July 30, 2026 • 60 mins
In the months leading up to the murder of Medgar Evers, the man who killed him was watching his world crumble. Byron de la Beckwith had dedicated his life to the cause of segregation, but it was a losing battle. The governor of Mississippi had backed down, allowing a second black student to enter Ole Miss. Governor George Wallace in Alabama backed down, too. Integration was creeping in all over. That, and his wife left him.
Sources & Further Reading:
Doyle, William (2001). An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi 1962. Doubleday.
Lambert, Frank (2010). The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights vs States’ Rights. Oxford University Press.
Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.
Metzl, Jonathan (2009). The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease. Beacon Press.
Rolph, Stephanie (2018). Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954-1989. Louisiana State University Press
Smith, Frank (1964). Congressman From Mississippi. Capricorn Books.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/race/100262race-ra.html
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/citizens_news/index.3.html
https://www.southernfoodways.org/the-greenwood-food-blockade/
https://snccdigital.org/events/leflore-county-cuts-off-surplus-commodities/
https://snccdigital.org/people/dick-gregory/
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/22/us/samuel-block-60-civil-rights-battler-dies.html
https://www.crmvet.org/docs/src/6210_src_ns.pdf
https://themilitant.com/1962/2633/MIL2633.pdf
https://snccdigital.org/people/lawrence-guyot/
https://snccdigital.org/events/jimmy-travis-shot-greenwood/
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/multimedia/medgar-evers-and-jackson-movement.html
https://da.mdah.ms.gov/vault/projects/OHtranscripts/AU_MP198001_119_098611.pdf
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The Army transport trucks started arriving on campus around four
in the afternoon that Sunday, at the end of September
in nineteen sixty two. Men poured out of the trucks,
Federal marshals, border patrol officers, and a contingent of federal
prison guards on special assignment, more than five hundred in total,
(00:29):
all with specialized riot training and strict orders directly from
the President, do not, under any circumstances fire your weapon.
They held out as long as they could that night.
The crowd was small at first, White students watched the
(00:54):
federal officers set up their command post at the Lyceum,
an academic building that had won served as a hospital
for wounded Confederate soldiers. A little after five PM, an
announcement was made over the loud speakers of the student
union reminding students to steer clear of the Lyceum that night.
That only made them more curious. The crowd swelled, Dozens
(01:20):
of onlookers became hundreds, and as the sun began to set.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Thousands.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
The situation was tense even before the first rock was thrown.
Earlier that week, in speeches broadcast on the radio and television,
anti communist activist Edwin Walker exhorted white Mississippians to protest
the court's order to allow a black student to enroll
the University of Mississippi. Walker called on white Mississippians to
(01:52):
descend upon the campus to rally to the cause of
freedom against this anti christ conspiracy of the Supreme Court.
On Friday, two days before the riot, Mississippi Governor Ross
Barnett was held in contempt by a federal judge for
refusing the court's order to admit James Meredith, the black
(02:14):
student in question, at the University of Mississippi. On Saturday,
when the Old miss Rebels played a football game at
the stadium in Jackson, the governor started the fifty yard
line at halftime to boldly signal his intent to defy
federal integration orders.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah. I love, I love her people. I'm a person
(02:53):
I love and I respect our heritage.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And now on Sunday, President John F. Kennedy had federalized
the National Guard, but privately, behind the scenes, there were
anxious phone calls about the possibility that the Mississippi National
Guard would refuse federal orders. The President conferred with the
Solicitor General about what it would look like for US
(03:27):
marshals to arrest the governor of Mississippi. And outside the lyceum,
the crowd was getting restless. Eighty miles away in Greenwood, Mississippi,
Byron de La Beckwith was loading guns into the back
of his pickup truck. He was eager to get on
the road so he wouldn't miss the showdown. I'm Molly Conger,
(03:55):
and this is weird, little guys Byron Della Beckwith never
(04:16):
made it to Oxford, Mississippi, on September thirtieth, nineteen sixty two,
and that's probably for the best. Some local cops down
in Greenwood knew Beckwith was probably thinking about heading up
to Oxford, and they intercepted him before he hit the highway,
encouraging him to maybe sit this one out. By the
(04:37):
time the United States Army arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, to
put down the riot, two people were dead and dozens
of people had been shot, but not by the federal officers.
They were disproportionately the ones who'd been shot by the
white mob attempting to storm the lyceum, hoping to kill
(04:57):
James Meredith. More than two dozen federal officers suffered from
gunshot wounds.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
That night, Paul Gaillard.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
A French journalist, was killed. Associated Press reporter Bill Krider
kept filing updates with his editor for hours after being
shot in the back. A sniper took shots at Newsweek
reporter Carl Fleming, a cameraman from Dallas, was beaten by
a mob. An off duty sailor hijacked a fire truck
and tried to run over a line of U S Marshals.
(05:30):
Someone stole a bulldozer and tried to ram it through
the front of the building. The entire campus stank of
tear gas. Truly, it's a miracle only two people were killed.
If the Lieutenant Governor had not intervened to stop Mississippi
State troopers from carrying out a plan to retake the
(05:50):
campus from the Marshals by force, the death toll may
have been in the hundreds. When the smoke cleared on
Monday morning, October first, nineteen sixty two, US Marshalls escorted
James Meredith to the registrar's office and he registered for
five classes. When he took his seat in a history
(06:14):
lecture at nine fourteen am that morning, it became the
first legally integrated classroom at a public educational facility in
the state of Mississippi, and two people were dead. Eight
months before Byron Della Beckwith shot and killed Medgar Evers.
He sat at home fuming because he hadn't been part
(06:35):
of that violent white mob tearing or miss apart rather
than see it desegregate. When he opened up his local
paper that Monday, he saw stories of federal troops occupying
a southern city. That's the kind of indignity he'd heard
stories about from his grandparents. It was reconstruction all over again,
rubbing salt in the wounds that white Southerners like Beckwith
(06:58):
seemed to keep open on per Medgar Evers was responsible
for this in some ways, that's actually true. When James
Meredith went to the NAACP office in Jackson, Mississippi to
ask for help applying to the University of Mississippi, it
was Medgar Evers he spoke to. You might recall from
(07:20):
earlier in this series that Evers himself had applied to
Old miss in nineteen fifty four. He too had had
some assistance from the NAACP, but his rejection letter came
in the months after the Brown v Board of Education decision,
and the legal strategy had changed, so his rejection was
never litigated. Medgar Evers was personally involved in James Meredith's case.
(07:45):
When Meredith first spoke to Thurgood Marshall on the phone.
It was at Medgar's house when Meredith got frustrated with
Thurgood Marshal's approach to the conversation and tried to walk out.
It was Medgar Evers who mediated the disagreement and brought
them both.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Back to the table.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Without Medgar Evers, James Meredith would never have made it
to Ole Miss. It's hard to say how much of
that Byron Delah Beckwith could reasonably have known at the time,
but whether his feeling was based in fact or not.
By the end of nineteen sixty two, he was convinced
that Medgar Evers was to blame. His first wife, Mary
(08:27):
Louise Williams, who went by Willie, told Beckwith's biographer, her
nephew Read Massingille, that this was the turning point. It
was in October of nineteen sixty two that Byron Dela
Beckwyth became obsessed with Medgar Evers. He didn't kill Medgar
Evers because of anything he actually knew about Medgar Evers
(08:51):
as a living, breathing human man. He killed him because
he was the living embodiment of integration, and preventing integration
had been Beckweth's sole focus in life for almost a decade.
We left off last week in nineteen fifty five. The
(09:13):
Brown Verse Board of Education decision in nineteen fifty four
found that racially segregated schools were un constitutional. Brown two
a year later ordered states to actually start desegregating, but
they didn't. Across the South, they just flat out did
not do that, and in Mississippi, the Citizens Council formed
(09:36):
as a powerful political network with just one goal, preventing
integration by any means necessary. Byron de la Beckwith was
one of the Council's first and most passionate members. He
joined right away in the summer of nineteen fifty four,
and it became his entire personality practically overnight. It probably
(10:00):
won't surprise you to hear that Byron Della beck With
wasn't a particularly likable guy. I mean, the racist assassination
thing aside, he just wasn't good to hang out with
at this point in his life.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
He's a heavy drinker.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
He beats his wife, and he's always felt like whatever
he's doing just isn't good enough, or someone like him,
for someone with this esteemed Southern pedigree. And in the
early nineteen fifties he starts joining a lot of organizations.
He got involved with the Veterans of Foreign Wars and
(10:37):
the American Legion. He joined a fraternal organization called the
Knights of Pythius. He became a freemason, He joined his
local moose lodge. He was a card carrying member of
the National Rifle Association. He attended meetings of the Greenwood
Historical Society, and most importantly, he joined the Sons of
Confederate Veterans and the Sons of the American Revolution. Any
(10:59):
old and pay to join the NRA, but you have
to come from a certain stock to join those sorts
of heritage organizations. And just as a sidebar here, I
admit I was a little puzzled when I first read
that the Citizens' Council was born out of a speech
that was given at the Greenwood chapter of the Sons
(11:19):
of the American Revolution. I mean, Beckwe was a member
of the Sons of Confederate Veterans too, wouldn't it make
more sense for this kind of racist organizing to be
going on at the more explicitly racist meetings. I mean,
doesn't it make more sense to talk about segregation at.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Your Confederate Heritage meeting?
Speaker 2 (11:40):
But I was thinking about the way those organizations look today. Now,
the Sons of Confederate Veterans is a pretty explicit hate group,
and now there are concerted efforts to document the service
of black soldiers in the Revolutionary War. Ever since a
lawsuit in the eighties, black descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers
(12:03):
are allowed to join the Sons and Daughters of the
American Revolution. But in Mississippi in nineteen fifty four, the
difference in the membership list between your local chapters of
the Confederate and Revolutionary War Heritage organizations is mostly just class.
(12:24):
Confederate pride is cheap in Mississippi. Anybody could claim it.
It's abundant, it's celebrated, absolutely, but you're not special for
having it. But if your family's American roots are deep
enough that you had an ancestor in the Revolution, well
that meant something in a concrete sense. It meant you
(12:47):
were white, not just regular white, but the right kind
of white, because if your family had been here since
seventeen fifty, you were almost certainly descended from British colonists,
So you're an Anglo Saxon, not some newer wave of
European immigrant. Remember this is the nineteen fifties. Not everybody
(13:11):
is in agreement yet on whether Italians are white. If
you could trace your family line back to the colonies,
you also almost certainly weren't Jewish, and you probably weren't Catholic.
