July 16, 2026 • 54 mins
Byron de la Beckwith and Medgar Evers never met. Evers didn’t even see the man who killed him. But the man and his killer grew up a hundred miles apart, fought in the same war, worked similar jobs, and were both deeply invested in the outcome over the fight for integration.
Sources & Further Reading:
Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.
Mendelsohn, Jack. (1966) The martyrs : sixteen who gave their lives for racial justice. Harper & Row
Vollers, Maryanne (1995). Ghosts of Mississippi. Little Brown & Company.
Rolph, Stephanie (2018). Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954-1989. Louisiana State University Press
Williams, Michael Vinson (2011). Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr. The University of Arkansas Press
Evers, Charles and Andrew Szanton (1997). Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story. John Wiley & Sons Inc
Tisale, John (1996). Medgar Evers (1925-1963) and the Mississippi Press. Doctoral Dissertation, University of North Texas
Sheridan, Louis (2021) "Patriotism Betrayed: How the U.S. Military Resegregated From 1913-1939," Historical Perspectives: Santa Clara University Undergraduate Journal of History, Series II : Vol. 26, Article 11.
Donaldson, Le'Trice, "A Legacy All Their Own: African American Soldiers Fight for Citizenship, Race, and
Manhood, 1870-1920" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1167.
https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/etd/1167
Hartgrove, W. B. “The Negro Soldier in the American Revolution.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 1, no. 2, 1916, pp. 110–31. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3035634.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/07/06/where-is-the-voice-coming-from
https://da.mdah.ms.gov/series/welty/welty-manuscripts/weltys08
https://press.bobmizer.org/releases/instant-gratification
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/20/books/my-uncle-the-bigot.html
https://www.history.com/articles/battle-of-tarawa
https://dpaa-mil.sites.crmforce.mil/Tarawa/InvasionCasualties
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/marine-killed-battle-tarawa-laid-rest-80-years-later
https://www.oyez.org/about-audio
https://www.army.mil/article/97705/black_soldiers_in_the_revolutionary_war
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/CombatMultipliers.pdf
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
That was him.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
I knowed it when he cut off the car lights
and put his foot out, and I knowed him standing
dark against the light. I knowed him then like I
know me now. I knowed him even by his still
listening back. Never seen him before, never seen him since,
never seen anything of his black face but his picture,
(00:30):
Never seen his face alive anytime at all or anywheres,
And didn't want to, need to, never hope to see
that face, and never will as long as there was
no question in my mind he had to be the one.
He stood right still and waited against the light, his
back fixed fixed on me like a preacher's eyeballs when
he's yelling, are you saved? He's the one. I'd already
(00:55):
brought up my rifle, I'd already taken up my sights,
and i'd already got him. Because it was too late
then for him or for me to turn by one hair.
Something darker than him, like the wings of a bird,
spread on his back and pulled him down. He climbed
up once, like a man under bad claws, and just
(01:15):
like blood could weigh a ton, he walked with it
on his back to better light. Didn't get no further
than his door, and fell to stay. He was down.
He was down, and a ton load of bricks on
his back wouldn't have laid any heavier there on his
paved driveway, Yes, sir. And it wasn't until the minute
(01:38):
before that the mockingbird had quit saying he'd been singing
up my sassafras tree. Either he was up early or
he hadn't never gone to bed. He was like me,
and that mocker stayed right with me, fell in the
air till come the crack, till I turned loose on
my load. I was like him. I was on top
(02:02):
of the world myself for once. And I says Medgar,
there was one way left for me to be ahead
of you and stay ahead of you, by Christ, and
I'd just taken it. Now I'm alive and you ain't.
What about that, Medgar? An excerpt from where is the
(02:24):
Voice Coming From? A short story by you Doorra Welty,
originally published in The New Yorker July sixth, nineteen sixty three.
American short story author Eudor Welty wrote like a woman
possessed all night On June thirteenth, nineteen sixty three, A
lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi. Wealthy lived just a few
(02:47):
miles away from the driveway where Medgar Evers had just
been shot and killed in front of his wife and children.
