Medgar Evers

Case background and investigation

Medgar Evers was born in Decatur, Mississippi, on July 2, 1925, and served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. As the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, based in Jackson, he set up local chapters, organized voter registration drives and led campaigns to desegregate schools, parks and beaches, according to the NAACP. The organization says there had been several earlier attempts on his life.

At about half past midnight on June 12, 1963, Evers returned home from an NAACP meeting, the FBI's case history states. A few hours earlier President Kennedy had delivered a televised address on civil rights. As Evers walked from his car, carrying T-shirts printed with the slogan "Jim Crow Must Go," a rifle bullet struck him in the back. He reached the steps of the house and collapsed. His wife, Myrlie, and their three children came outside after hearing the shot. He died at a hospital less than an hour later, aged 37, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Jackson police found an Enfield rifle on a wooded rise across the street. A fingerprint recovered from its scope was sent to the FBI, which matched it to Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and segregationist, using his military service prints. He was arrested several days later.

Beckwith was tried for murder twice in 1964, in February and April. Both all-white juries failed to reach a verdict, and he went free. These were mistrials, not acquittals, which left the state able to prosecute again. PBS NewsHour reported that the case was revived after the Jackson Clarion-Ledger examined records of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, unsealed in 1989, that pointed to possible jury tampering and official misconduct in the second trial. Myrlie Evers asked prosecutors to reopen the case, and Hinds County Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter took it on.

A grand jury indicted Beckwith in December 1990, relying in part on witnesses who said they had heard him boast of the killing, according to the FBI. Evers's body was exhumed for a new autopsy. The third trial began in Jackson in January 1994, and on February 5, 1994, a racially mixed jury found Beckwith guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. The Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1997, and Beckwith died in custody on January 21, 2001, aged 80. The Evers home in Jackson is now the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, and Evers was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024.