A meeting of the Sons of the American Revolution in
nineteen fifty four wasn't about getting together to work on
(13:32):
your genealogical research or learn eighteenth century American history. They
weren't talking about the Revolutionary War. It was a way
to fill a room with the exact right kind of
white people, so you could talk about all the other
things you had in common. The organization's focus on militant
(13:53):
patriotism and idealization of the past made it the perfect
place for anti communists fervor during the Red Scare and
segregationist agitation during the Civil Rights Movement. Looking back at
old issues of the Greenwood Commonwealth beckwith local newspaper, you
can see who the special guest speaker was at each
month's essayr meeting. At one meeting in nineteen fifty five,
(14:17):
Beckw heard a speech from a local attorney named Hardy Lot.
Lot presented a history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which he
heavily implied had been ratified illegally and thus could not
be used to justify Supreme Court decisions. Like Brown, Hardy
Lot was a local leader in the Citizens Council, and
he would later represent Beckwith in his murder trial and
(14:42):
for beckworth sons of the American Revolution, meetings provided him
with something else, access to the kind of people he
felt like he belonged with. He was a college dropout
who barely made it out of high school. He worked
as a traveling salesman, grew up an orphan in a
crumbling plantation house. But his pedigree afforded him this access
(15:07):
to the men who lived the kinds of lives he
thought he'd been entitled to. Businessmen, rich men, men who
still owned large, functioning plantations, influential men, and when the
Citizens Council came to town, the two organizations had very
similar membership lists. According to Willie Quote, he was trying
(15:31):
to be something he was never going to be. He
thought his name was better than anybody else's name in
the whole world, and he joined everything that came along,
anything that would take him. He needed that kind of approval,
and at that time he wanted to get to mingle
with all these important people in Greenwood. He was dedicated.
He was monomaniacal about promoting the citizens Council, and that
(15:55):
made him very useful. He sold citizens Council memberships to
just about anybody who would give him the time of day.
Willi said sometimes people would pay the five dollars just
to get him to stop talking. And he loved to talk.
He could talk your ear off about the evils of integration.
In Massengal's book, Willy says he loved to give speeches
(16:18):
at meetings, so much so that some people started avoiding
the meetings altogether if they had an inkling he was
going to talk, and people were known to sneak out
while he was still talking. But it made him feel important.
He wanted to be heard in those rooms full of
important men. It made him feel like he was one
(16:38):
of them. He didn't seem to notice that people laughed
behind his back. In nineteen fifty six, Mississippi Governor James
Coleman formed a state agency tasked with preserving segregation. The
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission hired scores of investigators to keep
(16:59):
tab on civil rights activists. Byron de la Bequi jumped
at the opportunity to join these segregation secret police. He
sent his application in straightaway, accompanied by a letter directly
to the governor outlining his qualifications for this position. Dear
Governor Coleman, nothing I know of would give me greater
(17:20):
pleasure than to be allowed to serve as an investigator
for the purpose of assisting Chief LS Hicks in uncovering
plots by the NAACP to integrate our beloved state. I
am long and strong for maintaining segregation. A copy of
the letter was reproduced in a newspaper article a few
decades later, so you can see how he's actually typed
(17:42):
this on his typewriter. And integrate is spelled incorrectly, and
long and strong is both all caps and underlined, and
you could do that on typewriter. He closes out the
letter by writing out his resume of sorts includes all
the boarding schools he failed out of as a teenager.
(18:02):
And all the local clubs he's involved in. The letter
ends with quote member of the National Rifle Association, gun
collector and expert with a pistol, good with a rifle,
fair with a shotgun, and rabid on the subject of segregation.
That last bit is in all caps. Apparently all he
(18:26):
got in return was a generic rejection letter, and this
seems to be when he started channeling this pent up
energy into more letter writing. He wrote a lot of
letters in the late fifties, and he got pretty weird
with it. He wrote letters to the editor of his
local paper, letters to the editor of the Citizens Council magazine.
(18:47):
He sent letters to congressman and senators, local and state politicians.
He even tried to get a letter to President Eisenhower.
It's not clear from the source material if maybe he
didn't know you could just mail a letter to the
White House, like I don't know if he couldn't figure
out the address. But his strategy here was to get
this letter into the hands of his congressman at his
(19:10):
congressman's Greenwood office, and then convince Representative Frank Smith to
hand deliver this letter to the president when he got
back to Washington.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I don't know. Maybe that was normal in.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
The fifties, but this meeting was weird enough that Smith
remembered it clearly years later. I knew day Law was
a racial nut. He was an extremist. He wasn't rational
at all, he said. In his autobiography, Smith wrote that
the letter was quote filled with abuse of both the
(19:43):
President and the federal government, and it was uncommonly illiterate.
Smith refused to receive the letter, so Beckwith sent it
to the newspaper instead. I found a copy of the
letter printed in the February third, nineteen fifty six issue
of the Why Nona Times typos and all, and there
(20:05):
were a lot of diapos. The Black Monday speech that
launched the Citizens Council originally had obviously left its mark
on Beckwith. He's convinced that integration is a communist plot
to destroy America, and he returns several times to the
argument that integration will inevitably lead to miscegenation, and the
(20:27):
result of that is what he calls mongrelization of the
white race. He urged the President to take note of
the Citizen's Council, calling it the greatest power in Mississippi.
Quote with one tremendous and crushing blow, we will fall
upon our enemies and forever rid our fair land of
the plague of race mixers that are thriving at our
(20:49):
very midst. He closes the letter by threatening that integration
will inevitably lead to the loss of life itself, while
claiming that the Citizens Council has been a stabilizing force
that has in fact prevented violence in spite of the
dastardly Supreme Court and their rulings that quote keep on
(21:10):
stirring the black minorities to acts of indecency and violence,
as far as I can tell. Eisenhower did not respond
to the letter, and for the next few years Beckwith
wrote more and more and more letters, and he always
clipped them out of the newspaper and saved them in
a special folder. In a nineteen fifty seven letter published
(21:35):
in the Jackson Clarion, Ledger Beckwith says, as a veteran,
he fought in a segregated military for a segregated country
quote and furthermore, when I die, I'll be buried in
a segregated cemetery. When you get to heaven, you'll find
me in the part of heaven that has a sign
saying for whites only, And if I go to Hades,
(21:55):
I'll raise Hell all over Hades till I get into
the white section of Hades. I would say, I wish
she's in the integrated section of Hell, but I wouldn't
wish that on the black people in Hell. And that
letter is signed respectfully submitted by a most sincere segregationist
Byron Della Beckwith, Greenwood, Mississippi. Willie Beckwith filed for divorce
(22:23):
for the first time in nineteen sixty. He'd been abusing
his wife for more than a decade by that point.
He hit her for the first time in nineteen forty six,
shortly after she gave birth to their son.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
By the late.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Nineteen fifties, things had gotten markedly worse.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
He would put cigarettes out on her, He pistol whipped her.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
He used his Marine Corps training to deliver carefully placed
kicks to her kidneys so she wouldn't walk around town
with bruises.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
On her face.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
But he wasn't actually always shy about blackening her eyes.
She sometimes had to stay home for weeks to hide
her injury. He'd put a knife to her throat and
said he was going to kill her. Neighbors heard gunshots
in the house. Apparently at various times they both fired
warning shots at each other during arguments, and in the
(23:14):
summer of nineteen sixty she had to get out he was.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Going to kill her.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
During an argument in June of nineteen sixty, he hogtied
her with an extension cord and just left her like that,
angles and wrists bound connected behind her back, just laying
there on the bed. Their thirteen year old son came
home and found her like that, but he just looked
at her and cried because he was too scared of
(23:42):
his father to try to help her.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
She filed for.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Divorce later that week, but quickly withdrew the petition after
he threatened to kill her if she didn't. She filed
for divorce again a few months later in September, and
this time she stuck to it for a few months.
The divorce was officially granted. They divorced for the first
time in the fall of nineteen sixty, but they married
(24:07):
again four months later in February of nineteen sixty one.
He promised he'd do better, he'd be different, but he wasn't.
During one argument, he tried to rip the wedding ring
off her finger, breaking her ring finger in the process
so badly that it was never straight again. He tried
(24:28):
to drown her. During those few months they'd been divorced,
she sold off most of the contents of their home,
which had been in her name, and she used that
money to buy herself a car, and during the day,
when her husband was at work, she asked her teenage
son to teach her how to drive. In August of
nineteen sixty two, she got a restraining order and she
(24:52):
kicked him out. Truthfully, I can't believe she was able
to get the court order. The police in Greenwood were
(25:14):
his friends. They were fellow members of the citizens Council.
This abuse had been an open secret for years, if
you could even call it a secret, and plenty of
times one or the other of them had gone to
the police to try to make a complaint. And aside
from one mention of a fine levied against Beckwith by
a judge for creating a disturbance because the fight he
(25:38):
had with his wife was in public, the only evidence
I can find are the police ever getting involved. Were
incidents that ended in Willie being arrested on his word
that she'd been violent. In court proceedings for this second divorce,
Beckworth argued that he'd never amused her. He'd only defended
(25:59):
himself because she had a mean and quarrelsome disposition when
she'd been drinking. Admittedly, she did drink a lot. She
didn't get sober till after she got rid of Byron
Milla Beckwith. And I won't say the police believed him
when he said these things. They probably didn't, but they
(26:21):
took care of their friend. They never would come and
get him when I would try to have him arrested
after a bad fight, she said. The only night he
ever spent in jail for abusing Willie was sometime early
in nineteen sixty three when the couple was out of
town in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a long weekend. An
Arkansas cop saw the car swerve when Beckwith leaned over
(26:44):
to burn his wife with a lit cigarette while he
was driving drunk. So it wasn't that the abuse wasn't
plan to see. It's just that his friends looked the
other way. It is interesting to me, although maybe it's
a coincidence that Willie and Byron de La Beckwith were
(27:05):
separated in September of nineteen sixty two, So on the
night he loaded up the bed of his pickup truck
with all of his guns, hoping to drive to Oxford
and participate in an armed insurrection at the University of Mississippi.
His wife had recently left him and he didn't have
a punching bag at home. The couple divorced for the
(27:29):
second time in October of nineteen sixty two. They remarried
three weeks later in October of nineteen sixty two, but
this time she had conditions. He had to see a doctor.
