of the text that described his murderer as a “racist” prior to public outcry. Yet, Byron De La Beckwith, the White man convicted of killing 37-year-old Medgar Wiley Evers as he stood in the driveway of his home, was a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan. Given his association with a group that targeted Black people with acts of violence, this fact shouldn’t be seen as controversial. And yet, some White Americans seem committed to rewriting history. Not all are genuinely ignorant of significant Black historical figures and events; some weaponize this purported ignorance or claim they’re the ones being harmed when black history bubbles up to the surface. In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo suggested some White people “weaponize tears” and “hurt feelings” as a “powerful means of white racial control.” Proposing an update to the brochure that removes the racist intention of a murderer denies the fact that Medgar Evers was targeted for being a Black man. And as a nation, we have no hope of confronting the problem of racism if we don’t face it.

In a 1990 interview, Beckwith told journalist Jerry Mitchell to “thank the KKK.” “If this group didn’t exist, you’d be a damn mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon instead of a white man, a Nordic man of blood and culture. You’d be a damn mongrel.” Given his rhetoric and actions, there’s no doubt he was anything other than a racist. So why do some want to hide that context? Denying that the White man who murdered Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, was racist is bigger than this one case; it’s part of a broader effort to minimize the nation’s legacy of racial violence. Portraying his race as a coincidence rather than a key factor contributing to Beckwith’s belief that he’d get away with the crime is dishonest. Beckwith boasted to prosecutors, “The point is you ain’t never, ever gonna get twelve people to convict me of killing a nigger in the state of Mississippi.” White people had grown so accustomed to terrorizing Black people and their communities without consequence. Beckwith had every reason to believe this system would protect him, as an all-white jury had protected the murderers of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black teenager in Money, Mississippi, and many others. The first two trials for the murder of Medgar Evers resulted in deadlocked juries, seemingly substantiating his assumption. Beckwith was released and free for three decades as a result. However, in 1994, a racially mixed jury found him guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

There’s nothing race-neutral about a member of the Ku Klux Klan killing a Black man who made it his life’s work to advocate for the advancement of his people.

By watering down black historical narratives, some hope to dilute the public’s understanding of how violence against Black people has functioned not as an occasional, unfortunate event but as a systemic campaign motivated by anti-black racial animus. The nostalgia associated with the “Make America Great Again” movement depends on a belief in a version of this country that never truly existed, a society where race didn’t matter, and White people just happened to have the most social, economic, and political power. Such a narrative overlooks the violence underlying systems such as chattel slavery and Jim Crow, as well as the lasting impact of systemic racism. Attempting to remove the role of race and racism from the events that took place in the 1960s overlooks racial terror lynchings, racial segregation, political disenfranchisement, and discrimination. There’s nothing race-neutral about a member of the Ku Klux Klan killing a Black man who made it his life’s work to advocate for the advancement of his people. Evers and others fought to register Black voters because White southerners established barriers designed specifically to marginalize them. The truth matters.

Martin Luther King III responded to the proposed changes to the brochures by saying, “The murder of Medgar Evers was an act of racial terror. That fact is not partisan. It is historical. Calling it anything else is not ‘restoring truth.’ It is erasing it. Sanitizing history from violence and racism does not bring the country together. It weakens our understanding of who we are and how far we still have to go.” Removing the context that the person who killed Medgar Evers was racist obscures an underlying problem at the heart of American society. Even in the modern era, Black people are the group most likely to be victims of hate crimes. In 2017, FBI data suggests that “48.6% were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Black or African American bias,” despite comprising roughly 13% of the U.S. population. In a country where people are taunted, beaten, and killed for being Black, discussing racism as a motivation for violence is essential. The truth can be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is essential to the nation’s health. We must reckon with the ideology of white supremacy that has caused so much harm. But some believe it’s more offensive to call a White person “racist” than for that person to be racist, including when they engage in acts of violence against Black people. Some believe White people’s feelings are more important than the lives of Black people.

