June 25, 2026 • 45 mins
On the night of June 11, 1963, Byron de la Beckwith murdered Medgar Evers with a single shot. But how did he end up hiding in a bush across the street from the home of a civil rights leader?
Sources & Further Reading:
Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.
Zinn, Howard. (1964) SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Beacon Press. Boston.
Mendelsohn, Jack. (1966) The martyrs : sixteen who gave their lives for racial justice. Harper & Row
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/06/12/issue.html
https://www.lodinews.com/features/vintage_lodi/article_426cb4b4-269e-5c6f-ba07-7e92ecf23142.html
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/witnesses/medgarevers.htm
https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/medgar-evers-and-the-origin-of-the-civil-rights-movement-in-mississippi
https://sites.rootsweb.com/~tnalhn/runawayslavenotices.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/23/us/byron-de-la-beckwith-dies-killer-of-medgar-evers-was-80.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Kozo Media. June eleventh, nineteen sixty three was a Tuesday
in Saigon. Buddhist monk te Kwan Duck set a cushion
down in the middle of a busy intersection and began
to pray as another monk doused him in gasoline. He
(00:23):
struck the match himself, immolating himself in protest of the
South Vietnamese government. In Greece, the prime minister resigned over
some nasty disagreement with the king. In Tehran, the Shah
made promises about upcoming elections in response to days of
unrest after his arrest of Iyatola Komeni. On the other
(00:45):
side of the world, in Jackson, Mississippi, a convicted murderer
dying of lung cancer received the first ever human lung
transplant at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Elsewhere in town,
mississippis and Doa, a c PEA field secretary, spent most
of his afternoon meeting with NAACP lawyers going over their
testimony for an upcoming appearance before Congress. Just north of Jackson,
(01:11):
in Wynna, Mississippi, activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
were desperately trying to get half a dozen voting rights
organizers out of the Little County jail. The group had
sent an observer to the jail to check on their condition,
but he'd been beaten senseless and arrested too. A snick
worker who had managed to get inside of the jail
(01:33):
reported that one of the teenage girls who'd been arrested
had been beaten so badly she couldn't speak. The orestees
had been on their way to Greenwood, Mississippi, to register
black voters. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Governor George Wallace stood in
the doorway at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama
(01:55):
to physically block the university's first black students from registering
for classes. President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and
dispatched soldiers who were prepared to physically remove the governor
from the doorway if necessary. In Washington, d C. President
Kennedy asked the networks to clear the eight PM timeslot.
(02:18):
He was going to have to say something to the country.
He wasn't sure what would happen in Tuscaloosa if a
federalized National guardsman put his hands on the governor of Alabama.
The country would need to hear from the President, but
Wallace blinked and the guardsman didn't have to do anything
at all. The President addressed the nation anyway that night,
(02:43):
and that NAACB. Field Secretary watched that speech on TV
just before his last meeting of the night. And on
June eleventh, nineteen sixty three, in Laflora County, Mississippi, a
fertilizer salesman made his round extolling the virtues of Delta
liquid plant food to the cotton planners in his sales territory,
(03:07):
or so he claimed. In his work log for the
afternoon of June eleventh, Byron de la Bequyth claimed he
lost a few hours to car trouble, and with a
broken odometer, he figured no one could prove he drove
to Jackson. He hadn't counted on dropping his rifle in
that honeysuckle thicket. I'm Molly Conger, and this this weird
(03:35):
little guides. A little after midnight on June twelfth, nineteen
(03:55):
sixty three, Medgar Evers died. He was thirty seven years old.
Evers was born in Mississippi in nineteen twenty five, and
as a boy, he walked miles to and from his
segregated school every day, a route that took him past
a field where a pile of bloody clothes had been
(04:15):
left as a warning. The clothes had belonged to Willy Tingle,
a black man accused of insulting a white woman. At
fourteen years old, Medgar Evers witnessed the lynching of Willy Tingle.
He saw a white mob dragging his father's friend through
the streets behind a cart before shooting and hanging him,
(04:41):
and every day after that, Medgar Evers stopped to look
at Willy's bloody clothes in the field on his way
to his segregated school. He dropped out of high school
to enlist in the army in nineteen forty three. The
United States military was still segregated, and black soldiers were
relegated to not combat roles, but ever served honorably in Europe.
(05:05):
He was one of countless black American soldiers who saw
that it didn't have to be that way. Their black
counterparts in the Free French forces didn't suffer the same indignities,
and when he got home after the war, Medgar Evers
wanted to vote. He and his brother organized a small
group of black veterans to attempt to vote in their
(05:27):
hometown of Decatur, Mississippi, in nineteen forty six, but they
were turned away from the polls by an angry white mob.
He finished high school and got a college education, and
for the next seventeen years the rest of his life,
Medgar Evers fought for civil rights in Mississippi. From nineteen
(05:47):
fifty four until his death in nineteen sixty three, he
was the NAACP Field Secretary in his home state, and
in nineteen sixty three he was murdered by Byron de
la Beckwith, a segregationist active in his local White citizens Council.
Last week's episode was meant to be a standalone sort
(06:10):
of deal. It wasn't really about the murder of Medgar
Evers or about his murderer, Byron de la Beckwith. It
was about the attempted erasure of history by the Trump administration.
The dust up over the brochures at the Medgar and
Burley Evers Home National Monument was just our window into
(06:31):
that story, and those brochures were not, in the end,
even changed at all last week. The latest reporting I
had on the issue was from Mississippi Today. Back in
February and I told you that at least as of February,
the brochures remained unchanged. Thanks to a listener down in
Mississippi who visited the site on June teenth, I can
(06:54):
update that to say that as of last week, the
brochures at the Evers Home National Park site are available
to the public and they have not been altered or censored.
Even though I just touched briefly on the murder of
Medgar Evers while I was writing last week's episode, I
spent a little bit of time researching it, just to
(07:14):
give myself the context, and I was surprised how much
of the story I didn't know and hadn't even considered
Byron de la Bequiff was a weird little guy. I mean,
you could have guessed that, right, he fits the bill.
Segregationist in the Deep South in the sixties, killed a
(07:37):
black man, joined the clan. That's weird little guy territory.
That would work as an episode, But I don't think
I was ready for the abundant evidence of what a
quintessential weird little guy he was. I mean, racist white
guy in Mississippi shot and killed a black civil rights activist,
(07:59):
white jury and missus Sippy won't convict justices served. Decades later,
I knew the shape of the story, another awful chapter
in the history of the American south right. Racist guy
does a racist thing for racist reasons, and the racist
system shrugs. I don't know why I assumed that was
kind of it. I know better than that. Of course,
(08:21):
there's more there. Of course there is a fascinating and
infinitely distracting context. I was kind of thinking I would
avoid another multi part series for a while, just to
shake things up, but I'm not sure that's possible. Every
single piece of this story connects to the bigger narrative
we've been working on over the last two years. I
(08:44):
know I'm always saying that, and if anyone from marketing
was listening to the show, they would tell me to
stop saying that. But it really jumped out at me
this week when I realized that medyor Eras's children saw
their father bleed out that night because they stayed up
late to watch the President's speech and the President was
(09:04):
speaking on TV that night because the National Guard had
been mobilized to forcibly integrate the University of Alabama that day.
Not only that, at the moment that Medgar Evers died,
Fanny Lou Hamer was singing hymns through bleeding lips in
a Mississippi jail cell ninety miles away. Those two historical
(09:29):
facts occurred in the same instant. In last week's episode,
I included a snippet of audio from Fanny Lou Hamer's
speech to the nineteen sixty four Democratic National Convention Credentialing Committee.
I chose that clip to illustrate my point, mostly because
(09:50):
I'm just particularly fond of that speech and I find
it very moving. She was saying what I was trying
to convey to you about fighting for an am America.