She wanted him to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. Now
(27:49):
Here we only have Willy's word for it, but she
told Read Massingill for his book that doctor Roland Toms
diagnosed her husband as schizophrenic with paranoid tencies. When doctor
Thoms was later called to testify in proceedings to determine
Beckwith's competence to stand trial for murder, he did confirm
(28:10):
under oath that he had evaluated Beckwith in nineteen sixty
two and that after that evaluation he had reached a
diagnostic conclusion. But before he could state for the record
what that conclusion was, he was cut off by an objection,
so we don't know.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
My guess is he.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Probably did diagnose Byron Della beckw as schizophrenic, but that
doesn't mean he was, and it doesn't mean doctor Toms
was out of the realm of normal practice. For the
time period. That word just didn't mean the same thing
then as it does now. In the early nineteen sixties,
(28:53):
a diagnosis of schizophrenia was much more malleable and expansive
than the current diagnostic criteria. It was incredibly broad, encompassing
mood disorders that will be diagnosed very differently today. It
didn't require patients to have any sort of hallucinations, delusions,
or even disordered thinking. Depending on the doctor, it could
(29:15):
be enough if you present it as very depressed and
kind of unpleasant to be around. One of the hallmarks
of a diagnosis of schizophrenia in this time period was hostility, aggression, anger,
and interestingly, that flexible diagnostic criteria leaning heavily on symptoms
(29:38):
such as hostility made a diagnosis of schizophrenia a powerful
political weapon during this time period, but not necessarily for
people like Byron de Leveque. In the nineteen fifties and sixties,
in the United States, a diagnosis of schizophrenia was used
to delegitimize an in institutionalize black civil rights activists.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
MENGR.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Evers and James Meredith weren't the only black men who
tried to go to the University of Mississippi. Four years
after Evers was rejected and four years before Meredith got in,
a black man named Clennin King applied to the University
of Mississippi, and the state argued that for a black
man to want to do something like that, he'd have
(30:25):
to be insane, and they didn't mean that in a
colloquial sense. They arrested him and forcibly confined him to
an institution. In Malcolm X's FBI file, there is a
speculative diagnosis of pre psychotic paranoid schizophrenia based on a
doctor's analysis of his speeches, which he deemed to be hostile.
(30:50):
Calling this schizophrenia was a sign of the times, but
dismissing the desire for freedom and equal rights as a
symptom of insanity was not known. In eighteen fifty one,
a doctor in Mississippi coined the term drepedomania to describe
what he said was a mental illness that made enslaved
(31:11):
people run away because they'd have to be crazy to
want to be free. Obviously, this isn't the same cultural
trend that may have made doctor Tom's see schizophrenia in
his evaluation of Byron dela bequ With. But in both instances,
something as simple as being perceived as too aggressive by
(31:32):
the doctor could earn you the label. As for what
was actually wrong with Byron dela Beque, I couldn't tell you.
I sincerely doubt it was what we would call schizophrenia today.
Maybe he did have a diagnosable psychiatric ailment. Maybe he
was just a guy who sucked. It's hard to say.
(31:56):
But whatever was wrong with him, I don't think it
was anything that made him lead incompetent that puts us
back in the fall of nineteen sixty two. The riot
at ole Miss was on October first, nineteen sixty two,
and the visit to the psychiatrist would have been sometime
between the divorce decree on October ninth and the remarriage
(32:18):
on October thirtieth, And according to Willy, October of nineteen
sixty two is when Byron de la Beckwith started talking
a lot about menuro evers about how he needed to go,
and that's when he started riding around town and stalking
and harassing organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And
(32:42):
this particular habit of his in this time period is
not just willy say so. We have corroboration on this
from activists with SNICK. They remember this, and that brings
me back to the question I had at the top
of the episode in the fall of nineteen sixty two,
how much did Byron de la Beckwith actually know about
(33:05):
Medgar Evers? What information can we definitively say he would
have known. I don't think we can answer that. It's
an impossible.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Question, but I tried.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
I tried something a little unorthodox and very unscientific. It's
a research method I used when I was working on
the Joseph Paul Franklin episodes earlier this year, the Nazi
serial Killer. If you missed those, Instead of learning everything
I could about the relevant time period and trying to
find my subject in that material, I read what I
(33:41):
know he read.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
So for Joseph Paul.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Franklin that meant finding copies of newsletters produced by Nazi
groups I know he was affiliated with. I read the
propaganda I can reasonably assume that he was consuming and
for this journey. I would have loved to have read
every issue of The Citizen, the monthly magazine put out
by the Citizen's Council, but unfortunately a lot of the
(34:07):
issues from the early sixties are missing. From the places
that I could find issues of The Citizen, the online
archive at the University of Mississippi only has one issue
from nineteen sixty two. I don't know, and I know
he read The Citizen because he would sometimes write letters
to the editor that I found reproduced elsewhere. But there's
only so much I can do without my superpower of choice.
(34:30):
You know that icebreaker. What superpower would you pick? Flying, invisibility,
mind control whatever? I would pick the ability to access
any document that has ever existed, classified, destroyed, burned in
a fire, existing in the form of one single tattered
copy in a cardboard box, and an elderly Nazi storage unit,
(34:50):
whatever wherever it is. I would to be able to
see it. But I don't have that power, so no dice.
I only read a few issues of The Citizen, and
none from the time period I'm talking about, But I
know that Byron Della Beckwith read the Greenwood Commonwealth. That
was his local daily paper. And I know that he
(35:14):
read the Greenwood Commonwealth because when the FBI tried to
question him about the murder of Medgar Evers, he told them, well,
I read an article in the Greenwood Commonwealth that a
citizen has a right not to answer any question asked
outside of a court proceeding. And then decades later he
mailed his little collection of clippings about that murder to
his nephew. And I can read every issue of the
(35:39):
Greenwood Commonwealth if I want to.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
I didn't, but I could.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
I read at least the front page of every issue
of the Greenwood Commonwealth from the weeks surrounding the Old
Miss Riot and the weeks before Medgar Ever's murder, and
then for the period in between those two events. I
went through and found every article that mentioned Beckwith or
Medgar Evers, or James Meredith, or the Citizens Council, or
(36:07):
just some black resident of Greenwood getting shot. I read
his newspaper. I consumed the local news that Byron de
la Beckworth would have been reading every day, and it
starts to paint a really unpleasant picture if he was
already rabid on the subject of segregation. If he was
(36:29):
already obsessed with furthering the goals of the Citizens Council,
if preventing integration was his main reason to live, by
the time we get to the end of nineteen sixty two,
he would have been going fucking nuts. In August of
nineteen sixty two, the front page of the Greenwood Commonwealth
(36:51):
ran a story about a group of parents and Jackson
who'd filed a petition with the school board to admit
black students in white public schools. Medgar Evers was the
spokesman for the petition as the State and of LACP secretary,
but he was also one of the signatories. Two of
those students seeking to attend those white schools were his children.
(37:12):
A day later, the paper ran a front page story
with the headline Jackson to fight threat of race mixing again,
quoting Medgrevers, and that same August seventeenth, nineteen sixty two,
front page had a story about three SNICK organizers jumping
out the second story window of their Greenwood voter registration
(37:33):
office to escape an armed mob of white men who'd
broken in. One of the Snick organizers said, right before
the attack, a Greenwood police car that had been parked
outside surveilling them suddenly drove off And after the attack,
they received a threatening phone call and the caller identified
(37:54):
himself as a member of the citizen's Council. And the
attack came just days after one of those NICKS organizers
had been beaten up outside the office, and the police
deny any of this even happened. And the paper goes
on to describe these men as having been involved in
racial disturbances. And this story is running directly next to
(38:16):
an editorial. Again, this is on the front page. There
is a front page editorial identifying these victims by name
calling them outside agitators and accusing them of faking this
attack to cause racial strife in Greenwood. In September of
nineteen sixty two, the Greenwood Commonwealth ran a story accusing
(38:39):
two teenage girls in Ruleville, a small town in nearby
Sunflower County, of making up a story about being injured
after someone fired a shotgun through their living room window
from a passing car. Now, if you cross reference the
names of these girls, these victims with newspapers written by
and for a book Black audience, These girls were visiting
(39:02):
one of the girl's uncle and the uncle's wife had
recently crossed the citizens council by registering to vote. The
girls themselves were not involved, they were just home. The
mayor of Ruleville told the paper that those people, those
people conducting the voter registration schools, they probably shot those
(39:23):
girls themselves to stir up trouble. No one was arrested
for the shooting because the police don't think it was real.
The only person who was arrested in all of this
was Charles Cobb.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
That name might sound familiar to you.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
He wasn't a famous activist, journalist, or professor in nineteen
sixty two. He was nineteen. It will be many years
before experiences like this one inspired him to write his
book This Nonviolent Stuff Will Get You Killed. And in
nineteen sixty two, the mayor of Ruleville said Charles Cobb
was taken into custody the hospital for creating a disturbance.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
He had a pencil and pad out, and he was
asking a lot of silly questions. A few days later,
Beckwith would have opened his morning paper to a gigantic
headline blaring, all miss will not mix. The governor was
vowing to stop James Meredith's enrollment.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Men Grevers is quoted He's.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Unimpressed by the governor's speech, and he says, not only
is Meredith going to enroll at all miss but black
people are going to attend every state school in Mississippi.
Beckwith would have spent weeks reading breathless coverage about the
riot in Oxford. He's beating his wife bloody on a
regular basis, drinking himself to sleep, and he's just stewing
over these stories about increasing efforts to integrate more schools.
(40:51):
He's seeing stories about escalating tensions in Jackson, and the
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee is stepping up their efforts
at voter registration right there in his hometown of Greenwood
in nineteen sixty two. This small town of Greenwood, Mississippi,
is home to the regional office of both SNICK and
(41:11):
the Citizen's Council. These aren't just individual chapters of these organizations.
These are regional hubs of these organizations that are at war.
In February of nineteen sixty three, four black businesses burned
down in Greenwood. The local snickfield secretary called for an investigation,
(41:33):
saying it was obviously arson. He was arrested, charged under
a relatively new statute that made it a crime to
make false statements.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
That could lead to a breach of the peace.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
It'd already served time in local jail for the same
charge for publicly stating that the county was withholding federal
food aid to punish black residents for participating in voter
registration efforts. That might sound far fetched, but it was true.
Laflor County had cut off local distribution of food from
(42:08):
the federal Surplus Commodities program in an effort to starve
out the will to organize for civil rights. They were
denying federal food aid to impoverished black families in Lafloor
County to punish them. The idea was the brainchild of
the local citizens Council, and in the history books it's
(42:30):
called the Greenwood Food Blockade. Organizations like SNICK organized a
national food drive to keep these families fed. In February
of nineteen sixty three, comedian and activist Dick Gregory personally
paid for a charter plane out of Chicago that brought
fourteen thousand pounds of food to starving black children in
(42:52):
La Floor County, Mississippi. Snick activists testified before Congress that
spring about the local government's interference in federal program, and
the DOJ intervened. It was real, and I'm willing to
bet the arson they accused him of lying about was too.