She typed out the first draft of the story just
a day after the murder, putting the idea to paper
nearly two two weeks before the killer was identified. She'd
spent decades photographing and writing about the American South, so
(03:08):
she knew what sort of man had been hiding in
that honeysuckle thicket that night. She didn't know Byron Villa
beck With, but she knew Mississippi. I'm Molly Conger, and
this is weird, little guys. We're back to talking about
(03:45):
Byron Villa beck With, the man who shot and killed
civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi in nineteen sixty three.
We took a brief detour for two weeks. Sorry about that,
I mean two weeks ago. I had to push this
back to talk about Elon Musk's fascination with Uve bowls
awful new race war propaganda movie that couldn't be helped.
(04:08):
That was one of those mental emergencies where I knew
I wasn't going to be able to write anything else
until I wrote that, and then last week I stuck
you with a rerun. Sorry, but today we're picking back
up where we left off two weeks ago. If you
can't entirely remember where it was that we left off,
(04:28):
or if you're just jumping in here for the first time, honestly,
don't worry about it. You're right where you need to be.
There won't be a quiz at the end of the episode.
And this is an instance where you really can just
slide on into the story with us here because it's
only kind of about him at all. I know I've
said that before. All of these stories are only kind
(04:52):
of about the awful man whose name is in the
title of the episode. If you want a quick summary
of the life of Byron de la Becku with he's
got a Wikipedia page, knock yourself out. If you're feeling
antsy because it seems like we're not getting to the
point of the story, that is always an option for me.
(05:12):
It's not about getting to the point because a quick
summary of the facts of an event like this stripped
from its context and presented in isolation. Well, that was
never the point of the show. Getting to the point
hitting the highlights of his career in racism. That's kind
of corying to me if I'm just fleshing out the
(05:34):
chronology you can find on Wikipedia. What am I doing?
What are you doing? He did a racist murder, he
got away with it. He went to prison for a
while for planning to do a different racist murder. He
thought he was going to live out the rest of
his days in peace as a hero to racist everywhere.
But he finally faced justice as an old man, and
he died in prison. There that's the short version of it,
(05:57):
But I want to tell you the long version, the
version of this story about a Mississippi poll tax and
a segregated American military and an explosion of organized racism
in response to the Supreme Court ruling in round ver
Sport of Education. That ruling, that moment in May of
nineteen fifty four was like the big bang of modern
(06:20):
American reactionary politics. The debris field from that decision is
still expanding and we live in it. So forget where
you think we're trying to end up and just walk
with me in isolation. Byron de lbeck With is just
a monster. This was an unpredictable inexplicable act of violence.
(06:47):
He's a rogue wave rising out of calm seas to
recavoc is racism personified. He's quite literally a stranger in
the night stalking his victim from the shadows with a rifle.
That's just true crime. You know, we're titillated by the
lurid details, but we don't learn anything if every act
(07:10):
of violence carried out by a right wing extremist is
just some hideous freak accident. But there's nothing you can
do except live in fear, and you don't have to.
The story is about him, it's about what he did.
But he's just our entry point into the world he
lived in, the world he killed in, because he was
(07:32):
a product of that world. I mean, how else could
someone like Eudora Welty have had such a clear idea
of who this killer was before he was even found.
I mean, she wasn't an FBI behavioral analyst. She was
a novelist of that short story she wrote the day
after the murder. She later told William F. Buckley, of
(07:53):
all people, quote, I've lived here all my life. I
know the kind of mind that did this. I'm in
a position where I know I know what this man
must feel like. I've lived with this kind of thing.
She didn't know Byron de la bequ With, but she
knew a million Byron's de la bequ With, And in
(08:15):
that brief, strange story, she captured this image of an
aggrieved white man. A white man whose life wasn't as
good as he felt like he was owed. A white
man who saw a black man living in the suburbs
with a decent house, drive in a new car, and
that made him angry. A black man who wanted to vote,
a black man who wanted equal pay. He was a
(08:38):
white man who was unkind to his wife and not
terribly well educated. He was a white man who didn't
want to be held accountable for his actions, but he
also wanted somehow to get credit for what he felt
like was a heroic good deed. A man who swore
up and down that he didn't do it for political reasons,
(08:59):
but was connected to some very political causes. I mean,
she really nailed him. She knew exactly what kind of
man was standing in the dark across the street from
Medgar Evers House in June of nineteen sixty three, because
she knew Mississippi and both Byron de La Beckwith and
(09:25):
Medgar Evers were sons of Mississippi. In the first part
of this story, we saw a young Beckwith wandering the
grounds of his family's dilapidated Mississippi plantation house, surrounded by
the rotting relics of their glorious Confederate past. And we
saw young Medgar Evers walking for miles to get to
(09:47):
the only school in the county that was opened to
black children, a route that took him past the bloody
clothes that had been stripped from the body of a
lynching victim. A friend of his father's. Byron Dilla Beckwith
was from a white family in Decline. They'd been plantation
owners and slaveholders, and before the war they were rich.