That actually is what we've been promised, even though we
know it isn't right now that I already had the
audio saved and transcribed because I've used it before. Fanny
(10:14):
Leehamer gave that speech at the DNC after she was
denied a fair shot at running on a ballot in Mississippi,
and a few months after the convention in January of
nineteen sixty five, she escalated her protest, and she took
it to the United States Capitol Building on the first
day of the Congressional session, and there in the Capitol Building.
(10:35):
Fanny lou Hamer was counter protested by George Lincoln Rockwell himself.
If you remember the several months we spent last fall
on Rockwell and his American Nazi Party, you might remember
this incident. Stormtrooper Robert Lloyd burst into the Congressional chambers
wearing blackface and no pants, screaming and making a scene,
(10:56):
and he was chased out. It was a whole ordeal.
What I didn't put together, though, what I didn't realize
when I chose that clip again last week, is that
if you listened to the whole speech. When she's speaking
to the DNC in nineteen sixty four, she's describing a
particular experience. It's something that happened to her while Medgar
(11:20):
Evers was being assassinated. It's something that happened to her
on June eleventh, nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
I began to scream, and one white man got up
and began to beat me in my head and tell
them at the hood. One white man my dress had
worked up time. She walked off and pulled my dress.
I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress
back up. I was in jail when Matka Allas was murdered.
(11:54):
All of this is on account of we want to
register to become first class met.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
The night that MegaR Evers died, Fanny lou Hamer was
ninety miles away in a jail cell. She and several
organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were arrested on
June ninth when the bus they were taking back to Greenwood, Mississippi,
stopped briefly in nearby Winona. In jail, she was beaten
so badly that she never really recovered. She suffered permanent
(12:28):
damage to one kidney from the blows to her lower back.
And they were on their way to Greenwood that day
because they were headed to the Greenwood office of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee because the black voter registration efforts
there were really heating up. The Department of Justice had
gotten involved earlier that year, threatening to take the city
(12:51):
to court over their interference with the registration drive. The
DOJ back down when the city promised to stop, but
Greenwood residents, Greenwood residents like Byron Dela beck With doubled down.
The organizers in Greenwood were very familiar with Byron Dela
(13:12):
beck With. He had this habit of driving around town,
heckling and stalking and photographing and intimidating black residents, particularly
those involved in civil rights demonstrations. His presence was so
constant and so unsettling that a snick worker in Greenwood
invited him to come to the office to try to
(13:35):
have a civil conversation. I mean, bless their hearts. They
must have thought they could reason with the man, but
he never took them up on the offer. But do
you see a little how these pieces fit together, These
moments in time captured from different angles in episodes about
different men, but they're all part of the same story,
(14:00):
and that's why the characters keep recurring. In nineteen eighty three,
when segregationist lawyer J. B. Stoner was on the run,
rather than showing up to serve his sentence for an
old clan bombing, the FBI went looking for him, and
one of the places they looked was at his old
friend Byron de la Beckwith's house. In nineteen eighty when
(14:23):
the FBI had no leads in the shooting of National
Urban League president Vernon Jordan, they sent agents to question
Byron de la Beckwith. A sniper had shot at a
civil rights leader, and that was his m oh It
would be another few months before the FBI caught up
with the actual shooter, Nazi serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin.
(14:45):
He was the subject of a series of episodes earlier
this year. In the late nineteen seventies, when Beckwith went
to prison for the first time for attempting to murder
the regional director of the ad L, he got fan
mail from Aryan Nation leader Richard Butler and White Arean
Resistance leader Tom Metzger. Then we've talked about countless times.
(15:08):
The New Christian Crusade Church, the Christian Identity Church that
would eventually be co owned by South African pro apartheid
terrorist Monica hugget Stone, raised five thousand dollars for Beckworth
to live off of after his release from prison in
nineteen eighty. He'd become an adherent of Christian Identity shortly
before going to prison. In May of nineteen ninety one,
(15:31):
when Byron de La Beckworth was sitting in jail, finally
about to face justice nearly three decades after killing Medgar Evers,
his face was on the cover of an issue of
The White Beret. Now this one's a deep cut. You
might not remember this. It was a short lived newsletter
published by Kansas City Clansman Dennis Mayhon featured in the
(15:54):
episodes back in December of twenty twenty four, and when
he pupped plish that issue in nineteen ninety one, Mayhon
had just returned from a clan rally in Jackson, Mississippi.
In April of nineteen ninety one, four hundred klansmen and
neo Nazis rallied in Jackson for Confederate Memorial Day, and
(16:15):
Tom Metzger headlined a rally to raise money from Byron
Della Beckwith. It might be faster to tell you which
subjects of the show he isn't connected to. So maybe
we should invest some time into seeing which other loose
ends can be knitted back together. Because even leaving aside
(16:38):
some larger exploration of the clan in Mississippi, which I'm
very interested in, it turns out Byron Della Beckwith is
just a textbook weird little guy. He didn't just commit
a racist murder. He wasn't just an ardent segregationist who
assassinated a prominent civil rights leader. He was an impotent
(17:01):
wife beater who, after being orphaned, was raised by two
eccentric uncles in the family's dilapidated plantation house. He was
obsessed with sending furious little letters to the editor, to
the point that people around town laughed at him. He
wasn't just a racist, Mississippi was full of racist that's
not really very special. He had an obsession with the
(17:24):
mythology of the lost cause of the Confederacy that was
baked into the same part of his brain that stored
his childhood abandonment issues. He clung to the ideas of
white supremacy in Southern pride because those lies felt like
the only home he ever had. Preserving segregation by any
means necessary was a way to keep the family lie alive,
(17:48):
even when his entire family was dead. Violence made him
feel powerful. It was a way of exerting control in
a life that was never as good as he felt
like he would owe. He shot Medgar Evers because he
was a racist who was willing to kill to preserve segregation. Obviously,
(18:10):
and quite frankly, if he hadn't shot Medgar Evers, it's
reasonably likely that someone else would have, and Beckwith did
go on to try and assassinate another guy a decade later,
I'm not saying Byron de la Beckwith isn't the racist
assassin we think of him as he is. I'm just
saying I didn't expect such a clear direct correlation between
(18:36):
the day his wife finally left him and the day
he started making concrete plans to kill someone else. We
(18:57):
won't even get to the murder today. I've already decided
this is going to go on a while because we
have to start at the beginning. How did he end
up holding a rifle and honeysuckle thicket in Jackson, Mississippi
on June eleventh, nineteen sixty three. Well, first of all,
I regret to inform you that I had another full
(19:19):
on meltdown about some old racist's name. What even is
a man's name? I mean, the whole Louis Lewis Beam
thing really wrecked me. So maybe I'm developing a complex
or something. But it happened again. You probably know by
now that one of the things I love to waste
my own time on when I'm first sitting down with
(19:40):
a new, weird little guy is genealogy. Does it often matter? No? No,
it really very rarely results in anything that I even
tell you about. But Occasionally we get something good, like
Jack Kershaw's lie about his grandpa serving as a conveterate officer,
(20:01):
when in reality, his grandfather not only did not serve
in the Civil War, but I found a copy of
his draft registration for the Union Army in Illinois. There
was no Admiral Kershaw. My inability to skip this step
is kind of like carrying a huge purse full of garbage.
(20:23):
If you have a big purse, you know what I'm
talking about, You get yourself out of a jam one
time because you had something insane in your thirty pound perse,
and then you spend the rest of your life with
a sore shoulder because you might need everything you've ever owned.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
You know.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
It's exactly like that, except instead I have detailed notes
on the lives of the grandparents of all of America's
weirdest racists. For the most part, it's only good for
weird anecdotes like did you know that George Lincoln Rockwell's
mistress's sister was one of the hostages during the nineteen
seventy seven Hanafi siege and washing to DC, when a
(21:01):
black Muslim group held one hundred and fifty people hostage
in a two day stand off with the police. You
do now or one of Lewis Beam's daughters got arrested
during the pandemic for putting her son in the trunk
of her car to go to a drive through COVID
testing site because she didn't want to catch it from him. Interesting, sad,
(21:21):
weird stuff I didn't need, But now I know. My
husband laughed at me when he came home from work
one night this week to find me reading this old
racist grandfather's will from nineteen oh four, so I could
get to the bottom of this. So maybe I should
have just skipped all this, but it's too late. We're
on this ride together now. So the first problem is
(21:49):
I thought his last name was Dela Beckworth Byron Dala Beckworth,
So the Dla Beckwith part is his last name space
La space Beckwith. I interpreted the Dela portion of the
name as a nobiliary particle. That's the term for the
(22:13):
part of a last name that denotes a family's nobility.