At the end of February nineteen sixty three, a car
(43:14):
carrying Snick leader Bob Moses and field organizers Randolph Blackwell
and Jimmy Travis was shot up.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
By a passing car.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Bob Moses had to grab the wheel to keep the
car from crashing after the driver, Jimmy Travis, was shot
in the neck.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
He barely survived.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Bob Moses said they'd seen the car circling the Snick
office before the shooting and there were three white men inside.
In March, Medgar Evers ramped up his pressure on the
Jackson School board. They'd ignored that petition he'd filed over
the summer, so now it's a federal lawsuit. He was
one of several parents suing on behalf of their black
(43:53):
children to get the government to enforce their right to
attend white's only schools in Jackson. Day after Greenwood residents
read that story in their local paper, someone shot up
another car full of Snick organizers right outside their office.
Sam Block, who was freshly out of jail for asking
questions about Arson, was injured. Two weeks later, the SNICK
(44:15):
office was set on fire, and Block said all of
his records related to the voter registration drive were taken.
There was no evidence that those records had been burned
in the fire. Someone had them. Someone had a list
of every black person involved in this effort, every black
person who was even thinking about registering to vote or
(44:39):
participating in a demonstration. The police in the fire department
called him a liar, but at least they didn't arrest.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
Him for it.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
This time, Black activists in Greenwood staged to march after
the fire, and they were attacked.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
By police dogs.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
They begged Jfkate intervene, sent troops investigate, do something. There
was a half hearted conjunction, but nothing changed. Byron Della
Beckwith is opening up his paper every morning and reading
stories about these goddamn black voter registration drives. They just
will not give up. People keep shooting them and setting
(45:18):
their stuff on fire and starving them and beating them,
and it's not moving the needle. The violence isn't deterring
them more. Keep coming. They just keep trying. But the
violence is also extremely normalized. The violence is not positioned
as aberrant or even as violence. It's coming from all angles.
(45:43):
Anonymous vigilanti violence, state inaction, state oppression, overt state violence.
It's all on the table, it's all allowed, and nobody's
saying it's wrong. Not in the paper he's reading anyway.
At home, he's out of control. One night he got
blind drunk and tried to shoot his wife, but he missed,
(46:06):
thank god. She'd asked her son to teach her how
to drive. In May of nineteen sixty three, she left.
She stayed in a hotel for a bit, and she
got her own apartment. So in May of nineteen sixty three,
beck With is back in his childhood home. His uncle Will,
the old eccentric who raised him after his parents died,
(46:27):
passed away in nineteen sixty one, and at this point
he's back in the crumbling mansion, trying to sell off
anything valuable.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
It's May of nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
He's surrounded by piles of dusty Confederate memorabilia in the
house where he'd watched his mother waste away, and his
wife is gone, and every day he opens the newspaper
and watches his world fall apart. On May eleventh, Byron
de la Beckwith bought a fancy rifle scope. On May twentieth,
(47:00):
gave a speech on a Jackson area TV network. They
hadn't wanted to let him do it, but the mayor
had addressed the NAACP directly in a televised statement, and
SEC rules at the time said Evers was allowed to
respond in kind, and that night calls poured into the station.
(47:20):
A black man had never been allowed to talk to
them on that TV channel before. What is going on?
Transcripts of these calls are riddled with obscenities and racial slurs,
and quite a few outright calls Forever's murder. It's not
just Byron Diddle Beckwith talking like this. People were calling
in and telling the receptionists at the TV station that
(47:42):
they were going to shoot this man. A week later,
three student activists staged a sit in at the lunch
counter at the Woolworth's department store in Jackson. They sat
there calmly for hours while a white mob pelted them
with trash, burned them with lits, cigarettes, broke open the
sugar containers, and cut them with the glass poured condiments
(48:04):
on them.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
They were left bloodied.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
FBI agents watched from across the room and didn't intervene.
Medgar Evers had mentored these students and encouraged them and
supported them in the aftermath. The night of that sit
in at the Woolworths, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at
Medgrever's house. His wife, Merley, put it out with the hose.
(48:30):
He had two weeks left to live. Student organizers responded
to the backlash against the sit in with a march.
(48:52):
The mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, responded by arresting hundreds of children.
The demonstrations in Jackson grew so large, but police couldn't
contain the detainees. They just transported them to the fair
grounds and corralled them like cattle. And in response to
these demonstrations, the mayor of Jackson boasted that he'd find
(49:13):
a way to detain ten thousand black people if he
had to. But these outside agitators cannot be allowed to
instigate these incidents that are clearly designed to provoke federal intervention.
Right the federal intervention isn't because of what we the
government are doing it's because these black outside agitators, these
(49:35):
communist agitators, these people from up north, these people came
here and they riled up our black population to make
them do things they wouldn't do otherwise. Medgar Evers pleaded
publicly with Attorney General Robert F.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Kennedy t intervene.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
On June fifth, nineteen sixty three, a week before Medgar
Evers was assassinated in de La Beckwith would have opened
his issue of The Greenwood Commonwealth to see a pretty
jarring combination of headlines. The top of the page there
was a photo of a dozen white preschool aged girls
captioned Little Cuties. They were contestants in the upcoming Little
(50:18):
Miss Laflor beauty pageant. But next to the Little Cuties
the headline screamed Ross won't try to bar race mixing,
can't fight army, says Barnett of second negro at Ole.
Miss Cleve McDowell had recently won his legal battle to
be admitted to the University of Mississippi law school, something
(50:39):
Medgar Evers had tried to do nine years earlier, and
after the court's ruling in McDowell's case, Governor Ross Barnett
reluctantly conceded that if the federal government wanted to send
Cleve McDowell to Ole, miss Well, he couldn't very well
stop the army. No one wanted a repeat of the
riots surrounding James Meredith's registration. But Barnett remained committed to
(51:04):
segregation by all available means, and he said on the
record that he still believed these court orders were unlawful.
So he's not going to fight the army, but he's
not happy about it. Underneath that story, on this same
front page, there's a wire story about a federal judge
(51:27):
warning Alabama Governor George Wallace that he better not interfere
with court ordered integration at the University of Alabama. And
on that same page, that same June fifth, nineteen sixty
three front page of the Greenwood Commonwealth, headlines warned that
JFK is pushing for more civil rights enforcement. Underneath that,
(51:49):
the headline about a state conference of Methodist ministers warns
the world is changing. The world was changing, and for
Byron de la Beckwith, it was crumbling. On June seventh,
he would have seen on the front page a story
about some of the armed rioters arrested after the Old
(52:11):
miss riot.
Speaker 1 (52:14):
They'd been acquitted.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
They lost the battle, but they were going to be okay.
Members of this armed white mob that had tried to
murder federal officers were acquitted by a jury. On June eighth,
a store belonging to an NAACP activist and Jackson was
shot up. Underneath that, there was a brief story about
(52:40):
a Greenwood police officer claiming that the dead body of
a black man on the hood of his police car
was the result of a very bizarre accident. This man,
who is never named, just came out of nowhere, just
running full speed at his parked car. He just did that,
and he ran so fast, he ran into the car
(53:02):
so hard that he put a big dent in the
car and broke the windshield, and he died. This explanation
is presented as reasonable, and the man is not named,
and the officer was cleared. There were a lot of
poorly explained single car accidents involving dead black men in
(53:25):
Littleore County that year. I don't know if Byron de
la Beque read his daily paper on June eleventh, nineteen
sixty three. There are actually a lot of unanswered questions
about where exactly he was and when on June eleventh,
nineteen sixty three. But if he did, he would have
(53:49):
seen another blow to segregation. Federalized troops were in Tuscaloosa,
and Governor George Wallace backed down. This hero of segregation,
the man who'd proudly proclaimed segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
He'd let the government desegregate the University of Alabama.
Speaker 1 (54:12):
He just gave up.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
Everything's falling apart. His wife left him, she took his
son to He's drinking alone in this big old house.
And there's no guarantee anymore that there would be segregation tomorrow.
And it's all Medgarrever's fault. Med Grevers did not wake
(54:36):
up on June twelfth, nineteen sixty three, because he died
shortly after midnight. I don't know with ironclad certainty that
Byron dilabeck with read every issue of the Greenwood Commonwealth
in the weeks leading up to the murder. But I
know he did read the paper on June twelfth, nineteen
(54:56):
sixty three, hours after killing Medgar Evers. I know he
did because he carefully clipped out a front page editorial
blaming black activist groups for inciting Ever's murder. Murder is wrong, sure,
terrible even, But didn't he have it coming? On June twelfth,
(55:19):
nineteen sixty three. Byron de la Beckwith got out his
scissors and he cut that editorial out of the front
page of the Greenwood Commonwealth, and he held onto it
for years in a special folder. There are no lone wolves,
you know that. I say it all the time because
(55:41):
the term doesn't really mean anything. The term was invented
to provide cover for a variety of forms of networked violence.
There are all manner of theories about who knew what
and when, who might have plotted or schemed, or directed
(56:01):
or instructed or implied or been present, But I'm not
sure how much it matters. NAACP Regional director Ruby Hurley
swears she saw Byron Della Beckwith whispering with the Jackson
Police officer up in the balcony at that last NAACP
meeting Medgar Evers spoke at before his death, And maybe
(56:22):
she did, Maybe she did. Maybe It's true that the
Jackson Police officer assigned to tail Medgar Evers everywhere all
the time, just had somewhere else to be that evening
for a perfectly innocent reason, and he wasn't there when
MegaR Evers.
Speaker 1 (56:38):
Was shot in his driveway.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
Maybe Medgar Evers called to the FBI a few days
before his murder to share his concern that the Jackson
police were trying to kill him. Isn't related to this
at all. I do have some follow up questions for
the Jackson police detective who buried a tip with Becky
name on it early in the investigation, but who knows.
Speaker 1 (57:05):
I don't.
Speaker 2 (57:07):
I can try to form a coherent theory, but that
would take weeks, and I don't know how much it
matters the degree to which there was or wasn't a specific,
organized spoken conspiracy to direct to Byron Della Beckweth to
shoot Medgar Wiley Evers in June of nineteen sixty three. Well,
(57:29):
that was one of the most important questions on my
mind a few weeks ago, But now now maybe it isn't.
Maybe it was his idea alone, maybe someone else helped
him do it. But either way, what he did wasn't aberrant.
(57:52):
It wasn't unusual, not in the world he wanted to
live in, not in the society he was try trying
to help shape. It wasn't actually that out of bounds
for him to take the initiative here and carry out
what he very reasonably could have assumed was a desirable
(58:13):
action within his social circle. People were taking shots at
black civil rights activists all the time, and there was
rarely even an investigation, and even if there was, there
was never a punishment. You could shoot a federal marshal
and a Mississippi jury would acquit you. You could shoot
(58:34):
a man in a face and say it was a
car accident.
Speaker 1 (58:37):
You could shoot a.