“Today we have a cultural norm that insists we hide our racism from people of color and deny it among ourselves, but not that we actually challenge it. In fact, we are socially penalized for challenging racism,” DiAngelo suggested of White people. But the voices of Black people are also suppressed, particularly in terms of their ability to call out racism. For instance, Black participants in one study felt they were “stereotyped as the angry Black person” and were intimidated when they were in the minority. This led many to believe that “self-silencing was essential to their development as students” (Laufer, 2012). In Scientific Reports, one study found that “people who disclose experiences of discrimination face heightened risk of backlash, minimization, and dismissal. Indeed, Black Americans who claim experiences of discrimination are often labeled as complainers or troublemakers. Moreover, White Americans often underestimate the prevalence of anti-Black racial bias and discrimination, both at societal and individual levels” (Sanchez et al., 2024). The denial of racism is a pervasive problem in this country, and the campaign of historical erasure is a continuation of that trend.

Medgar Evers was born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, during the Jim Crow era, a period defined by hundreds of state-based laws that restricted the freedoms of Black people and limited their upward mobility. Thousands of Black people were lynched, and numerous communities were ruined to advance the cause of white supremacy in this country. While Black people were technically free citizens, they were deprived of equal rights and opportunities. Policies such as the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and literacy tests politically disenfranchised most Black voters, maintaining the racial hierarchy established during the chattel slavery era. It’s important to acknowledge that the work Evers and others engaged in directly challenged the system of white supremacy. In a 1958 address celebrating the fourth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, Medgar Evers described the “multitude of complexities, which confront, harass, and keep the Mississippi Negro in a state of second-class citizenship in this twentieth century.” Less than three weeks earlier, in Jackson, Mississippi, “the ceiling of a room that houses some thirty-five students and a teacher fell to the floor, amid the seats where the children sat eight hours earlier.” Segregated Black schools were falling apart because the government failed to produce the equality promised by the 14th Amendment. Evers was fighting for a better quality of life for Black people, for equitable opportunity. This fight persists today, as predominantly Black schools receive significantly less funding than predominantly White schools.

“We come now to a phase of our current struggle, where in 1955 some five petitions to separate boards of education, in five cities and counties in Mississippi, were filed, and brought only the wrath of the Nazi-like activities of the White Citizens Council,” Evers said. Despite fighting against the Nazis as a soldier in the U.S. Army during World War II, Black veterans faced cruel exclusion and violence from White Americans once returning home. Manning Marable, the co-author of Medgar Evers’ autobiography, noted that people like Medgar Evers don’t often receive the same level of public attention as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other great public speakers. Yet, “they labored tirelessly, making telephone calls, visiting people’s homes, organizing community and educational meetings, building support for the cause at the grassroots level. The speeches they delivered were rarely made before television cameras or for radio networks. They were only occasionally quoted in local newspaper accounts of civil rights-related events. Yet they were the foundation of the movement’s success.” For decades, Evers served as a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), tirelessly working toward the goal of registering Black people to vote, of empowering their voices.

Evers referred to the lynching of Emmett Till as one of the most “infamous crimes committed against Negroes,” and fought passionately to make progress and chip away at systems that perpetuated racial disparities. He offered criticism against President Eisenhower, who suggested Black citizens should be “forbearing in…efforts for first-class citizenship,” saying, “who could be more forbearing than a people whose homes, churches, and businesses have been bombed, and individuals shot down in cold blood with nothing having ever been done about it.” Sadly, he would become a victim of the very racial violence and inequality he sought to expose. Black people were targeted, alienated, and denied equal rights in a country built in part through the exploitation of their enslaved ancestors’ labor. But some act as if talking about race is more offensive than being racist. Aaliyah Steward, a student at Florida A&M University College of Law, told reporters the word “Black” was banned from flyers for a Black History Month event scheduled there this month. This is yet another example of how the topics of race, racism, or even identity have been suppressed during the Trump era.