So in a German last name, if you spot a Vaughan,
you know their family used to be noble. Right. The
Dela surname particle shows up in Spanish and French last
names like Dela Vega or de la Fayette. Nowadays a
(22:34):
lot of these names have sort of collapsed over time,
and the spaces have disappeared, and there are plenty of
non noble people walking around today with last names like
Dela Cruz or Dela Rosa. And that's what I thought
we were looking at, but it's not. His last name
is not Dela Beckwith. That's his middle name. His middle
(22:58):
name is Dela. The last name is just Beckwe apparently
the family pronounced it delay. His obituary in the New
York Times has a note about the pronunciation that emphasized
the first syllable as de in all caps. So maybe
(23:19):
it was delay, But based on phonetic spellings and old newspapers,
it seems like people pronounced it like the word delay.
And that's actually what people called him. He didn't usually
go by his first name. People just called him delay.
And bear with me just one more second, while we're
(23:40):
already here. This family did not have a consistent approach
to their own names. Typically, you'll see R. Byron, the
subject of this show, the one we're talking about, you'll
see him referred to as Byron de la beck With Junior,
or just his name with no general suffix, but either
(24:01):
junior or nothing. But both his father and his grandfather
had the exact same name. I know having your father's
name can come with some baggage, and it definitely does
in this family, But not one generation of this family
can agree on how many Byrons Delabeque there have been
(24:22):
across five generations of Byrons spanning one hundred and fifty years.
It's very unclear if any of the Byrons know which
Byron they even are. Our Byron's father spent more than
a decade litigating his own father's will and court in California.
Some of the legal wrangling related to his dead father's
(24:42):
business interests made it all the way to the California
Supreme Court, and never in any of the documents over
the course of fifteen years is either man referred to
as junior or senior. They're both just referred to by
their identical name every time, and it makes the legal
documents a nightmare. When our Byron was born, the newspaper
(25:07):
announcement called him Byron Junior, but he would have been
Byron the third, and he definitely knew that because he
named his own son Byron the Fourth. But when that
Byron's name showed up in a newspaper for a marriage
announcement for his son Byron in the nineteen nineties, he
had suddenly become Byron the six. And I genuinely think
(25:30):
that that is because the Roman numerals for the number
four and the number six are the same letters in
a different order, you know, IV versus v I, and
he just got him backwards. I do not think this
family has a firm grasp on Roman numerals. I went
as far as to find documents with these men's signatures
(25:51):
on them, you know, in for a penny, in for
a pound. I gotta figure it out. So not just
what other people are assuming their names are, but how
they signed their own names pen to paper on documents.
When our Byron signed his draft card in nineteen forty six,
there's no suffix. He signed it Byron d beckwith. Fair enough,
(26:16):
his father was dead, his son wasn't born yet, so
he was the only living Byron Dela beckwith in early
nineteen forty six. But when he married his second wife
in nineteen eighty three, he signed his Tennessee marriage license
Byron Della beckwith parentheses senior comma. The I close parentheses
(26:42):
Byron Senior the sixth. Remember he's technically Byron the third.
He never used that, he's Byron Junior. He named his
son Byron the fourth, and now he's calling himself Byron
Senior the sixth. That's not even a real configuration of
generational suffix What would that even mean? When his son
(27:03):
Byron the fourth signed an application for Membership and the
Sons of the American Revolution in nineteen sixty eight, he
signed his name Byron de la Beckwith Junior. But the
junior was written sort of as an afterthought, and it's
very large, and there's room for it to have been
after the beckwith, but it's actually sort of on top
(27:24):
of it for some reason. Granted, some guides about the
use of these suffixes say that it is really only
to distinguish between living relatives. So when he did this
in the nineteen sixties, he was Byron junior because he
was the younger of two living Byron's di la Bequeth.
(27:45):
The suffix aren't generally part of your legal name, so
it can just be a matter of preference. But you'd
think your preference about what your name is would hold
pretty steady. But there's no consistency throughout any of their
lives in how they refer to themselves or each other.
(28:05):
When our Byron was five, his father died, and in
the obituary he's Byron Junior. But when his mother died
a few years later, there's no mention of any Byrons
at all. He's identified only with his nickname Delay, and
most sources don't even mention that he named his own
(28:26):
son Byron at all either. The boy's name is often
just listed as Delay de la Bequeth, which is very
redundant and implies not only that Delay was the kid's
legal first name, but that the dela is part of
the last name, and neither of those things are true.
If your goal is to understand the early twentieth century
(28:47):
legal battles over canal rights in Central California, the lack
of clarity from one Byron to the next is going
to be a disaster. But none of that matters for us,
because we're just talking about the one who was so
racist he killed a man in Mississippi, So who cares
if he's Byron Junior, Byron IID regular Byron, or inexplicably
(29:11):
Byron Senior. The sixth I just wanted you to know
all of that in case you googled him and you
read the Wikipedia page and you were wondering why on
Wikipedia it says he's Byron Junior. The answer is no,
one knows. He didn't even know, So I'm just gonna
(29:31):
call him beck With from here on out. I'm so
sorry about all that. The family name is beckw the
de La shows up as a middle name when his
grandfather was born in the eighteen thirties. But if you're
still with me, if you haven't turned this off in
a rage because I got upset about a man's name again,
this did turn out to be one of those rare
(29:52):
occasions where the time that I spent on genealogy wasn't
a total waste. He carried his father's name, but it
was his mother's blood line that shaped the man he
thought he was. And that brings us to the actual
beginning of where we're trying to go. Byron Dela Beckwy
(30:16):
was born in Sacramento, California, on November ninth, nineteen twenty
to Byron Dela Beckwy and Susie Yerger Beckwyth. His parents
were in their mid thirties, which is a normal age
to have your first and only child today, but quite
old by the standards of the time. His father had
been born in California, the first and only son of
(30:39):
his father, Byron Dela Beckw. That first Byron moved west
in the eighteen fifties during the gold Rush, and he
was an early resident of Lodi, California. The first of
the Byrons, Dilla Beckwy was arguably the only successful one.
He started the town's drug store, He became the postmaster,
(31:01):
He sold insurance, and he formed the Woodbridge Canal and
Irrigation Company, providing the first large scale irrigation in the region.
That company eventually reformed as the Woodbridge Irrigation District, and
it still provides water to the lod Eye area today.
Our Byron's father, the son of the irrigationist, took over
(31:24):
his father's business as a young man when his father
died and he was less successful. He spent most of
his adult life litigating his father's estate, and he eventually
won a large sum of money. He worked in title
insurance and real estate, and the family appeared to be
doing well. He bought a nice house in Colusa for
(31:47):
his wife and son, and he would drive all the
way to Sacramento so his wife could chop for the
latest fashions in the department stores in the city. They
socialized with other successful and influential families. One frequent game,
a drinking buddy of byrons, was the author Jack London.
It wasn't until her husband's death from alcoholism that Susie
(32:10):
Beckwith realized they'd been living in an illusion. She thought
they were wealthy. They owned nice things, they went to
nice parties, they took nice vacations. But everything the couple
owned was mortgaged to the hilt, and there were unpaid debts.