Speaker 2 (58:38):
Man on the steps of the courthouse in front of
the sheriff and everyone would shrug. You could burn a
building down and arrest a man for asking why. You
could systematically starve thousands of families to punish them for
not wanting to be shot, beaten, or set on fire
Byron de la Beckwith woke up every day and read
(59:00):
in the newspaper about other people doing it. So whether
there was a meeting about it ahead of time or not,
the message had been clear since nineteen fifty four. The
Citizens Council was going to stop integration by any means necessary.
There was a loaded gun pointed at every black person
(59:21):
in Mississippi. All he did was pull the trigger. Weird
(59:41):
Little Guys Say production of Cool'shoe 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 Ory 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,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
(01:00:02):
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything
that's going to make you one of my Weird Little
Guys
Cool Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The Army transport trucks started arriving on campus around four
in the afternoon that Sunday, at the end of September
in nineteen sixty two. Men poured out of the trucks,
Federal marshals, border patrol officers, and a contingent of federal
prison guards on special assignment, more than five hundred in total,
(00:29):
all with specialized riot training and strict orders directly from
the President, do not, under any circumstances fire your weapon.
They held out as long as they could that night.
The crowd was small at first, White students watched the
(00:54):
federal officers set up their command post at the Lyceum,
an academic building that had won served as a hospital
for wounded Confederate soldiers. A little after five PM, an
announcement was made over the loud speakers of the student
union reminding students to steer clear of the Lyceum that night.
That only made them more curious. The crowd swelled, Dozens
(01:20):
of onlookers became hundreds, and as the sun began to set.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Thousands.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
The situation was tense even before the first rock was thrown.
Earlier that week, in speeches broadcast on the radio and television,
anti communist activist Edwin Walker exhorted white Mississippians to protest
the court's order to allow a black student to enroll
the University of Mississippi. Walker called on white Mississippians to
(01:52):
descend upon the campus to rally to the cause of
freedom against this anti christ conspiracy of the Supreme Court.
On Friday, two days before the riot, Mississippi Governor Ross
Barnett was held in contempt by a federal judge for
refusing the court's order to admit James Meredith, the black
(02:14):
student in question, at the University of Mississippi. On Saturday,
when the Old miss Rebels played a football game at
the stadium in Jackson, the governor started the fifty yard
line at halftime to boldly signal his intent to defy
federal integration orders.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah. I love, I love her people. I'm a person
(02:53):
I love and I respect our heritage.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And now on Sunday, President John F. Kennedy had federalized
the National Guard, but privately, behind the scenes, there were
anxious phone calls about the possibility that the Mississippi National
Guard would refuse federal orders. The President conferred with the
Solicitor General about what it would look like for US
(03:27):
marshals to arrest the governor of Mississippi. And outside the lyceum,
the crowd was getting restless. Eighty miles away in Greenwood, Mississippi,
Byron de La Beckwith was loading guns into the back
of his pickup truck. He was eager to get on
the road so he wouldn't miss the showdown. I'm Molly Conger,
(03:55):
and this is weird, little guys Byron Della Beckwith never
(04:16):
made it to Oxford, Mississippi, on September thirtieth, nineteen sixty two,
and that's probably for the best. Some local cops down
in Greenwood knew Beckwith was probably thinking about heading up
to Oxford, and they intercepted him before he hit the highway,
encouraging him to maybe sit this one out. By the
(04:37):
time the United States Army arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, to
put down the riot, two people were dead and dozens
of people had been shot, but not by the federal officers.
They were disproportionately the ones who'd been shot by the
white mob attempting to storm the lyceum, hoping to kill
(04:57):
James Meredith. More than two dozen federal officers suffered from
gunshot wounds.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
That night, Paul Gaillard.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
A French journalist, was killed. Associated Press reporter Bill Krider
kept filing updates with his editor for hours after being
shot in the back. A sniper took shots at Newsweek
reporter Carl Fleming, a cameraman from Dallas, was beaten by
a mob. An off duty sailor hijacked a fire truck
and tried to run over a line of U S Marshals.
(05:30):
Someone stole a bulldozer and tried to ram it through
the front of the building. The entire campus stank of
tear gas. Truly, it's a miracle only two people were killed.
If the Lieutenant Governor had not intervened to stop Mississippi
State troopers from carrying out a plan to retake the
(05:50):
campus from the Marshals by force, the death toll may
have been in the hundreds. When the smoke cleared on
Monday morning, October first, nineteen sixty two, US Marshalls escorted
James Meredith to the registrar's office and he registered for
five classes. When he took his seat in a history
(06:14):
lecture at nine fourteen am that morning, it became the
first legally integrated classroom at a public educational facility in
the state of Mississippi, and two people were dead. Eight
months before Byron Della Beckwith shot and killed Medgar Evers.
He sat at home fuming because he hadn't been part
(06:35):
of that violent white mob tearing or miss apart rather
than see it desegregate. When he opened up his local
paper that Monday, he saw stories of federal troops occupying
a southern city. That's the kind of indignity he'd heard
stories about from his grandparents. It was reconstruction all over again,
rubbing salt in the wounds that white Southerners like Beckwith
(06:58):
seemed to keep open on per Medgar Evers was responsible
for this in some ways, that's actually true. When James
Meredith went to the NAACP office in Jackson, Mississippi to
ask for help applying to the University of Mississippi, it
was Medgar Evers he spoke to. You might recall from
(07:20):
earlier in this series that Evers himself had applied to
Old miss in nineteen fifty four. He too had had
some assistance from the NAACP, but his rejection letter came
in the months after the Brown v Board of Education decision,
and the legal strategy had changed, so his rejection was
never litigated. Medgar Evers was personally involved in James Meredith's case.
(07:45):
When Meredith first spoke to Thurgood Marshall on the phone.
It was at Medgar's house when Meredith got frustrated with
Thurgood Marshal's approach to the conversation and tried to walk out.
It was Medgar Evers who mediated the disagreement and brought
them both.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Back to the table.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Without Medgar Evers, James Meredith would never have made it
to Ole Miss. It's hard to say how much of
that Byron Delah Beckwith could reasonably have known at the time,
but whether his feeling was based in fact or not.
By the end of nineteen sixty two, he was convinced
that Medgar Evers was to blame. His first wife, Mary
(08:27):
Louise Williams, who went by Willie, told Beckwith's biographer, her
nephew Read Massingille, that this was the turning point. It
was in October of nineteen sixty two that Byron Dela
Beckwyth became obsessed with Medgar Evers. He didn't kill Medgar
Evers because of anything he actually knew about Medgar Evers
(08:51):
as a living, breathing human man. He killed him because
he was the living embodiment of integration, and preventing integration
had been Beckweth's sole focus in life for almost a decade.
We left off last week in nineteen fifty five. The
(09:13):
Brown Verse Board of Education decision in nineteen fifty four
found that racially segregated schools were un constitutional. Brown two
a year later ordered states to actually start desegregating, but
they didn't. Across the South, they just flat out did
not do that, and in Mississippi, the Citizens Council formed
(09:36):
as a powerful political network with just one goal, preventing
integration by any means necessary. Byron de la Beckwith was
one of the Council's first and most passionate members. He
joined right away in the summer of nineteen fifty four,
and it became his entire personality practically overnight. It probably
(10:00):
won't surprise you to hear that Byron Della beck With
wasn't a particularly likable guy. I mean, the racist assassination
thing aside, he just wasn't good to hang out with
at this point in his life.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
He's a heavy drinker.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
He beats his wife, and he's always felt like whatever
he's doing just isn't good enough, or someone like him,
for someone with this esteemed Southern pedigree. And in the
early nineteen fifties he starts joining a lot of organizations.
He got involved with the Veterans of Foreign Wars and
(10:37):
the American Legion. He joined a fraternal organization called the
Knights of Pythius. He became a freemason, He joined his
local moose lodge. He was a card carrying member of
the National Rifle Association. He attended meetings of the Greenwood
Historical Society, and most importantly, he joined the Sons of
Confederate Veterans and the Sons of the American Revolution. Any
(10:59):
old and pay to join the NRA, but you have
to come from a certain stock to join those sorts
of heritage organizations. And just as a sidebar here, I
admit I was a little puzzled when I first read
that the Citizens' Council was born out of a speech
that was given at the Greenwood chapter of the Sons
(11:19):
of the American Revolution. I mean, Beckwe was a member
of the Sons of Confederate Veterans too, wouldn't it make
more sense for this kind of racist organizing to be
going on at the more explicitly racist meetings. I mean,
doesn't it make more sense to talk about segregation at.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Your Confederate Heritage meeting?
Speaker 2 (11:40):
But I was thinking about the way those organizations look today. Now,
the Sons of Confederate Veterans is a pretty explicit hate group,
and now there are concerted efforts to document the service
of black soldiers in the Revolutionary War. Ever since a
lawsuit in the eighties, black descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers
(12:03):
are allowed to join the Sons and Daughters of the
American Revolution. But in Mississippi in nineteen fifty four, the
difference in the membership list between your local chapters of
the Confederate and Revolutionary War Heritage organizations is mostly just class.
(12:24):
Confederate pride is cheap in Mississippi. Anybody could claim it.
It's abundant, it's celebrated, absolutely, but you're not special for
having it. But if your family's American roots are deep
enough that you had an ancestor in the Revolution, well
that meant something in a concrete sense. It meant you
(12:47):
were white, not just regular white, but the right kind
of white, because if your family had been here since
seventeen fifty, you were almost certainly descended from British colonists,
So you're an Anglo Saxon, not some newer wave of
European immigrant. Remember this is the nineteen fifties. Not everybody
(13:11):
is in agreement yet on whether Italians are white. If
you could trace your family line back to the colonies,
you also almost certainly weren't Jewish, and you probably weren't Catholic.
A meeting of the Sons of the American Revolution in
nineteen fifty four wasn't about getting together to work on
(13:32):
your genealogical research or learn eighteenth century American history. They
weren't talking about the Revolutionary War. It was a way
to fill a room with the exact right kind of
white people, so you could talk about all the other
things you had in common. The organization's focus on militant
(13:53):
patriotism and idealization of the past made it the perfect
place for anti communists fervor during the Red Scare and
segregationist agitation during the Civil Rights Movement. Looking back at
old issues of the Greenwood Commonwealth beckwith local newspaper, you
can see who the special guest speaker was at each
month's essayr meeting. At one meeting in nineteen fifty five,
(14:17):
Beckw heard a speech from a local attorney named Hardy Lot.