(10:11):
His mother's extended family owned tens of thousands of acres
of cotton field and the Mississippi Delta, and they owned
the hundreds of human beings required to work that land.
When he moved back into his grandparents house as a
little boy, his grandfather would still wear his old Confederate
uniform on special occasions, and if the day was something
(10:34):
really special, his grandmother served tea using the china she'd
received as a gift from Jefferson Davis's widow. But before
Byron Dila Bequwith was a teenager, his grandparents were dead
and his parents were dead too. His father had squandered
his inheritance and died young from complications from alcoholism, and
(10:56):
then his mother wasted away in her childhood bedroom in
between in a sanitarium, and he was left to be
raised in this crumbling old house by a pair of
eccentric uncles. The family name still meant something, but that
was really all they had. The money was gone. It
(11:17):
was a terrible student. He flunked out of several fancy
boarding schools before eventually graduating from his local public high
school at the age of twenty. Then he proceeded to
immediately fail out of college two times before Christmas. Medgar Evers,
on the other hand, was the son of a black
family whose lot in life was overall all things considered
(11:42):
improving from generation to generation as bad at things still were.
His badest things still are for black residence in Mississippi,
It's not hard to say he was doing better than
his ancestors. His mother named him after her grandfather, Medgar Wright,
a man who, according to the family lore, had a
(12:04):
reputation as the most troublesome slave in East Mississippi. When
Medgar and his brother Charles were born in the nineteen twenties,
the Ever's family was doing all right. Sixty years after
the abolition of slavery, a lot of black Mississippians were
still farming the same land that had been worked by
enslaved people before the Civil War, just under the slightly
(12:27):
modified and still highly exploited of terms of sharecropping. But
the Ever's family weren't sharecroppers. I mean, by the time
the depression hit, they weren't well off, nobody really was,
but they owned a little bit of land that they
farmed for themselves. His father, Jim Evers, worked at the sawmill,
and his mother, Jesse, worked as a housekeeper for a
(12:48):
white family in town. His father's family also ran a
funeral home that they were involved with to some degree
at different points in time, and even during the depression.
The Evers children had dress shoes on at church every Sunday,
and there was food on the table every night, which
is more than a lot of people could say. These
(13:10):
two men seem almost as if they were written into
a novel, as literary foils a dowardly mobile son of
the Confederacy flunking out of private school after private school,
and the son of a black landowner who walked to
the next town over to go to high school because
he wanted to be an attorney. Both men volunteered for
(13:32):
the military during World War II. Both returned home to Mississippi,
married and became traveling salesmen, and in the nineteen fifties
they found themselves on the opposite sides of the battle
over segregation. Byron de la Bequeth enlisted in the Marine
Corps in January of nineteen forty two, just a few
(13:54):
weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He'd spent all
of nineteen forty one working at the PEPs bottling plant
after dropping out of college twice. In the fall of
nineteen forty he was twenty one years old. He was
an orphan. He didn't have a girlfriend. He owned a
little bit of land that his mother had left him
from the old family plantation, but he had no interest
(14:17):
in farming. But he'd grown up on stories about his ancestors.
They'd fought great battles from the Revolutionary War to the
Civil War. He'd grow up hearing Civil War stories first
hand from his grandfather. Maybe this war was just what
he needed. This was his chance to be a hero
(14:40):
like his Confederate ancestors. Don't think too hard about that.
He definitely considered his ancestors service in the Revolutionary War
and the Civil War to be equally patriotic endeavors. That
wasn't a contradiction for him. As his biographer wrote, there
(15:01):
was no unresolved conflict in Beckworth's mind about killing the enemy.
