The assassin and white supremacist who murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers will no longer be labeled a racist in educational brochures outside of Evers’ historic home museum.
According to Mississippi Today, the National Park Service removed the descriptive language from visitor brochures at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument.
In 1963, Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith fatally shot Evers in the back in the driveway of the NAACP leader’s home in Jackson, Mississippi.
De La Beckwith waited in the bushes, then ambushed Evers as he was getting out of his car. Evers’ wife and three children were inside the house waiting for Evers to walk through the front door.
Evers was a World War II veteran and the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi who fiercely advocated for the expansion of voting rights for Black Americans and the end of segregation.
De La Beckwith was cleared of any wrongdoing in Evers’ murder after two trials in 1964 came to a close when the all-male, all-white juries deadlocked on his charges. He went on to unsuccessfully run for lieutenant governor of Mississippi in 1967, telling potential voters he believed in “absolute white supremacy under white Christian rule.”
He served as a minister with the Christian Identity Movement, promoting the idea that Adam and Eve were white and that white people are the “true Israelites.” He also once falsely claimed that the Bible says “n—rs are beasts.”
Before killing Evers, he called the NAACP leader a “mongrel,” and said, “God hates mongrels.”
In 1994 — 31 years after the assassination — De La Beckwith was finally convicted of Evers’ murder. State authorities reopened the case in 1989 after learning that a now-defunct segregationist spy agency made covert efforts to get him acquitted.
He was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001.
National Park Service officials say the newly edited brochures outside the Evers’ historic home might also exclude any mention of Evers lying in a pool of his own blood after the shooting.
Evers’ daughter, Reena Evers-Everette, who now serves as the executive director of the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute, said her family has been told the matter is under review, “but the final product has not been put out yet.”
The changes come at the direction of the Trump administration, which issued an executive order last March claiming that Americans have witnessed a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.” The order tasked Interior Secretary Doug Burgum with revising or replacing signs that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”
In May, Burgum called for changes to national monuments and memorials, including the removal of “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
Critics argue that deleting language that portrays the full reality and scope of Evers’ assassination is a whitewashing of American history that will stain the civil rights activist’s legacy.
“One of the first things he did was to investigate the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till, and he went on to be a champion for voting rights for African Americans, that’s what cost him his life,” National Parks Conservation Association senior director Alan Spears told WAPT. “He devoted himself to making those changes happen, and now we want to sanitize and censor the history that’s coming out of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home in order to make people who like Byron De la Beckwith feel better. It’s about as ridiculous as it gets.”
Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, the lead pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once pastored, said the Trump administration is erasing Black history.
Edits to the brochure materials at the Evers’ house museum are just the latest change in the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to overhaul the country’s historical landmarks.
Last month, the National Park Service removed a slavery exhibit at the Philadelphia President’s House that sparked public outcry. The installation told the stories of the nine enslaved Africans owned by President George Washington at the President’s House, which was built where Washington’s mansion originally stood.
The city of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking a permanent injunction to restore the panels belonging to the installation.
The federal judge overseeing the proceedings connected to the complaint recently ordered the federal government to safely store the panels in a “secure” place, after noting that some of them “exhibited damage” during their removal.