On top of that, he hadn't paid their tab at
the grocer in years. There were unpaid legal judgments, laborers
(32:36):
still owed for their services, and there was nothing in
the bank. He'd even taken on debt in her name. Widowed, destitute,
and two thousand miles from any of her family, she
had no way of taking care of her five year
old son, so she went home. Susie Yuger Beckwith had
(33:12):
grown up on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Susie's father,
Lemuel Juger, wore his Confederate Army uniform when he walked
her down the aisle at her wedding to Byron. Her mother,
Susan Yeger, had been a personal friend of Verena Davis,
the widow of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate
(33:33):
States of America. But by the turn of the century
the Yurgers were a family in decline. They still had
some land, and they still had their name, but they
lived in what one source I read called genteel poverty.
They were old money without any of the money anymore.
(33:57):
Susie's family tree was a lightly incestuous mix of several
influential plantation owning families in the region. She was a Yuruger,
but she was also a Southworth, a Kimbro, and a Morgan.
And between those families they'd owned tens of thousands of
acres of cotton fields in the Mississippi Delta before the war,
(34:19):
and tens of thousands of acres of cotton needed to
be worked by a significant amount of people people those
families owned. I didn't go quite so far as to
dig up comprehensive records about the exact holdings of these families.
That would probably take me a day or two, but
(34:40):
I did find an eighteen sixty newspaper ad placed by
Beckworth's great grandfather, Hunter Home Southworth, and in eighteen sixty
he was offering a five hundred dollars reward for the
return of Albert, Dudley and Fred, three young men who
had a sci from slavery on his Carroll County plantation.
(35:04):
Five hundred dollars was more than the average laborer could
earn in a year in eighteen sixty. Census records I
could find for a handful of central Mississippi counties from
the years immediately before the war showed hundreds of enslaved
people on land belonging to various Yurgurs, Morgan's, Kimbros, and Southworths. Now,
(35:27):
Mississippi did have a higher concentration of enslaved people than
many other Southern states. So about half of white families
in Mississippi in eighteen sixty owned at least one person,
which was much higher than the average across the South.
But even in Mississippi, owning more than a few people
(35:47):
put your family firmly in the upper echelons of Mississippi society.
These families were in the planter class. They were plantation
elites until they weren't. When Susie Beckwith brought her five
year old son Byron back to the plantation in nineteen
twenty six, her parents were still living in the past.
(36:12):
Her mother was active in the Daughters of the Confederacy,
and she headed local efforts to get a Confederate monument
put up in Greenwood. She even modeled for it. Her
father was the head of his local chapter of the
Sons of Confederate Veterans, and he'd given the speech when
the statue was unveiled. Their land was still worked by
black farm hands, in some cases the actual descendants of
(36:34):
the people who'd been enslaved there, but they were tenant
farmers now, and the family hadn't really adjusted their attitudes
about the arrangement. The house itself was getting more and
more run down with each passing year, was packed with
Confederate memorabilia. One of Susan Yeger's most prized possessions was
(36:55):
some china that had been given to her by Verena Davis,
but the wallpaper was peeling off the walls. A black
woman identified only as Mami in the sources I read,
arrived every day at dawn to cook their breakfast and
wash their clothes, but she was never allowed to enter
through the front door. Susie wasn't coping well. She'd always
(37:18):
suffered from fragile nerves. She was shipped off to sanitarium's,
mental hospitals, retreats, health spas, mineral springs, you name it,
pretty often throughout her adult life. During one nineteen oh
six day at doctor Kellogg's Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan,
she even met Upton Sinclair, and she introduced the author
to her cousin, Mary Craig Kimbrough, and the couple married
(37:41):
over these strenuous objections of the kimbro family. Upton Sinclair
was famously a socialist, which didn't sit right with the
plantation owning families, and now a widow pulled up in
her childhood bedrooms, Yogurt just kind of left her son
(38:02):
to his own devices on the plantation. At night, before
bed she would tell Byron's stories about his father, But
Byron was never told about his father's failures. He didn't
know that his father had been an alcoholic who squandered
his inheritance and left them penniless. Susie told her son
(38:23):
that his father had been wealthy and successful and it
was just bad luck. They lost everything when the depression hit.
I have to assume at some point, maybe he was
an adult, he must have realized that the money disappeared
years too early for that to have been true. But
as a child he believed the stories. He heard, these
(38:46):
stories of his father's success in California, stories about how
the plantation used to be beautiful, how everything was better
in the past. His mother, his grandmother, his uncles, they
were all living in the past, telling stories about what
life was like before, before the war, before the depression,
back when they were wealthy and influential, back when they
(39:07):
could be proud of their lot in life, and it
had all been taken from them. In nineteen thirty two,
Byron's grandmother, Susie's mother died. Susie had another one of
her nervous breakdowns, and she never came back from this one.
(39:27):
Repeated visits to sanitariums and mental hospitals didn't help.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
This time.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
She was dying. In nineteen thirty three, Susie Beckworth died
of cancer so at age twelve. Byron de la Beckwith
was an orphan. Technically, his cousin Yugur Morehead was assigned
as his legal guardian, but Moorehead didn't take a very
active role in his life. Beckworth lived alone in the
(39:56):
Rotting mansion with his uncle Will Yerger and his great
uncle HH. Southworth. Will Yurger was a known eccentric. None
of the descriptions I read make him sound cruel or dangerous,
but he wasn't a fit guardian for a child, and
this wasn't a good environment for a child. I mean, honestly,
(40:20):
it probably was not safe for will Yurgur to take
care of himself, let alone a child. If not for
the black housekeeper who came every day to cook for
and clean up after the men, Uncle will may well
have found himself dead under a pile of hoarded newspapers.
Will Yuger had suffered repeated nervous breakdowns, just like his
(40:41):
sister Susy. According to recollections Beckwyth shared with a biographer,
Uncle Will didn't drink, he enjoyed gardening, and he was
active in his church. But he was also known to
walk around town on his pajamas and present strangers on
the street with gifts, and do things like leave dead
rotting fish in his dresser drawers. He never seemed to
(41:06):
quite know what was going on around him, and he
was committed to a psychiatric institution by a family member
at least once. Beckwith was never really parented as a
little boy. He had an alcoholic father and a mother
who was often taken to bed with nerves, and when
his father died, his mother withdrew from him even further,
(41:27):
just sort of fading out of his life until she
died too a few years later. The grandmother, who offered
her half hearted attempts at discipline for a few years,
was dead, and as a teen he was physically cared
for by a servant, and the pair of old bachelors
tasked with his upbringing didn't offer much in the way
(41:48):
of discipline. His grades were bad and his attitude was worse.
His cousin arranged for him to finish high school at
a prestigious boarding school in Tennessee. They traded on a
family name to get him in, but they had to
dip into the meager inheritance Beckwith's mother had left him
to pay for it. He flunked out after a year,
(42:11):
despite being placed two grade levels below his age. His
cousin then called in every favor he had left to
get beck With admitted to a military school the following year,
but he only lasted four months there. He finally graduated
high school in nineteen forty, a few months before his
twentieth birthday, after returning to the local public school in Greenwood, Mississippi.
(42:37):
He worked at a dry cleaners that summer to say
for tuition, and he enrolled at the University of Alabama
and the fall, but he dropped out almost immediately when
it became clear that he would not be accepted at
the fraternity of his choice. He was able to enroll
at Mississippi State right away, and he started the fall
semester as a pledge at sigmafy Epsilon, but the fraternity
(42:58):
kicked him out for flunking his midterm, and he never
even finished his first semester. He failed again. He went
back to live with Uncle Will in the rapidly decaying
family home, and he took a job at the Pepsi
bottling plant. Maybe, if things had been different, he and
Uncle Will would have lived out the rest of their
(43:19):
days in some kind of grotesque Southern Gothic Confederate version
of Gray Gardens Byron de la Beckwyth would have followed
in his father's footsteps, squandering what little family money was
left as he drank himself to death. Or maybe he
would have been like Uncle Will, a harmless old crank,
dadding around town, keeping himself busy telling stories about the
(43:41):
good old days on the plantation. But December seventh, nineteen
forty one he is a date which lives in infamy.