It fit his psyche. His ancestors had proudly killed the
enemies of their young country, and he was proud to
finally be among their illustrious company. His was a boy's
pride grounded in a sense of insecurity that made him
want to prove himself worthy of his noble ancestry. This
(15:24):
comes from kind of an unusual source. That quote is
from a fascinating biography of Byron Della Beckwith called Portrait
of a Racist by Reed Massengil. Masengillis Beckworth's nephew. His
mother's sister was Beckwith's first wife, and growing up, Massengil
(15:46):
didn't know his uncle. He had no contact with this
man for obvious reasons. But when he graduated with a
degree in journalism. In the mid eighties, his estranged uncle
reached out. He wanted someone to write a book about him.
He'd tried to write it himself, but he hadn't gotten
very far, and he hadn't found any interest in publishers.
(16:10):
But he's in his sixties at that point and he
wanted a story told, so he reached out to this
nephew he's never met. Massing Kill's book is unique. It's
one of the better biographies of a terrible man I've
ever read, and I think that's because it's maybe the
(16:30):
only one I've ever read where the author had the
long term trust and cooperation of the subject without any
sort of emotional entanglement, either familial or because he himself
is a believer. I mean, they're related, but they do
not have a relationship. I've talked a few times on
(16:52):
this show about various biographies of racist that I've used
for my research. There's one I come back to a
lot that I can't rely on necessarily. Fame of a
Dead Man's Deeds is the most detailed account of the
life of William Muther Pierce, the Nazi who wrote the
Turner Diaries. So I keep coming back to it. But
(17:15):
over the course of their work together on the book,
Pierce managed to recruit the book's author, Robert S. Griffin.
So as he's interviewing him to write this unbiased biography,
he's becoming a white supremacist. So the book is detailed,
but it's deeply flawed. And then I'm thinking too, of
(17:37):
other biographies I've used for the show. One's written by
relatives of the subject, and those are intimate looks at
the subject of the book. But there's this entanglement, right.
It's difficult to write about your father, for example, or
your ex husband. Massing Gill is in this unique position
of having this close, intimate relationship with the man without
(18:00):
the emotional baggage that would allow the subject to manipulate him.
It's interesting. Everything has a bias, but it seems clear
where the author stands. He's repulsed by and at times
terrified of his uncle. He spent years working with his uncle,
(18:22):
talking to him, writing to him, being proselytized to by him,
and his uncle gave him letters and materials that wouldn't
have been available to anyone else. Because he's cooperating, because
he thinks this is going to be a flattering book,
and critically it's not because Read Masengil does not appear
to be a racist. He was not charmed by his uncle.
(18:44):
He's not making excuses for this man. And the subject
of the book wasn't his only source. His aunt, Beckwit's
ex wife provided her own recollections of their marriage and
gave the author access to her personal letters. It really
is rare to get a look at one of these
men that is both intimate and growded. In reality, the
(19:11):
uncle and nephew had a pretty bad falling out long
before the book was actually published. But I couldn't find
anything definitive to answer my biggest question, did Byron de
la Beckwith know what kind of work his nephew would
end up being most famous for aside from this book,
which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but most of
(19:33):
Reed Massingale's other works in photography, According to a press
release for an exhibition of his work at the Bob
Meiser Museum in Photographic archive, quote best known for his candid, erotic,
and deeply humane portraits of the all American male, Read
Massingille has long chronicled an alternative history of masculinity, one
(19:53):
grounded in everyday beauty, queer intimacy, and unguarded self presentation.
In this exhibition, massen Yell turns to the Fuji Instacts
mini format to create a tactile, instant archive of desire
and disclosure. The resulting images are raw, yet affectionate, playful
yet sincere, offering a vernacular counterpoint to stylized queer portraiture
(20:18):
and mainstream erotic conventions. Portrait of a Racist was his
first book, published in nineteen ninety four, but in the
three decades since he's mostly an expert on vintage nude
male photography. He's written and edited several volumes, and his
(20:38):
photographs have been shown in galleries and museums all over
the country. I couldn't tell you what Beckwith may have
thought about that, but I think you can.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Imagine what I'm getting at here is the book is
unusual in a good way, and I trust the author
(21:08):
enough to believe some of the claims that appear without citation,
like this description of the injury Beckwith suffered at the
Battle of Tarawa in November of nineteen forty three.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
Quote, he was lucky. The doctor's thought slightly higher and
to the right, and the Japs would have literally blown
Corporal Beckwith's testicles away. End quote. Now, the book is
largely very thoroughly footnoted. It's well sighted. I checked a
lot of these primary sources myself just to see more information.