Lot presented a history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which he
heavily implied had been ratified illegally and thus could not
be used to justify Supreme Court decisions. Like Brown, Hardy
Lot was a local leader in the Citizens Council, and
he would later represent Beckwith in his murder trial and
(14:42):
for beckworth sons of the American Revolution, meetings provided him
with something else, access to the kind of people he
felt like he belonged with. He was a college dropout
who barely made it out of high school. He worked
as a traveling salesman, grew up an orphan in a
crumbling plantation house. But his pedigree afforded him this access
(15:07):
to the men who lived the kinds of lives he
thought he'd been entitled to. Businessmen, rich men, men who
still owned large, functioning plantations, influential men, and when the
Citizens Council came to town, the two organizations had very
similar membership lists. According to Willie Quote, he was trying
(15:31):
to be something he was never going to be. He
thought his name was better than anybody else's name in
the whole world, and he joined everything that came along,
anything that would take him. He needed that kind of approval,
and at that time he wanted to get to mingle
with all these important people in Greenwood. He was dedicated.
He was monomaniacal about promoting the citizens Council, and that
(15:55):
made him very useful. He sold citizens Council memberships to
just about anybody who would give him the time of day.
Willi said sometimes people would pay the five dollars just
to get him to stop talking. And he loved to talk.
He could talk your ear off about the evils of integration.
In Massengal's book, Willy says he loved to give speeches
(16:18):
at meetings, so much so that some people started avoiding
the meetings altogether if they had an inkling he was
going to talk, and people were known to sneak out
while he was still talking. But it made him feel important.
He wanted to be heard in those rooms full of
important men. It made him feel like he was one
(16:38):
of them. He didn't seem to notice that people laughed
behind his back. In nineteen fifty six, Mississippi Governor James
Coleman formed a state agency tasked with preserving segregation. The
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission hired scores of investigators to keep
(16:59):
tab on civil rights activists. Byron de la Bequi jumped
at the opportunity to join these segregation secret police. He
sent his application in straightaway, accompanied by a letter directly
to the governor outlining his qualifications for this position. Dear
Governor Coleman, nothing I know of would give me greater
(17:20):
pleasure than to be allowed to serve as an investigator
for the purpose of assisting Chief LS Hicks in uncovering
plots by the NAACP to integrate our beloved state. I
am long and strong for maintaining segregation. A copy of
the letter was reproduced in a newspaper article a few
decades later, so you can see how he's actually typed
(17:42):
this on his typewriter. And integrate is spelled incorrectly, and
long and strong is both all caps and underlined, and
you could do that on typewriter. He closes out the
letter by writing out his resume of sorts includes all
the boarding schools he failed out of as a teenager.
(18:02):
And all the local clubs he's involved in. The letter
ends with quote member of the National Rifle Association, gun
collector and expert with a pistol, good with a rifle,
fair with a shotgun, and rabid on the subject of segregation.
That last bit is in all caps. Apparently all he
(18:26):
got in return was a generic rejection letter, and this
seems to be when he started channeling this pent up
energy into more letter writing. He wrote a lot of
letters in the late fifties, and he got pretty weird
with it. He wrote letters to the editor of his
local paper, letters to the editor of the Citizens Council magazine.
(18:47):
He sent letters to congressman and senators, local and state politicians.
He even tried to get a letter to President Eisenhower.
It's not clear from the source material if maybe he
didn't know you could just mail a letter to the
White House, like I don't know if he couldn't figure
out the address. But his strategy here was to get
this letter into the hands of his congressman at his
(19:10):
congressman's Greenwood office, and then convince Representative Frank Smith to
hand deliver this letter to the president when he got
back to Washington.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I don't know. Maybe that was normal in.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
The fifties, but this meeting was weird enough that Smith
remembered it clearly years later. I knew day Law was
a racial nut. He was an extremist. He wasn't rational
at all, he said. In his autobiography, Smith wrote that
the letter was quote filled with abuse of both the
(19:43):
President and the federal government, and it was uncommonly illiterate.
Smith refused to receive the letter, so Beckwith sent it
to the newspaper instead. I found a copy of the
letter printed in the February third, nineteen fifty six issue
of the Why Nona Times typos and all, and there
(20:05):
were a lot of diapos. The Black Monday speech that
launched the Citizens Council originally had obviously left its mark
on Beckwith. He's convinced that integration is a communist plot
to destroy America, and he returns several times to the
argument that integration will inevitably lead to miscegenation, and the
(20:27):
result of that is what he calls mongrelization of the
white race. He urged the President to take note of
the Citizen's Council, calling it the greatest power in Mississippi.
Quote with one tremendous and crushing blow, we will fall
upon our enemies and forever rid our fair land of
the plague of race mixers that are thriving at our
(20:49):
very midst. He closes the letter by threatening that integration
will inevitably lead to the loss of life itself, while
claiming that the Citizens Council has been a stabilizing force
that has in fact prevented violence in spite of the
dastardly Supreme Court and their rulings that quote keep on
(21:10):
stirring the black minorities to acts of indecency and violence,
as far as I can tell. Eisenhower did not respond
to the letter, and for the next few years Beckwith
wrote more and more and more letters, and he always
clipped them out of the newspaper and saved them in
a special folder. In a nineteen fifty seven letter published
(21:35):
in the Jackson Clarion, Ledger Beckwith says, as a veteran,
he fought in a segregated military for a segregated country
quote and furthermore, when I die, I'll be buried in
a segregated cemetery. When you get to heaven, you'll find
me in the part of heaven that has a sign
saying for whites only, And if I go to Hades,
(21:55):
I'll raise Hell all over Hades till I get into
the white section of Hades. I would say, I wish
she's in the integrated section of Hell, but I wouldn't
wish that on the black people in Hell. And that
letter is signed respectfully submitted by a most sincere segregationist
Byron Della Beckwith, Greenwood, Mississippi. Willie Beckwith filed for divorce
(22:23):
for the first time in nineteen sixty. He'd been abusing
his wife for more than a decade by that point.
He hit her for the first time in nineteen forty six,
shortly after she gave birth to their son.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
By the late.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Nineteen fifties, things had gotten markedly worse.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
He would put cigarettes out on her, He pistol whipped her.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
He used his Marine Corps training to deliver carefully placed
kicks to her kidneys so she wouldn't walk around town
with bruises.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
On her face.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
But he wasn't actually always shy about blackening her eyes.
She sometimes had to stay home for weeks to hide
her injury. He'd put a knife to her throat and
said he was going to kill her. Neighbors heard gunshots
in the house. Apparently at various times they both fired
warning shots at each other during arguments, and in the
(23:14):
summer of nineteen sixty she had to get out he was.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Going to kill her.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
During an argument in June of nineteen sixty, he hogtied
her with an extension cord and just left her like that,
angles and wrists bound connected behind her back, just laying
there on the bed. Their thirteen year old son came
home and found her like that, but he just looked
at her and cried because he was too scared of
(23:42):
his father to try to help her.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
She filed for.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Divorce later that week, but quickly withdrew the petition after
he threatened to kill her if she didn't. She filed
for divorce again a few months later in September, and
this time she stuck to it for a few months.
The divorce was officially granted. They divorced for the first
time in the fall of nineteen sixty, but they married
(24:07):
again four months later in February of nineteen sixty one.
He promised he'd do better, he'd be different, but he wasn't.
During one argument, he tried to rip the wedding ring
off her finger, breaking her ring finger in the process
so badly that it was never straight again. He tried
(24:28):
to drown her. During those few months they'd been divorced,
she sold off most of the contents of their home,
which had been in her name, and she used that
money to buy herself a car, and during the day,
when her husband was at work, she asked her teenage
son to teach her how to drive. In August of
nineteen sixty two, she got a restraining order and she
(24:52):
kicked him out. Truthfully, I can't believe she was able
to get the court order. The police in Greenwood were
(25:14):
his friends. They were fellow members of the citizens Council.
This abuse had been an open secret for years, if
you could even call it a secret, and plenty of
times one or the other of them had gone to
the police to try to make a complaint. And aside
from one mention of a fine levied against Beckwith by
a judge for creating a disturbance because the fight he
(25:38):
had with his wife was in public, the only evidence
I can find are the police ever getting involved. Were
incidents that ended in Willie being arrested on his word
that she'd been violent. In court proceedings for this second divorce,
Beckworth argued that he'd never amused her. He'd only defended
(25:59):
himself because she had a mean and quarrelsome disposition when
she'd been drinking. Admittedly, she did drink a lot. She
didn't get sober till after she got rid of Byron
Milla Beckwith. And I won't say the police believed him
when he said these things. They probably didn't, but they
(26:21):
took care of their friend. They never would come and
get him when I would try to have him arrested
after a bad fight, she said. The only night he
ever spent in jail for abusing Willie was sometime early
in nineteen sixty three when the couple was out of
town in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a long weekend. An
Arkansas cop saw the car swerve when Beckwith leaned over
(26:44):
to burn his wife with a lit cigarette while he
was driving drunk. So it wasn't that the abuse wasn't
plan to see. It's just that his friends looked the
other way. It is interesting to me, although maybe it's
a coincidence that Willie and Byron de La Beckwith were
(27:05):
separated in September of nineteen sixty two, So on the
night he loaded up the bed of his pickup truck
with all of his guns, hoping to drive to Oxford
and participate in an armed insurrection at the University of Mississippi.
His wife had recently left him and he didn't have
a punching bag at home. The couple divorced for the
(27:29):
second time in October of nineteen sixty two. They remarried
three weeks later in October of nineteen sixty two, but
this time she had conditions. He had to see a doctor.
She wanted him to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. Now
(27:49):
Here we only have Willy's word for it, but she
told Read Massingill for his book that doctor Roland Toms
diagnosed her husband as schizophrenic with paranoid tencies. When doctor
Thoms was later called to testify in proceedings to determine
Beckwith's competence to stand trial for murder, he did confirm
(28:10):
under oath that he had evaluated Beckwith in nineteen sixty
two and that after that evaluation he had reached a
diagnostic conclusion. But before he could state for the record
what that conclusion was, he was cut off by an objection,
so we don't know.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
My guess is he.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Probably did diagnose Byron Della beckw as schizophrenic, but that
doesn't mean he was, and it doesn't mean doctor Toms
was out of the realm of normal practice. For the
time period. That word just didn't mean the same thing
then as it does now. In the early nineteen sixties,
(28:53):
a diagnosis of schizophrenia was much more malleable and expansive
than the current diagnostic criteria. It was incredibly broad, encompassing
mood disorders that will be diagnosed very differently today. It
didn't require patients to have any sort of hallucinations, delusions,
or even disordered thinking. Depending on the doctor, it could
(29:15):
be enough if you present it as very depressed and
kind of unpleasant to be around. One of the hallmarks
of a diagnosis of schizophrenia in this time period was hostility, aggression, anger,
and interestingly, that flexible diagnostic criteria leaning heavily on symptoms
(29:38):
such as hostility made a diagnosis of schizophrenia a powerful
political weapon during this time period, but not necessarily for
people like Byron de Leveque. In the nineteen fifties and sixties,
in the United States, a diagnosis of schizophrenia was used
to delegitimize an in institutionalize black civil rights activists.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
MENGR.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Evers and James Meredith weren't the only black men who
tried to go to the University of Mississippi. Four years
after Evers was rejected and four years before Meredith got in,
a black man named Clennin King applied to the University
of Mississippi, and the state argued that for a black
man to want to do something like that, he'd have
(30:25):
to be insane, and they didn't mean that in a
colloquial sense. They arrested him and forcibly confined him to
an institution. In Malcolm X's FBI file, there is a
speculative diagnosis of pre psychotic paranoid schizophrenia based on a
doctor's analysis of his speeches, which he deemed to be hostile.