After all, just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
Byron de la Beckwith enlisted in the Marines. It was
(44:01):
in the Pacific Theater that Byron Della Beckwith finally found purpose, discipline, religion,
and a sense of pride. For the first time in
his life. He was finally living up to his noble bloodline,
he felt, and he developed a strange, violent personal theology
he would carry with him for the rest of his life.
(44:37):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Coolshoe Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Hunger. Our
executive producers are Sophie Lectreman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Lory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(45:00):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subredd.
It just don't post anything that's going to make you
one of my Weird Little Guys
Kozo Media. June eleventh, nineteen sixty three was a Tuesday
in Saigon. Buddhist monk te Kwan Duck set a cushion
down in the middle of a busy intersection and began
to pray as another monk doused him in gasoline. He
(00:23):
struck the match himself, immolating himself in protest of the
South Vietnamese government. In Greece, the prime minister resigned over
some nasty disagreement with the king. In Tehran, the Shah
made promises about upcoming elections in response to days of
unrest after his arrest of Iyatola Komeni. On the other
(00:45):
side of the world, in Jackson, Mississippi, a convicted murderer
dying of lung cancer received the first ever human lung
transplant at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Elsewhere in town,
mississippis and Doa, a c PEA field secretary, spent most
of his afternoon meeting with NAACP lawyers going over their
testimony for an upcoming appearance before Congress. Just north of Jackson,
(01:11):
in Wynna, Mississippi, activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
were desperately trying to get half a dozen voting rights
organizers out of the Little County jail. The group had
sent an observer to the jail to check on their condition,
but he'd been beaten senseless and arrested too. A snick
worker who had managed to get inside of the jail
(01:33):
reported that one of the teenage girls who'd been arrested
had been beaten so badly she couldn't speak. The orestees
had been on their way to Greenwood, Mississippi, to register
black voters. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Governor George Wallace stood in
the doorway at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama
(01:55):
to physically block the university's first black students from registering
for classes. President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and
dispatched soldiers who were prepared to physically remove the governor
from the doorway if necessary. In Washington, d C. President
Kennedy asked the networks to clear the eight PM timeslot.
(02:18):
He was going to have to say something to the country.
He wasn't sure what would happen in Tuscaloosa if a
federalized National guardsman put his hands on the governor of Alabama.
The country would need to hear from the President, but
Wallace blinked and the guardsman didn't have to do anything
at all. The President addressed the nation anyway that night,
(02:43):
and that NAACB. Field Secretary watched that speech on TV
just before his last meeting of the night. And on
June eleventh, nineteen sixty three, in Laflora County, Mississippi, a
fertilizer salesman made his round extolling the virtues of Delta
liquid plant food to the cotton planners in his sales territory,
(03:07):
or so he claimed. In his work log for the
afternoon of June eleventh, Byron de la Bequyth claimed he
lost a few hours to car trouble, and with a
broken odometer, he figured no one could prove he drove
to Jackson. He hadn't counted on dropping his rifle in
that honeysuckle thicket. I'm Molly Conger, and this this weird
(03:35):
little guides. A little after midnight on June twelfth, nineteen
(03:55):
sixty three, Medgar Evers died. He was thirty seven years old.
Evers was born in Mississippi in nineteen twenty five, and
as a boy, he walked miles to and from his
segregated school every day, a route that took him past
a field where a pile of bloody clothes had been
(04:15):
left as a warning. The clothes had belonged to Willy Tingle,
a black man accused of insulting a white woman. At
fourteen years old, Medgar Evers witnessed the lynching of Willy Tingle.
He saw a white mob dragging his father's friend through
the streets behind a cart before shooting and hanging him,
(04:41):
and every day after that, Medgar Evers stopped to look
at Willy's bloody clothes in the field on his way
to his segregated school. He dropped out of high school
to enlist in the army in nineteen forty three. The
United States military was still segregated, and black soldiers were
relegated to not combat roles, but ever served honorably in Europe.
(05:05):
He was one of countless black American soldiers who saw
that it didn't have to be that way. Their black
counterparts in the Free French forces didn't suffer the same indignities,
and when he got home after the war, Medgar Evers
wanted to vote. He and his brother organized a small
group of black veterans to attempt to vote in their
(05:27):
hometown of Decatur, Mississippi, in nineteen forty six, but they
were turned away from the polls by an angry white mob.
He finished high school and got a college education, and
for the next seventeen years the rest of his life,
Medgar Evers fought for civil rights in Mississippi. From nineteen
(05:47):
fifty four until his death in nineteen sixty three, he
was the NAACP Field Secretary in his home state, and
in nineteen sixty three he was murdered by Byron de
la Beckwith, a segregationist active in his local White citizens Council.
Last week's episode was meant to be a standalone sort
(06:10):
of deal. It wasn't really about the murder of Medgar
Evers or about his murderer, Byron de la Beckwith. It
was about the attempted erasure of history by the Trump administration.
The dust up over the brochures at the Medgar and
Burley Evers Home National Monument was just our window into
(06:31):
that story, and those brochures were not, in the end,
even changed at all last week. The latest reporting I
had on the issue was from Mississippi Today. Back in
February and I told you that at least as of February,
the brochures remained unchanged. Thanks to a listener down in
Mississippi who visited the site on June teenth, I can
(06:54):
update that to say that as of last week, the
brochures at the Evers Home National Park site are available
to the public and they have not been altered or censored.
Even though I just touched briefly on the murder of
Medgar Evers while I was writing last week's episode, I
spent a little bit of time researching it, just to
(07:14):
give myself the context, and I was surprised how much
of the story I didn't know and hadn't even considered
Byron de la Bequiff was a weird little guy. I mean,
you could have guessed that, right, he fits the bill.
Segregationist in the Deep South in the sixties, killed a
(07:37):
black man, joined the clan. That's weird little guy territory.
That would work as an episode, But I don't think
I was ready for the abundant evidence of what a
quintessential weird little guy he was. I mean, racist white
guy in Mississippi shot and killed a black civil rights activist,
(07:59):
white jury and missus Sippy won't convict justices served. Decades later,
I knew the shape of the story, another awful chapter
in the history of the American south right. Racist guy
does a racist thing for racist reasons, and the racist
system shrugs. I don't know why I assumed that was
kind of it. I know better than that. Of course,
(08:21):
there's more there. Of course there is a fascinating and
infinitely distracting context. I was kind of thinking I would
avoid another multi part series for a while, just to
shake things up, but I'm not sure that's possible. Every
single piece of this story connects to the bigger narrative
we've been working on over the last two years. I
(08:44):
know I'm always saying that, and if anyone from marketing
was listening to the show, they would tell me to
stop saying that. But it really jumped out at me
this week when I realized that medyor Eras's children saw
their father bleed out that night because they stayed up
late to watch the President's speech and the President was
(09:04):
speaking on TV that night because the National Guard had
been mobilized to forcibly integrate the University of Alabama that day.
Not only that, at the moment that Medgar Evers died,
Fanny Lou Hamer was singing hymns through bleeding lips in
a Mississippi jail cell ninety miles away. Those two historical
(09:29):
facts occurred in the same instant. In last week's episode,
I included a snippet of audio from Fanny Lou Hamer's
speech to the nineteen sixty four Democratic National Convention Credentialing Committee.
I chose that clip to illustrate my point, mostly because
(09:50):
I'm just particularly fond of that speech and I find
it very moving. She was saying what I was trying
to convey to you about fighting for an am America.
That actually is what we've been promised, even though we
know it isn't right now that I already had the
audio saved and transcribed because I've used it before. Fanny
(10:14):
Leehamer gave that speech at the DNC after she was
denied a fair shot at running on a ballot in Mississippi,
and a few months after the convention in January of
nineteen sixty five, she escalated her protest, and she took
it to the United States Capitol Building on the first
day of the Congressional session, and there in the Capitol Building.
(10:35):
Fanny lou Hamer was counter protested by George Lincoln Rockwell himself.