(21:44):
But oddly, this bit about how the doctors were amazed
that his testicles hadn't been blown off, there's no citation
for that. Maybe it's something his uncle told him personally
Byron de la Beckwith spent the first half of nineteen
forty two in San Diego before his platoon was shipped
off to the Pacific Theater at the end of the summer,
(22:06):
where his unit ran supplies for the troops fighting at Guadalcanal.
Massengkill interviewed several marines who'd served with Beckwith, and they
all remember him fondly. He was quote a very likable person,
one of them said. Another said he was one hell
of a good marine. Frankly, I liked Beckwith, said another.
(22:32):
The guy who said he was likable shared fond memories
that he had of hanging out with Beckwith while they
were in the Solomon Islands. They'd throw hand grenades in
the water and scoop up the dead fish. They spent
their afternoons off swimming off the coast of the island,
playing make believe in a sunken ship they found. I mean,
they were practically just kids, and that really drives home
(22:54):
that God, these young men they send off to war,
they were really barely adults swimming down to a sunken
ship a few feet underwater and pretending to drive it
like their little boys.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
You know.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
The trip down memory Lane ends abruptly.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
I can't remember if it was Japanese skulls or teeth
that he kept, but it was one of the other.
That was one thing that was a little weird about him.
End quote. Beckwith unit spent most of nineteen forty three
stationed in New Zealand. He drank too much and spent
(23:35):
all his money on shore leave and read his Bible
every day. And the Marines trained for an amphibious landing
using the landing vehicles that had been debuted at Guadalcanal.
When those amphibious tracked vehicles made their second appearance at
the Battle of Tarawa November of nineteen forty three, Byron
de la Beckwith was one of the men manning a
machine gun Taroa is a little atoll in the Gilbert
(23:59):
Island in what is now the Republic of Kiribas and
in nineteen forty three, the United States felt that the
tiny Japanese airstrip on the tiny island in that atoll
had to be taken before they could gain control of
the Marshall Islands, which they needed in order to launch
an attack on the Mariana Islands. They were just leapfrogging
(24:22):
their way across the Pacific Ocean to get close to Japan.
And just a quick side note about the pronunciation of
these locations in the Gilbert Islands. I'm sorry. I watched
a ton of videos of historians and World War two
weirdos talking about the battle, and it seems like they
were just choosing which syllable distress at random. And half
(24:46):
the tourist videos I found were Australians pronouncing the country Kiribati,
which is what it looks like, but that's not how
it's pronounced, so I don't think I can trust them.
They were saying Tarawa. I think it's Taroa. I did
my best, and I apologize to any Gilbertese speakers and
any e Kiribas people in the audience. The Japanese garrison
(25:10):
there was on this teeny tiny island at the tip
of the atoll called Bischeo. Bisheo is half a square mile,
that is the total area of the island of Bisheo.
It's eight hundred yards wide at its widest point, so
they thought they could take it pretty easily. But the
(25:32):
Americans had not anticipated the extent of the Japanese fortifications
on Bascheo, and they failed to thoroughly account for the
neep tide that's those two days a month where the
high tide is slightly less high than usual, and this
tidal miscalculation left their troop transport ships stuck on coral
(25:54):
reefs under heavy fire from the Japanese troops on the beach.
Over the course of this four day battle, more than
six thousand people died. There were over one thousand American casualties.
Almost every last Japanese soldier on the island was killed
(26:15):
or died by suicide, over thirty five hundred of them.
And there were over one thousand forcibly conscripted Korean laborers
there on the Japanese base, and almost all of them died.
It sounds like it must have been hell on Earth.
A shocking number of the American casualties were drownings. Men
(26:37):
who were desperate to get out of those stranded troop
transport ships just jumped into the water and never made
it to shore. I'm not a huge World War two guy.
I mean, I know a lot about Nazis, but mostly
the ones that came later. I don't really know shit
about the Pacific theater. But I'm a little surprised I'd
(26:57):
never heard of Taroa. The mistakes they made and planning
that beach landing are kind of why the Navy Seals exist.
