Assassin of Medgar Evers Dies

Monday, January 22nd 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) â€” Byron De La Beckwith, the white supremacist convicted after three decades and three trials of assassinating civil rights leader Medgar Evers, has died while serving life in prison, marking what Evers' brother called the ``final chapter'' of a troubling story.

Beckwith, 80, died Sunday night at University Medical Center where he had been taken from his prison cell.

Hospital spokeswoman Barbara Austin would not comment on the cause of death, saying that would be for the coroner to determine. Beckwith had a history of high blood pressure, heart problems and other ailments.

Evers, a 37-year-old NAACP field secretary who pushed for an end to segregation, was shot in the back on June 12, 1963, after stepping out of his Oldsmobile. He was walking to his house with an armful of ``Jim Crow Must Go'' T-shirts.

The slaying haunted the Evers family, Charles Evers, a veteran civil rights activist, said in a telephone interview early Monday with The Associated Press.

``What do you say? Finally, it is all over,'' Evers said. ``I don't want to say anything negative about him because we know what he did.''

Beckwith's philosophy left no room for blacks, Jews, Asians or any race other than white.

``There are only three kinds of people that live in Mississippi,'' Beckwith told The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., in an interview shortly before his arrest in 1990. ``Whites, colored and trash, and there's very little trash in Mississippi.''

Beckwith said that while he was ``not willing to lay my life down to rid evil from this country,'' he was ``willing to kill the evil in this country that would try to push me out.''

Beckwith wore a Confederate flag pin on his lapel throughout the 15 days of jury selection, testimony and deliberation of the 1994 trial that sent him to prison.

The deer rifle used to kill Evers was found abandoned in a nearby empty lot and Beckwith's fingerprint was found on it. But the former fertilizer salesman insisted he was 90 miles away in Greenwood when Evers was murdered.

Two all-white juries deadlocked in trials in 1964.

Three years later, Beckwith ran for lieutenant governor and finished fifth among six candidates with more than 34,000 votes. In 1973, he was convicted of possessing dynamite without a permit and served five years in prison.

Twelve years ago, Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers Williams, asked that the case be reopened and Hinds County District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter agreed even though he faced daunting challenges.

``At the very beginning ... we didn't have anything,'' DeLaughter said. ``The DA's file was nowhere to be found. We did not have the benefit of a trial transcript to know who the witnesses were. None of the evidence had been retained by the court.''

But DeLaughter and his officers stumbled across new evidence, including negatives of photos of the crime scene and new witnesses who testified Beckwith had bragged to them about ``beating the system.''

The Clarion-Ledger reported in 1989 that secret files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission showed it aided Beckwith's defense in his second trial by screening potential jurors.

The commission, a state agency formed to safeguard segregation in Mississippi, detailed jurors' racial views and their ancestry and listed those likely to be ``fair and impartial,'' including a white member of the pro-segregation Citizens' Council, a group Beckwith joined in 1954.

At Beckwith's final trial, eight of the 12 jurors were black.

He was convicted of murder, and the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the decision in 1997.

The conviction ``was justice,'' Charles Evers said. ``It should have been done earlier.''

Beckwith is survived by his wife and a son.