(30:50):
Calling this schizophrenia was a sign of the times, but
dismissing the desire for freedom and equal rights as a
symptom of insanity was not known. In eighteen fifty one,
a doctor in Mississippi coined the term drepedomania to describe
what he said was a mental illness that made enslaved
(31:11):
people run away because they'd have to be crazy to
want to be free. Obviously, this isn't the same cultural
trend that may have made doctor Tom's see schizophrenia in
his evaluation of Byron dela bequ With. But in both instances,
something as simple as being perceived as too aggressive by
(31:32):
the doctor could earn you the label. As for what
was actually wrong with Byron dela Beque, I couldn't tell you.
I sincerely doubt it was what we would call schizophrenia today.
Maybe he did have a diagnosable psychiatric ailment. Maybe he
was just a guy who sucked. It's hard to say.
(31:56):
But whatever was wrong with him, I don't think it
was anything that made him lead incompetent that puts us
back in the fall of nineteen sixty two. The riot
at ole Miss was on October first, nineteen sixty two,
and the visit to the psychiatrist would have been sometime
between the divorce decree on October ninth and the remarriage
(32:18):
on October thirtieth, And according to Willy, October of nineteen
sixty two is when Byron de la Beckwith started talking
a lot about menuro evers about how he needed to go,
and that's when he started riding around town and stalking
and harassing organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And
(32:42):
this particular habit of his in this time period is
not just willy say so. We have corroboration on this
from activists with SNICK. They remember this, and that brings
me back to the question I had at the top
of the episode in the fall of nineteen sixty two,
how much did Byron de la Beckwith actually know about
(33:05):
Medgar Evers? What information can we definitively say he would
have known. I don't think we can answer that. It's
an impossible.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Question, but I tried.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
I tried something a little unorthodox and very unscientific. It's
a research method I used when I was working on
the Joseph Paul Franklin episodes earlier this year, the Nazi
serial Killer. If you missed those, Instead of learning everything
I could about the relevant time period and trying to
find my subject in that material, I read what I
(33:41):
know he read.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
So for Joseph Paul.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Franklin that meant finding copies of newsletters produced by Nazi
groups I know he was affiliated with. I read the
propaganda I can reasonably assume that he was consuming and
for this journey. I would have loved to have read
every issue of The Citizen, the monthly magazine put out
by the Citizen's Council, but unfortunately a lot of the
(34:07):
issues from the early sixties are missing. From the places
that I could find issues of The Citizen, the online
archive at the University of Mississippi only has one issue
from nineteen sixty two. I don't know, and I know
he read The Citizen because he would sometimes write letters
to the editor that I found reproduced elsewhere. But there's
only so much I can do without my superpower of choice.
(34:30):
You know that icebreaker. What superpower would you pick? Flying, invisibility,
mind control whatever? I would pick the ability to access
any document that has ever existed, classified, destroyed, burned in
a fire, existing in the form of one single tattered
copy in a cardboard box, and an elderly Nazi storage unit,
(34:50):
whatever wherever it is. I would to be able to
see it. But I don't have that power, so no dice.
I only read a few issues of The Citizen, and
none from the time period I'm talking about, But I
know that Byron Della Beckwith read the Greenwood Commonwealth. That
was his local daily paper. And I know that he
(35:14):
read the Greenwood Commonwealth because when the FBI tried to
question him about the murder of Medgar Evers, he told them, well,
I read an article in the Greenwood Commonwealth that a
citizen has a right not to answer any question asked
outside of a court proceeding. And then decades later he
mailed his little collection of clippings about that murder to
his nephew. And I can read every issue of the
(35:39):
Greenwood Commonwealth if I want to.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
I didn't, but I could.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
I read at least the front page of every issue
of the Greenwood Commonwealth from the weeks surrounding the Old
Miss Riot and the weeks before Medgar Ever's murder, and
then for the period in between those two events. I
went through and found every article that mentioned Beckwith or
Medgar Evers, or James Meredith, or the Citizens Council, or
(36:07):
just some black resident of Greenwood getting shot. I read
his newspaper. I consumed the local news that Byron de
la Beckworth would have been reading every day, and it
starts to paint a really unpleasant picture if he was
already rabid on the subject of segregation. If he was
(36:29):
already obsessed with furthering the goals of the Citizens Council,
if preventing integration was his main reason to live, by
the time we get to the end of nineteen sixty two,
he would have been going fucking nuts. In August of
nineteen sixty two, the front page of the Greenwood Commonwealth
(36:51):
ran a story about a group of parents and Jackson
who'd filed a petition with the school board to admit
black students in white public schools. Medgar Evers was the
spokesman for the petition as the State and of LACP secretary,
but he was also one of the signatories. Two of
those students seeking to attend those white schools were his children.
(37:12):
A day later, the paper ran a front page story
with the headline Jackson to fight threat of race mixing again,
quoting Medgrevers, and that same August seventeenth, nineteen sixty two,
front page had a story about three SNICK organizers jumping
out the second story window of their Greenwood voter registration
(37:33):
office to escape an armed mob of white men who'd
broken in. One of the Snick organizers said, right before
the attack, a Greenwood police car that had been parked
outside surveilling them suddenly drove off And after the attack,
they received a threatening phone call and the caller identified
(37:54):
himself as a member of the citizen's Council. And the
attack came just days after one of those NICKS organizers
had been beaten up outside the office, and the police
deny any of this even happened. And the paper goes
on to describe these men as having been involved in
racial disturbances. And this story is running directly next to
(38:16):
an editorial. Again, this is on the front page. There
is a front page editorial identifying these victims by name
calling them outside agitators and accusing them of faking this
attack to cause racial strife in Greenwood. In September of
nineteen sixty two, the Greenwood Commonwealth ran a story accusing
(38:39):
two teenage girls in Ruleville, a small town in nearby
Sunflower County, of making up a story about being injured
after someone fired a shotgun through their living room window
from a passing car. Now, if you cross reference the
names of these girls, these victims with newspapers written by
and for a book Black audience, These girls were visiting
(39:02):
one of the girl's uncle and the uncle's wife had
recently crossed the citizens council by registering to vote. The
girls themselves were not involved, they were just home. The
mayor of Ruleville told the paper that those people, those
people conducting the voter registration schools, they probably shot those
(39:23):
girls themselves to stir up trouble. No one was arrested
for the shooting because the police don't think it was real.
The only person who was arrested in all of this
was Charles Cobb.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
That name might sound familiar to you.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
He wasn't a famous activist, journalist, or professor in nineteen
sixty two. He was nineteen. It will be many years
before experiences like this one inspired him to write his
book This Nonviolent Stuff Will Get You Killed. And in
nineteen sixty two, the mayor of Ruleville said Charles Cobb
was taken into custody the hospital for creating a disturbance.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
He had a pencil and pad out, and he was
asking a lot of silly questions. A few days later,
Beckwith would have opened his morning paper to a gigantic
headline blaring, all miss will not mix. The governor was
vowing to stop James Meredith's enrollment.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Men Grevers is quoted He's.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Unimpressed by the governor's speech, and he says, not only
is Meredith going to enroll at all miss but black
people are going to attend every state school in Mississippi.
Beckwith would have spent weeks reading breathless coverage about the
riot in Oxford. He's beating his wife bloody on a
regular basis, drinking himself to sleep, and he's just stewing
over these stories about increasing efforts to integrate more schools.
(40:51):
He's seeing stories about escalating tensions in Jackson, and the
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee is stepping up their efforts
at voter registration right there in his hometown of Greenwood
in nineteen sixty two. This small town of Greenwood, Mississippi,
is home to the regional office of both SNICK and
(41:11):
the Citizen's Council. These aren't just individual chapters of these organizations.
These are regional hubs of these organizations that are at war.
In February of nineteen sixty three, four black businesses burned
down in Greenwood. The local snickfield secretary called for an investigation,
(41:33):
saying it was obviously arson. He was arrested, charged under
a relatively new statute that made it a crime to
make false statements.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
That could lead to a breach of the peace.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
It'd already served time in local jail for the same
charge for publicly stating that the county was withholding federal
food aid to punish black residents for participating in voter
registration efforts. That might sound far fetched, but it was true.
Laflor County had cut off local distribution of food from
(42:08):
the federal Surplus Commodities program in an effort to starve
out the will to organize for civil rights. They were
denying federal food aid to impoverished black families in Lafloor
County to punish them. The idea was the brainchild of
the local citizens Council, and in the history books it's
(42:30):
called the Greenwood Food Blockade. Organizations like SNICK organized a
national food drive to keep these families fed. In February
of nineteen sixty three, comedian and activist Dick Gregory personally
paid for a charter plane out of Chicago that brought
fourteen thousand pounds of food to starving black children in
(42:52):
La Floor County, Mississippi. Snick activists testified before Congress that
spring about the local government's interference in federal program, and
the DOJ intervened. It was real, and I'm willing to
bet the arson they accused him of lying about was too.
At the end of February nineteen sixty three, a car
(43:14):
carrying Snick leader Bob Moses and field organizers Randolph Blackwell
and Jimmy Travis was shot up.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
By a passing car.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Bob Moses had to grab the wheel to keep the
car from crashing after the driver, Jimmy Travis, was shot
in the neck.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
He barely survived.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Bob Moses said they'd seen the car circling the Snick
office before the shooting and there were three white men inside.
In March, Medgar Evers ramped up his pressure on the
Jackson School board. They'd ignored that petition he'd filed over
the summer, so now it's a federal lawsuit. He was
one of several parents suing on behalf of their black
(43:53):
children to get the government to enforce their right to
attend white's only schools in Jackson. Day after Greenwood residents
read that story in their local paper, someone shot up
another car full of Snick organizers right outside their office.
Sam Block, who was freshly out of jail for asking
questions about Arson, was injured. Two weeks later, the SNICK
(44:15):
office was set on fire, and Block said all of
his records related to the voter registration drive were taken.