The Navy had been studying ways to improve amphibious landing
since World War One, but after the massive and deadly
miscalculations regarding the coral at Taroa, a group of Navy
officers and sailors were recruited for a formal training program
(27:20):
in underwater reconnaissance and demolition. This formed the first underwater
demolition Team, which was the precursor to the Seals Who
Knew Byron de la Beckwith was one of more than
two thousand American Marines who were injured in the Battle
of Tarowa. He was a machine gunner on one of
the amphibious landing vehicles, and those were heavy enough to
(27:43):
make it over the reefs to land on the beach.
But Beckwith never made it to the island, and honestly,
he's lucky he got shot when he did, because I
think making it to the island would have been worse
for him. But with fifty yards of ocean between him
and the Japanese soldiers on the shore, he took a
bullet to the upper thigh. A roving medic found him
(28:05):
unconscious in the water, and he woke up aboard a
hospital ship headed for Hawaii. He spent a month there
recovering before being sent back to the mainland. He received
a purple heart for his service and spent the remainder
of his time in the military working as an airplane
mechanic at a base in Tennessee. In the definitive account
of the battle written by war correspondent Robert Sherid, his
(28:29):
name is misspelled in the list of casualties. According to
his nephew, Beckwith believed God had spared him at Taroa,
and if God had personally intervened to save his life
that morning in the middle of the ocean. Well, surely
he was meant to do something important. In October of
(28:52):
nineteen forty three, a month before Byron de Labequit got
shot in the leg, Medgar Evers dropped out of high
school at seventeen enlist in the army, following his older
brother Charles, who'd already signed up twenty years later. Shortly
before his death, Fivers told journalist ben Bagdickian quote, just
before I went into the Army, I began wondering how
(29:15):
long I could take it. I used to watch the
Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down
a Negro with their car, or white gang is coming
through town to beat up a Negro. He wanted to
get out of Mississippi. There had to be more in
this world than getting spat on by a white man
in Decatur, Mississippi, and he was gonna see it. The
(29:36):
United States Army that Medgar Evers joined in nineteen forty
three was segregated. It always had been, although the rules
changed from war to war. But black Americans have fought
and died in every conflict in American history before there
was an America. But they did so as second class
(29:58):
citizens at the I mean, they were fighting and dying
for this country a century before you could even call
them second class citizens because they weren't granted the legal
right to be considered citizens at all. In seventeen seventy five,
George Washington signed an order stating that boys unable to
bear arms, old men unfit to endure the fatigues of battle,
(30:22):
and negroes were not suitable for enlistment in the Continental Army.
It wasn't until nineteen forty eight, when President Truman signed
an executive order that the entire United States military was
legally integrated. But that path isn't linear. We like to
smooth out the bumps in the road when we look
(30:44):
back at history. So we have this idea that history
is a story of things getting incrementally better all the time.
It's just this smooth upward trajectory. To get from slavery
in eighteen sixty to a black president in two thousand
and eight, to get from Washington's whites only militia to
today's multi racial armed forces, this must be a story
(31:04):
of steady, positive trajectory in American race relations.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Right.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
It doesn't work like that. I mean, Washington himself ended
up changing his mind. The decision to exclude black men
from the Continental Army had been motivated mostly by fear
of slave rebellions. You can't give these people weapons, you
can't train them to do violence, because they'll do it
to us, right, that's what they're worried about. But their
(31:33):
refusal to engage with willing black volunteers just made Lord
Dunmore's offer twice as appealing. The former governor of the
Virginia Colony was offering freedom to any black slave or
indentured servant who took up arms for the British, and
hundreds of men took him up on the offer. Lord
(31:54):
Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, as he called it, was formidable. Now
I'm embarrassed to say, I don't think i've ever heard
this story. I was telling my husband about it, and
he very excitedly said, oh, yeah, after you go to
bed at night, I'm watching that new ken Burns Revolutionary
War documentary and that's in there. And he was telling
me things that I hadn't even read. I haven't watched
(32:16):
the ken Burns documentary, but I feel like they should
have taught me about this in school, not just because
it's fascinating American history. But because one of the battles
Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian regiment won was the Battle of Kemp's Landing,
And like, I don't know, maybe that could have come
(32:36):
up in some kind of lesson at my middle school,
which was called Kemp's Landing. This battle happened in the
neighborhood I grew up in, but I never heard this story.