If you remember the several months we spent last fall
on Rockwell and his American Nazi Party, you might remember
this incident. Stormtrooper Robert Lloyd burst into the Congressional chambers
wearing blackface and no pants, screaming and making a scene,
(10:56):
and he was chased out. It was a whole ordeal.
What I didn't put together, though, what I didn't realize
when I chose that clip again last week, is that
if you listened to the whole speech. When she's speaking
to the DNC in nineteen sixty four, she's describing a
particular experience. It's something that happened to her while Medgar
(11:20):
Evers was being assassinated. It's something that happened to her
on June eleventh, nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
I began to scream, and one white man got up
and began to beat me in my head and tell
them at the hood. One white man my dress had
worked up time. She walked off and pulled my dress.
I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress
back up. I was in jail when Matka Allas was murdered.
(11:54):
All of this is on account of we want to
register to become first class met.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
The night that MegaR Evers died, Fanny lou Hamer was
ninety miles away in a jail cell. She and several
organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were arrested on
June ninth when the bus they were taking back to Greenwood, Mississippi,
stopped briefly in nearby Winona. In jail, she was beaten
so badly that she never really recovered. She suffered permanent
(12:28):
damage to one kidney from the blows to her lower back.
And they were on their way to Greenwood that day
because they were headed to the Greenwood office of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee because the black voter registration efforts
there were really heating up. The Department of Justice had
gotten involved earlier that year, threatening to take the city
(12:51):
to court over their interference with the registration drive. The
DOJ back down when the city promised to stop, but
Greenwood residents, Greenwood residents like Byron Dela beck With doubled down.
The organizers in Greenwood were very familiar with Byron Dela
(13:12):
beck With. He had this habit of driving around town,
heckling and stalking and photographing and intimidating black residents, particularly
those involved in civil rights demonstrations. His presence was so
constant and so unsettling that a snick worker in Greenwood
invited him to come to the office to try to
(13:35):
have a civil conversation. I mean, bless their hearts. They
must have thought they could reason with the man, but
he never took them up on the offer. But do
you see a little how these pieces fit together, These
moments in time captured from different angles in episodes about
different men, but they're all part of the same story,
(14:00):
and that's why the characters keep recurring. In nineteen eighty three,
when segregationist lawyer J. B. Stoner was on the run,
rather than showing up to serve his sentence for an
old clan bombing, the FBI went looking for him, and
one of the places they looked was at his old
friend Byron de la Beckwith's house. In nineteen eighty when
(14:23):
the FBI had no leads in the shooting of National
Urban League president Vernon Jordan, they sent agents to question
Byron de la Beckwith. A sniper had shot at a
civil rights leader, and that was his m oh It
would be another few months before the FBI caught up
with the actual shooter, Nazi serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin.
(14:45):
He was the subject of a series of episodes earlier
this year. In the late nineteen seventies, when Beckwith went
to prison for the first time for attempting to murder
the regional director of the ad L, he got fan
mail from Aryan Nation leader Richard Butler and White Arean
Resistance leader Tom Metzger. Then we've talked about countless times.
(15:08):
The New Christian Crusade Church, the Christian Identity Church that
would eventually be co owned by South African pro apartheid
terrorist Monica hugget Stone, raised five thousand dollars for Beckworth
to live off of after his release from prison in
nineteen eighty. He'd become an adherent of Christian Identity shortly
before going to prison. In May of nineteen ninety one,
(15:31):
when Byron de La Beckworth was sitting in jail, finally
about to face justice nearly three decades after killing Medgar Evers,
his face was on the cover of an issue of
The White Beret. Now this one's a deep cut. You
might not remember this. It was a short lived newsletter
published by Kansas City Clansman Dennis Mayhon featured in the
(15:54):
episodes back in December of twenty twenty four, and when
he pupped plish that issue in nineteen ninety one, Mayhon
had just returned from a clan rally in Jackson, Mississippi.
In April of nineteen ninety one, four hundred klansmen and
neo Nazis rallied in Jackson for Confederate Memorial Day, and
(16:15):
Tom Metzger headlined a rally to raise money from Byron
Della Beckwith. It might be faster to tell you which
subjects of the show he isn't connected to. So maybe
we should invest some time into seeing which other loose
ends can be knitted back together. Because even leaving aside
(16:38):
some larger exploration of the clan in Mississippi, which I'm
very interested in, it turns out Byron Della Beckwith is
just a textbook weird little guy. He didn't just commit
a racist murder. He wasn't just an ardent segregationist who
assassinated a prominent civil rights leader. He was an impotent
(17:01):
wife beater who, after being orphaned, was raised by two
eccentric uncles in the family's dilapidated plantation house. He was
obsessed with sending furious little letters to the editor, to
the point that people around town laughed at him. He
wasn't just a racist, Mississippi was full of racist that's
not really very special. He had an obsession with the
(17:24):
mythology of the lost cause of the Confederacy that was
baked into the same part of his brain that stored
his childhood abandonment issues. He clung to the ideas of
white supremacy in Southern pride because those lies felt like
the only home he ever had. Preserving segregation by any
means necessary was a way to keep the family lie alive,
(17:48):
even when his entire family was dead. Violence made him
feel powerful. It was a way of exerting control in
a life that was never as good as he felt
like he would owe. He shot Medgar Evers because he
was a racist who was willing to kill to preserve segregation. Obviously,
(18:10):
and quite frankly, if he hadn't shot Medgar Evers, it's
reasonably likely that someone else would have, and Beckwith did
go on to try and assassinate another guy a decade later,
I'm not saying Byron de la Beckwith isn't the racist
assassin we think of him as he is. I'm just
saying I didn't expect such a clear direct correlation between
(18:36):
the day his wife finally left him and the day
he started making concrete plans to kill someone else. We
(18:57):
won't even get to the murder today. I've already decided
this is going to go on a while because we
have to start at the beginning. How did he end
up holding a rifle and honeysuckle thicket in Jackson, Mississippi
on June eleventh, nineteen sixty three. Well, first of all,
I regret to inform you that I had another full
(19:19):
on meltdown about some old racist's name. What even is
a man's name? I mean, the whole Louis Lewis Beam
thing really wrecked me. So maybe I'm developing a complex
or something. But it happened again. You probably know by
now that one of the things I love to waste
my own time on when I'm first sitting down with
(19:40):
a new, weird little guy is genealogy. Does it often matter? No? No,
it really very rarely results in anything that I even
tell you about. But Occasionally we get something good, like
Jack Kershaw's lie about his grandpa serving as a conveterate officer,
(20:01):
when in reality, his grandfather not only did not serve
in the Civil War, but I found a copy of
his draft registration for the Union Army in Illinois. There
was no Admiral Kershaw. My inability to skip this step
is kind of like carrying a huge purse full of garbage.
(20:23):
If you have a big purse, you know what I'm
talking about, You get yourself out of a jam one
time because you had something insane in your thirty pound perse,
and then you spend the rest of your life with
a sore shoulder because you might need everything you've ever owned.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
You know.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
It's exactly like that, except instead I have detailed notes
on the lives of the grandparents of all of America's
weirdest racists. For the most part, it's only good for
weird anecdotes like did you know that George Lincoln Rockwell's
mistress's sister was one of the hostages during the nineteen
seventy seven Hanafi siege and washing to DC, when a
(21:01):
black Muslim group held one hundred and fifty people hostage
in a two day stand off with the police. You
do now or one of Lewis Beam's daughters got arrested
during the pandemic for putting her son in the trunk
of her car to go to a drive through COVID
testing site because she didn't want to catch it from him. Interesting, sad,
(21:21):
weird stuff I didn't need, But now I know. My
husband laughed at me when he came home from work
one night this week to find me reading this old
racist grandfather's will from nineteen oh four, so I could
get to the bottom of this. So maybe I should
have just skipped all this, but it's too late. We're
on this ride together now. So the first problem is
(21:49):
I thought his last name was Dela Beckworth Byron Dala Beckworth,
So the Dla Beckwith part is his last name space
La space Beckwith. I interpreted the Dela portion of the
name as a nobiliary particle. That's the term for the
(22:13):
part of a last name that denotes a family's nobility.