There was no evidence that those records had been burned
in the fire. Someone had them. Someone had a list
of every black person involved in this effort, every black
person who was even thinking about registering to vote or
(44:39):
participating in a demonstration. The police in the fire department
called him a liar, but at least they didn't arrest.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
Him for it.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
This time, Black activists in Greenwood staged to march after
the fire, and they were attacked.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
By police dogs.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
They begged Jfkate intervene, sent troops investigate, do something. There
was a half hearted conjunction, but nothing changed. Byron Della
Beckwith is opening up his paper every morning and reading
stories about these goddamn black voter registration drives. They just
will not give up. People keep shooting them and setting
(45:18):
their stuff on fire and starving them and beating them,
and it's not moving the needle. The violence isn't deterring
them more. Keep coming. They just keep trying. But the
violence is also extremely normalized. The violence is not positioned
as aberrant or even as violence. It's coming from all angles.
(45:43):
Anonymous vigilanti violence, state inaction, state oppression, overt state violence.
It's all on the table, it's all allowed, and nobody's
saying it's wrong. Not in the paper he's reading anyway.
At home, he's out of control. One night he got
blind drunk and tried to shoot his wife, but he missed,
(46:06):
thank god. She'd asked her son to teach her how
to drive. In May of nineteen sixty three, she left.
She stayed in a hotel for a bit, and she
got her own apartment. So in May of nineteen sixty three,
beck With is back in his childhood home. His uncle Will,
the old eccentric who raised him after his parents died,
(46:27):
passed away in nineteen sixty one, and at this point
he's back in the crumbling mansion, trying to sell off
anything valuable.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
It's May of nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
He's surrounded by piles of dusty Confederate memorabilia in the
house where he'd watched his mother waste away, and his
wife is gone, and every day he opens the newspaper
and watches his world fall apart. On May eleventh, Byron
de la Beckwith bought a fancy rifle scope. On May twentieth,
(47:00):
gave a speech on a Jackson area TV network. They
hadn't wanted to let him do it, but the mayor
had addressed the NAACP directly in a televised statement, and
SEC rules at the time said Evers was allowed to
respond in kind, and that night calls poured into the station.
(47:20):
A black man had never been allowed to talk to
them on that TV channel before. What is going on?
Transcripts of these calls are riddled with obscenities and racial slurs,
and quite a few outright calls Forever's murder. It's not
just Byron Diddle Beckwith talking like this. People were calling
in and telling the receptionists at the TV station that
(47:42):
they were going to shoot this man. A week later,
three student activists staged a sit in at the lunch
counter at the Woolworth's department store in Jackson. They sat
there calmly for hours while a white mob pelted them
with trash, burned them with lits, cigarettes, broke open the
sugar containers, and cut them with the glass poured condiments
(48:04):
on them.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
They were left bloodied.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
FBI agents watched from across the room and didn't intervene.
Medgar Evers had mentored these students and encouraged them and
supported them in the aftermath. The night of that sit
in at the Woolworths, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at
Medgrever's house. His wife, Merley, put it out with the hose.
(48:30):
He had two weeks left to live. Student organizers responded
to the backlash against the sit in with a march.
(48:52):
The mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, responded by arresting hundreds of children.
The demonstrations in Jackson grew so large, but police couldn't
contain the detainees. They just transported them to the fair
grounds and corralled them like cattle. And in response to
these demonstrations, the mayor of Jackson boasted that he'd find
(49:13):
a way to detain ten thousand black people if he
had to. But these outside agitators cannot be allowed to
instigate these incidents that are clearly designed to provoke federal intervention.
Right the federal intervention isn't because of what we the
government are doing it's because these black outside agitators, these
(49:35):
communist agitators, these people from up north, these people came
here and they riled up our black population to make
them do things they wouldn't do otherwise. Medgar Evers pleaded
publicly with Attorney General Robert F.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Kennedy t intervene.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
On June fifth, nineteen sixty three, a week before Medgar
Evers was assassinated in de La Beckwith would have opened
his issue of The Greenwood Commonwealth to see a pretty
jarring combination of headlines. The top of the page there
was a photo of a dozen white preschool aged girls
captioned Little Cuties. They were contestants in the upcoming Little
(50:18):
Miss Laflor beauty pageant. But next to the Little Cuties
the headline screamed Ross won't try to bar race mixing,
can't fight army, says Barnett of second negro at Ole.
Miss Cleve McDowell had recently won his legal battle to
be admitted to the University of Mississippi law school, something
(50:39):
Medgar Evers had tried to do nine years earlier, and
after the court's ruling in McDowell's case, Governor Ross Barnett
reluctantly conceded that if the federal government wanted to send
Cleve McDowell to Ole, miss Well, he couldn't very well
stop the army. No one wanted a repeat of the
riots surrounding James Meredith's registration. But Barnett remained committed to
(51:04):
segregation by all available means, and he said on the
record that he still believed these court orders were unlawful.
So he's not going to fight the army, but he's
not happy about it. Underneath that story, on this same
front page, there's a wire story about a federal judge
(51:27):
warning Alabama Governor George Wallace that he better not interfere
with court ordered integration at the University of Alabama. And
on that same page, that same June fifth, nineteen sixty
three front page of the Greenwood Commonwealth, headlines warned that
JFK is pushing for more civil rights enforcement. Underneath that,
(51:49):
the headline about a state conference of Methodist ministers warns
the world is changing. The world was changing, and for
Byron de la Beckwith, it was crumbling. On June seventh,
he would have seen on the front page a story
about some of the armed rioters arrested after the Old
(52:11):
miss riot.
Speaker 1 (52:14):
They'd been acquitted.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
They lost the battle, but they were going to be okay.
Members of this armed white mob that had tried to
murder federal officers were acquitted by a jury. On June eighth,
a store belonging to an NAACP activist and Jackson was
shot up. Underneath that, there was a brief story about
(52:40):
a Greenwood police officer claiming that the dead body of
a black man on the hood of his police car
was the result of a very bizarre accident. This man,
who is never named, just came out of nowhere, just
running full speed at his parked car. He just did that,
and he ran so fast, he ran into the car
(53:02):
so hard that he put a big dent in the
car and broke the windshield, and he died. This explanation
is presented as reasonable, and the man is not named,
and the officer was cleared. There were a lot of
poorly explained single car accidents involving dead black men in
(53:25):
Littleore County that year. I don't know if Byron de
la Beque read his daily paper on June eleventh, nineteen
sixty three. There are actually a lot of unanswered questions
about where exactly he was and when on June eleventh,
nineteen sixty three. But if he did, he would have
(53:49):
seen another blow to segregation. Federalized troops were in Tuscaloosa,
and Governor George Wallace backed down. This hero of segregation,
the man who'd proudly proclaimed segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
He'd let the government desegregate the University of Alabama.
Speaker 1 (54:12):
He just gave up.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
Everything's falling apart. His wife left him, she took his
son to He's drinking alone in this big old house.
And there's no guarantee anymore that there would be segregation tomorrow.
And it's all Medgarrever's fault. Med Grevers did not wake
(54:36):
up on June twelfth, nineteen sixty three, because he died
shortly after midnight. I don't know with ironclad certainty that
Byron dilabeck with read every issue of the Greenwood Commonwealth
in the weeks leading up to the murder. But I
know he did read the paper on June twelfth, nineteen
(54:56):
sixty three, hours after killing Medgar Evers. I know he
did because he carefully clipped out a front page editorial
blaming black activist groups for inciting Ever's murder. Murder is wrong, sure,
terrible even, But didn't he have it coming? On June twelfth,
(55:19):
nineteen sixty three. Byron de la Beckwith got out his
scissors and he cut that editorial out of the front
page of the Greenwood Commonwealth, and he held onto it
for years in a special folder. There are no lone wolves,
you know that. I say it all the time because
(55:41):
the term doesn't really mean anything. The term was invented
to provide cover for a variety of forms of networked violence.
There are all manner of theories about who knew what
and when, who might have plotted or schemed, or directed
(56:01):
or instructed or implied or been present, But I'm not
sure how much it matters. NAACP Regional director Ruby Hurley
swears she saw Byron Della Beckwith whispering with the Jackson
Police officer up in the balcony at that last NAACP
meeting Medgar Evers spoke at before his death, And maybe
(56:22):
she did, Maybe she did. Maybe It's true that the
Jackson Police officer assigned to tail Medgar Evers everywhere all
the time, just had somewhere else to be that evening
for a perfectly innocent reason, and he wasn't there when
MegaR Evers.
Speaker 1 (56:38):
Was shot in his driveway.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
Maybe Medgar Evers called to the FBI a few days
before his murder to share his concern that the Jackson
police were trying to kill him. Isn't related to this
at all. I do have some follow up questions for
the Jackson police detective who buried a tip with Becky
name on it early in the investigation, but who knows.
Speaker 1 (57:05):
I don't.
Speaker 2 (57:07):
I can try to form a coherent theory, but that
would take weeks, and I don't know how much it
matters the degree to which there was or wasn't a specific,
organized spoken conspiracy to direct to Byron Della Beckweth to
shoot Medgar Wiley Evers in June of nineteen sixty three. Well,
(57:29):
that was one of the most important questions on my
mind a few weeks ago, But now now maybe it isn't.
Maybe it was his idea alone, maybe someone else helped
him do it. But either way, what he did wasn't aberrant.
(57:52):
It wasn't unusual, not in the world he wanted to
live in, not in the society he was try trying
to help shape. It wasn't actually that out of bounds
for him to take the initiative here and carry out
what he very reasonably could have assumed was a desirable
(58:13):
action within his social circle. People were taking shots at
black civil rights activists all the time, and there was
rarely even an investigation, and even if there was, there
was never a punishment. You could shoot a federal marshal
and a Mississippi jury would acquit you. You could shoot
(58:34):
a man in a face and say it was a
car accident.
Speaker 1 (58:37):
You could shoot a.
Speaker 2 (58:38):
Man on the steps of the courthouse in front of
the sheriff and everyone would shrug. You could burn a
building down and arrest a man for asking why. You
could systematically starve thousands of families to punish them for
not wanting to be shot, beaten, or set on fire
Byron de la Beckwith woke up every day and read
(59:00):
in the newspaper about other people doing it. So whether
there was a meeting about it ahead of time or not,
the message had been clear since nineteen fifty four. The
Citizens Council was going to stop integration by any means necessary.
There was a loaded gun pointed at every black person
(59:21):
in Mississippi. All he did was pull the trigger. Weird
(59:41):
Little Guys Say production of Cool'shoe 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 Ory 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,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
(01:00:02):
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything
that's going to make you one of my Weird Little
Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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