My great uncle, Dr. C.O. Simpkins, a dentist and minister in Shreveport, Louisiana, played a pivotal role as a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King and engaged in work that paralleled Medgar Evers's in Mississippi. Around 500 people attended the church to hear King speak, but Simpkins noted “they paid a price for it.” You see, “their cars were vandalized. One of the windshields was broken. They got tickets. And I got a phone call, they were [threatening to] kill me. Kill King. And do things to my children. All kinds of negative things that they said, to try to discourage people from coming. But people came, nevertheless.” In 1962, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed Simpkins’ Lake Bistineau properties. But, since neither he, his wife, nor his children were home at the time, they survived these attacks. Sadly, a member of that same organization fatally shot Medgar Evers the following year in Mississippi, and five years after that, a white supremacist, James Earl Ray, assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April of 1968. The motivation behind this campaign of violence inflicted upon Black people was racism. And the denial of that is not neutral, but rather sides with the members of white domestic terrorist groups. Medgar Evers was targeted by the Klan because of his efforts as a civil rights leader, which is why it’s intellectually dishonest to overlook the role race played in his life, as well as his assassination.

References

Bracey, J. H., Meier, A., Boehm, R., & Hydrick, B. (1996). A guide to the microfilm edition of papers of the NAACP. Part 20: White Resistance and Reprisals, 1956–1965. University Publications of America.

Collins, C. (2024, December 12). 60 years after the March on Washington, black economic inequality persists. Inequality.org. https://inequality.org/article/racial-wealth-divide-still-a-dream/#:~:text=In%20a%20few%20areas%2C%20African,15%20percent%20for%20white%20Americans.

DiAngelo, R., & Dyson, M. E. (2020). White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.

Dr. C.O. Simpkins (1925–2019). North Louisiana Civil Rights Coalition. (n.d.). https://nlcrc.org/dr-c-o-simpkins-1925-2019/

Evers-Williams, M., & Marable, M. (2006). The autobiography of Medgar Evers: A hero’s life and legacy revealed through his writings, letters, and speeches. Basic Books.

Flags at Half Staff C.O. Simpkins Sr. (n.d.-a). https://gov.louisiana.gov/assets/ExecutiveOrders/JBE-19-21-Flags-at-Half-Staff-C.O.-Simpkins.pdf

Hampton, T. (2026, February 6). “black” banned from flyers for FAMU College of Law Black History Month event, student says. WKMG. https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2026/02/06/black-banned-from-flyers-for-famu-college-of-law-black-history-month-event-student-says/

Laufer, Mahajoy A., “Black students’ classroom silence in predominantly White institutions of higher education” (2012). Master’s Thesis, Smith College, Northampton, MA. https://scholarworks.smith.edu/theses/639

Mitchell, J. (2025, December 2). Extreme views of assassin Beckwith from 35 years ago now in mainstream. https://mississippitoday.org/2025/12/02/extreme-views-of-assassin-beckwith-from-35-years-ago-now-in-mainstream/

Mitchell, J. (2026, February 5). Medgar Evers’ killer was a Klansman, but the Trump administration says stop calling him a racist — Mississippi Today. https://mississippitoday.org/2026/02/05/medgar-evers-killer-trump-says-stop-calling-him-racist/

Sanchez, K. L., Harrington, M., Lee, C., & Eberhardt, J. L. (2024). Observers of social media discussions about racial discrimination condemn denial but also adopt it. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 18246. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-68332-8

So, what is white fragility? (n.d.-c). https://robindiangelo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/zeit-campus-transcript.pdf

Walker, E. J. (2023, October 4). At 16, Osbourn Dorsey opened the door for all of Us. The Black Wall Street Times. https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2023/09/15/at-16-osbourn-dorsey-opened-the-door-for-all-of-us/