So in a German last name, if you spot a Vaughan,
you know their family used to be noble. Right. The
Dela surname particle shows up in Spanish and French last
names like Dela Vega or de la Fayette. Nowadays a
(22:34):
lot of these names have sort of collapsed over time,
and the spaces have disappeared, and there are plenty of
non noble people walking around today with last names like
Dela Cruz or Dela Rosa. And that's what I thought
we were looking at, but it's not. His last name
is not Dela Beckwith. That's his middle name. His middle
(22:58):
name is Dela. The last name is just Beckwe apparently
the family pronounced it delay. His obituary in the New
York Times has a note about the pronunciation that emphasized
the first syllable as de in all caps. So maybe
(23:19):
it was delay, But based on phonetic spellings and old newspapers,
it seems like people pronounced it like the word delay.
And that's actually what people called him. He didn't usually
go by his first name. People just called him delay.
And bear with me just one more second, while we're
(23:40):
already here. This family did not have a consistent approach
to their own names. Typically, you'll see R. Byron, the
subject of this show, the one we're talking about, you'll
see him referred to as Byron de la beck With Junior,
or just his name with no general suffix, but either
(24:01):
junior or nothing. But both his father and his grandfather
had the exact same name. I know having your father's
name can come with some baggage, and it definitely does
in this family, But not one generation of this family
can agree on how many Byrons Delabeque there have been
(24:22):
across five generations of Byrons spanning one hundred and fifty years.
It's very unclear if any of the Byrons know which
Byron they even are. Our Byron's father spent more than
a decade litigating his own father's will and court in California.
Some of the legal wrangling related to his dead father's
(24:42):
business interests made it all the way to the California
Supreme Court, and never in any of the documents over
the course of fifteen years is either man referred to
as junior or senior. They're both just referred to by
their identical name every time, and it makes the legal
documents a nightmare. When our Byron was born, the newspaper
(25:07):
announcement called him Byron Junior, but he would have been
Byron the third, and he definitely knew that because he
named his own son Byron the Fourth. But when that
Byron's name showed up in a newspaper for a marriage
announcement for his son Byron in the nineteen nineties, he
had suddenly become Byron the six. And I genuinely think
(25:30):
that that is because the Roman numerals for the number
four and the number six are the same letters in
a different order, you know, IV versus v I, and
he just got him backwards. I do not think this
family has a firm grasp on Roman numerals. I went
as far as to find documents with these men's signatures
(25:51):
on them, you know, in for a penny, in for
a pound. I gotta figure it out. So not just
what other people are assuming their names are, but how
they signed their own names pen to paper on documents.
When our Byron signed his draft card in nineteen forty six,
there's no suffix. He signed it Byron d beckwith. Fair enough,
(26:16):
his father was dead, his son wasn't born yet, so
he was the only living Byron Dela beckwith in early
nineteen forty six. But when he married his second wife
in nineteen eighty three, he signed his Tennessee marriage license
Byron Della beckwith parentheses senior comma. The I close parentheses
(26:42):
Byron Senior the sixth. Remember he's technically Byron the third.
He never used that, he's Byron Junior. He named his
son Byron the fourth, and now he's calling himself Byron
Senior the sixth. That's not even a real configuration of
generational suffix What would that even mean? When his son
(27:03):
Byron the fourth signed an application for Membership and the
Sons of the American Revolution in nineteen sixty eight, he
signed his name Byron de la Beckwith Junior. But the
junior was written sort of as an afterthought, and it's
very large, and there's room for it to have been
after the beckwith, but it's actually sort of on top
(27:24):
of it for some reason. Granted, some guides about the
use of these suffixes say that it is really only
to distinguish between living relatives. So when he did this
in the nineteen sixties, he was Byron junior because he
was the younger of two living Byron's di la Bequeth.
(27:45):
The suffix aren't generally part of your legal name, so
it can just be a matter of preference. But you'd
think your preference about what your name is would hold
pretty steady. But there's no consistency throughout any of their
lives in how they refer to themselves or each other.
(28:05):
When our Byron was five, his father died, and in
the obituary he's Byron Junior. But when his mother died
a few years later, there's no mention of any Byrons
at all. He's identified only with his nickname Delay, and
most sources don't even mention that he named his own
(28:26):
son Byron at all either. The boy's name is often
just listed as Delay de la Bequeth, which is very
redundant and implies not only that Delay was the kid's
legal first name, but that the dela is part of
the last name, and neither of those things are true.
If your goal is to understand the early twentieth century
(28:47):
legal battles over canal rights in Central California, the lack
of clarity from one Byron to the next is going
to be a disaster. But none of that matters for us,
because we're just talking about the one who was so
racist he killed a man in Mississippi, So who cares
if he's Byron Junior, Byron IID regular Byron, or inexplicably
(29:11):
Byron Senior. The sixth I just wanted you to know
all of that in case you googled him and you
read the Wikipedia page and you were wondering why on
Wikipedia it says he's Byron Junior. The answer is no,
one knows. He didn't even know, So I'm just gonna
(29:31):
call him beck With from here on out. I'm so
sorry about all that. The family name is beckw the
de La shows up as a middle name when his
grandfather was born in the eighteen thirties. But if you're
still with me, if you haven't turned this off in
a rage because I got upset about a man's name again,
this did turn out to be one of those rare
(29:52):
occasions where the time that I spent on genealogy wasn't
a total waste. He carried his father's name, but it
was his mother's blood line that shaped the man he
thought he was. And that brings us to the actual
beginning of where we're trying to go. Byron Dela Beckwy
(30:16):
was born in Sacramento, California, on November ninth, nineteen twenty
to Byron Dela Beckwy and Susie Yerger Beckwyth. His parents
were in their mid thirties, which is a normal age
to have your first and only child today, but quite
old by the standards of the time. His father had
been born in California, the first and only son of
(30:39):
his father, Byron Dela Beckw. That first Byron moved west
in the eighteen fifties during the gold Rush, and he
was an early resident of Lodi, California. The first of
the Byrons, Dilla Beckwy was arguably the only successful one.
He started the town's drug store, He became the postmaster,
(31:01):
He sold insurance, and he formed the Woodbridge Canal and
Irrigation Company, providing the first large scale irrigation in the region.
That company eventually reformed as the Woodbridge Irrigation District, and
it still provides water to the lod Eye area today.
Our Byron's father, the son of the irrigationist, took over
(31:24):
his father's business as a young man when his father
died and he was less successful. He spent most of
his adult life litigating his father's estate, and he eventually
won a large sum of money. He worked in title
insurance and real estate, and the family appeared to be
doing well. He bought a nice house in Colusa for
(31:47):
his wife and son, and he would drive all the
way to Sacramento so his wife could chop for the
latest fashions in the department stores in the city. They
socialized with other successful and influential families. One frequent game,
a drinking buddy of byrons, was the author Jack London.
It wasn't until her husband's death from alcoholism that Susie
(32:10):
Beckwith realized they'd been living in an illusion. She thought
they were wealthy. They owned nice things, they went to
nice parties, they took nice vacations. But everything the couple
owned was mortgaged to the hilt, and there were unpaid debts.
On top of that, he hadn't paid their tab at
the grocer in years. There were unpaid legal judgments, laborers
(32:36):
still owed for their services, and there was nothing in
the bank. He'd even taken on debt in her name. Widowed, destitute,
and two thousand miles from any of her family, she
had no way of taking care of her five year
old son, so she went home. Susie Yuger Beckwith had
(33:12):
grown up on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Susie's father,
Lemuel Juger, wore his Confederate Army uniform when he walked
her down the aisle at her wedding to Byron. Her mother,
Susan Yeger, had been a personal friend of Verena Davis,
the widow of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate
(33:33):
States of America. But by the turn of the century
the Yurgers were a family in decline. They still had
some land, and they still had their name, but they
lived in what one source I read called genteel poverty.
They were old money without any of the money anymore.
(33:57):
Susie's family tree was a lightly incestuous mix of several
influential plantation owning families in the region. She was a Yuruger,
but she was also a Southworth, a Kimbro, and a Morgan.
And between those families they'd owned tens of thousands of
acres of cotton fields in the Mississippi Delta before the war,
(34:19):
and tens of thousands of acres of cotton needed to
be worked by a significant amount of people people those
families owned. I didn't go quite so far as to
dig up comprehensive records about the exact holdings of these families.
That would probably take me a day or two, but
(34:40):
I did find an eighteen sixty newspaper ad placed by
Beckworth's great grandfather, Hunter Home Southworth, and in eighteen sixty
he was offering a five hundred dollars reward for the
return of Albert, Dudley and Fred, three young men who
had a sci from slavery on his Carroll County plantation.
(35:04):
Five hundred dollars was more than the average laborer could
earn in a year in eighteen sixty. Census records I
could find for a handful of central Mississippi counties from
the years immediately before the war showed hundreds of enslaved
people on land belonging to various Yurgurs, Morgan's, Kimbros, and Southworths. Now,
(35:27):
Mississippi did have a higher concentration of enslaved people than
many other Southern states. So about half of white families
in Mississippi in eighteen sixty owned at least one person,
which was much higher than the average across the South.
But even in Mississippi, owning more than a few people
(35:47):
put your family firmly in the upper echelons of Mississippi society.
These families were in the planter class. They were plantation
elites until they weren't. When Susie Beckwith brought her five
year old son Byron back to the plantation in nineteen
twenty six, her parents were still living in the past.
(36:12):
Her mother was active in the Daughters of the Confederacy,
and she headed local efforts to get a Confederate monument
put up in Greenwood. She even modeled for it. Her
father was the head of his local chapter of the
Sons of Confederate Veterans, and he'd given the speech when
the statue was unveiled. Their land was still worked by
black farm hands, in some cases the actual descendants of
(36:34):
the people who'd been enslaved there, but they were tenant
farmers now, and the family hadn't really adjusted their attitudes
about the arrangement. The house itself was getting more and
more run down with each passing year, was packed with
Confederate memorabilia. One of Susan Yeger's most prized possessions was
(36:55):
some china that had been given to her by Verena Davis,
but the wallpaper was peeling off the walls. A black
woman identified only as Mami in the sources I read,
arrived every day at dawn to cook their breakfast and
wash their clothes, but she was never allowed to enter
through the front door. Susie wasn't coping well. She'd always
(37:18):
suffered from fragile nerves. She was shipped off to sanitarium's,
mental hospitals, retreats, health spas, mineral springs, you name it,
pretty often throughout her adult life. During one nineteen oh
six day at doctor Kellogg's Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan,
she even met Upton Sinclair, and she introduced the author
to her cousin, Mary Craig Kimbrough, and the couple married
(37:41):
over these strenuous objections of the kimbro family. Upton Sinclair
was famously a socialist, which didn't sit right with the
plantation owning families, and now a widow pulled up in
her childhood bedrooms, Yogurt just kind of left her son
(38:02):
to his own devices on the plantation. At night, before
bed she would tell Byron's stories about his father, But
Byron was never told about his father's failures. He didn't
know that his father had been an alcoholic who squandered
his inheritance and left them penniless. Susie told her son
(38:23):
that his father had been wealthy and successful and it
was just bad luck. They lost everything when the depression hit.
I have to assume at some point, maybe he was
an adult, he must have realized that the money disappeared
years too early for that to have been true. But
as a child he believed the stories. He heard, these
(38:46):
stories of his father's success in California, stories about how
the plantation used to be beautiful, how everything was better
in the past. His mother, his grandmother, his uncles, they
were all living in the past, telling stories about what
life was like before, before the war, before the depression,
back when they were wealthy and influential, back when they
(39:07):
could be proud of their lot in life, and it
had all been taken from them. In nineteen thirty two,
Byron's grandmother, Susie's mother died. Susie had another one of
her nervous breakdowns, and she never came back from this one.
(39:27):
Repeated visits to sanitariums and mental hospitals didn't help.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
This time.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
She was dying. In nineteen thirty three, Susie Beckworth died
of cancer so at age twelve. Byron de la Beckwith
was an orphan. Technically, his cousin Yugur Morehead was assigned
as his legal guardian, but Moorehead didn't take a very
active role in his life. Beckworth lived alone in the
(39:56):
Rotting mansion with his uncle Will Yerger and his great
uncle HH. Southworth. Will Yurger was a known eccentric. None
of the descriptions I read make him sound cruel or dangerous,
but he wasn't a fit guardian for a child, and
this wasn't a good environment for a child. I mean, honestly,
(40:20):
it probably was not safe for will Yurgur to take
care of himself, let alone a child. If not for
the black housekeeper who came every day to cook for
and clean up after the men, Uncle will may well
have found himself dead under a pile of hoarded newspapers.
Will Yuger had suffered repeated nervous breakdowns, just like his
(40:41):
sister Susy. According to recollections Beckwyth shared with a biographer,
Uncle Will didn't drink, he enjoyed gardening, and he was
active in his church. But he was also known to
walk around town on his pajamas and present strangers on
the street with gifts, and do things like leave dead
rotting fish in his dresser drawers. He never seemed to
(41:06):
quite know what was going on around him, and he
was committed to a psychiatric institution by a family member
at least once. Beckwith was never really parented as a
little boy. He had an alcoholic father and a mother
who was often taken to bed with nerves, and when
his father died, his mother withdrew from him even further,
(41:27):
just sort of fading out of his life until she
died too a few years later. The grandmother, who offered
her half hearted attempts at discipline for a few years,
was dead, and as a teen he was physically cared
for by a servant, and the pair of old bachelors
tasked with his upbringing didn't offer much in the way
(41:48):
of discipline. His grades were bad and his attitude was worse.
His cousin arranged for him to finish high school at
a prestigious boarding school in Tennessee. They traded on a
family name to get him in, but they had to
dip into the meager inheritance Beckwith's mother had left him
to pay for it. He flunked out after a year,
(42:11):
despite being placed two grade levels below his age. His
cousin then called in every favor he had left to
get beck With admitted to a military school the following year,
but he only lasted four months there. He finally graduated
high school in nineteen forty, a few months before his
twentieth birthday, after returning to the local public school in Greenwood, Mississippi.
(42:37):
He worked at a dry cleaners that summer to say
for tuition, and he enrolled at the University of Alabama
and the fall, but he dropped out almost immediately when
it became clear that he would not be accepted at
the fraternity of his choice. He was able to enroll
at Mississippi State right away, and he started the fall
semester as a pledge at sigmafy Epsilon, but the fraternity
(42:58):
kicked him out for flunking his midterm, and he never
even finished his first semester. He failed again. He went
back to live with Uncle Will in the rapidly decaying
family home, and he took a job at the Pepsi
bottling plant. Maybe, if things had been different, he and
Uncle Will would have lived out the rest of their
(43:19):
days in some kind of grotesque Southern Gothic Confederate version
of Gray Gardens Byron de la Beckwyth would have followed
in his father's footsteps, squandering what little family money was
left as he drank himself to death. Or maybe he
would have been like Uncle Will, a harmless old crank,
dadding around town, keeping himself busy telling stories about the
(43:41):
good old days on the plantation. But December seventh, nineteen
forty one he is a date which lives in infamy.
After all, just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
Byron de la Beckwith enlisted in the Marines. It was
(44:01):
in the Pacific Theater that Byron Della Beckwith finally found purpose, discipline, religion,
and a sense of pride. For the first time in
his life. He was finally living up to his noble bloodline,
he felt, and he developed a strange, violent personal theology
he would carry with him for the rest of his life.
(44:37):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Coolshoe Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Hunger. Our
executive producers are Sophie Lectreman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Lory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(45:00):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subredd.
It just don't post anything that's going to make you
one of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.