And initially Washington's only partially reversing course. He's allowing only
free black men to enlist. But as the colonists are
(32:59):
getting more and more desperate for more bodies for their war,
the looser these rules become. Enslaved men were first admitted
to the army as a form of alternative to service.
A white man could avoid the draft by sending an
enslaved person in his place, or he could send someone
that he owns and have them send his salary home.
But by the war's end, the Continental Army was compensating
(33:22):
slaveholders for the use of their property and offering those
men freedom in exchange for service, and ultimately George Washington
accidentally ended up commanding the closest thing to an integrated
armed services that this country would see until nineteen fifty.
(33:43):
But despite all that, as President George Washington codified a
white's only army. The Militia Act of seventeen ninety two
defined eligibility for service as being a free, able bodied,
white male citizen. Nevertheless, black Americans have served in every
(34:18):
conflict sense, but generally in segregated units commanded by white officers,
and often relegated to what we're seen as lesser roles
and paid less and not promoted. Oddly, the Navy has
always been kind of an exception here. I mean, I'm
not saying black sailors got equal pay and equal respect,
(34:41):
absolutely not, but the Navy's always been far less segregated
than the other branches. A lot of the sources I
read just chalk this up to an oddly simplistic explanation of, well,
it's just too hard to do segregation on a ship
because there's no privacy. But I don't buy that. I
don't buy that because they did eventually manage to do it.
(35:04):
But also I think there's more going on here. I mean,
the sea is a different world. Sailors have always had
different laws than we have on the land. They have
their own culture at sea, and There's a long, rich
history of black mariners, free black men who find work
on merchant vessels and traveled the world and eras where
that kind of freedom of movement and economic mobility just
(35:28):
wasn't an option for them on land. Whaling was famously diverse,
and the whaling ships of the eighteen hundreds were nothing
if not a racially integrated workplace. Demani Davis, an archivist
at the National Archives and an expert on African American history,
points to this whaling ship history to explain the disproportionate
number of black men serving in a relatively integrated Union
(35:52):
Navy during the Civil War. The large number of free
black men in the American Northeast who had experience on
whaling vessels meant there was a ready pool of experienced
sailors for the Union Navy, and they couldn't really afford
to turn them down. But even the Navy wasn't safe
from Woodrow Wilson. Progress isn't linear, and there is no
(36:16):
better proof of that than Woodrow Wilson. I mean, he's
a real contender in the very fierce competition to be
America's most racist president. When he took office in nineteen thirteen,
he resegregated the federal workforce. I mean, we're right there
at the halfway point between the abolition of slavery and
the civil rights legislation of the nineteen sixties, and we're
(36:38):
sliding backwards. Bathrooms, lunch rooms, whole offices in federal buildings,
the postal service. They'd been integrated before Wilson turned back
the clock. Wilson, the only American president to have been
born a Confederate citizen, packed his cabinet with rabbit white supremacists.
(36:59):
He appointed Josephus Daniels as his Secretary of the Navy.
Daniel's only qualification seems to have been that he was
extremely racist. I mean, he had no military experience at all.
I can't imagine what he thought he was going to
do in this job, because, aside from segregating the United
States Navy, Josephus Daniel's main claim to fame is that
(37:22):
he incited the Wilmington massacre. As the editor of the
News and Observer, he was responsible for running the propaganda
that whipped up the angry white mob that overthrew the
integrated government of Wilmington, North Carolina in eighteen ninety eight.
The mob killed and displaced most of the town's black population,
(37:44):
and as a result of the changes made by Secretary Daniels,
by nineteen fifteen, black sailors had been reduced to working
as servants for their white counterparts aboard naval ships, and
in the pages of the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper,
one sailor Lamente in the Navy of the United States,
we are Jim Crowd. On the eve of the United
(38:10):
States entry into World War One, Wilson personally intervened to
prevent the promotion of Colonel Charles Young. Young would have
been the army's first black general. Albert Dockery, a white
Southern officer, wrote to the Secretary of War to complain
about serving under a black officer, and surprisingly, the Secretary
(38:33):
of War told him to suck it up, do your duty,
or resign. Those are your options, soldier, simple as that.
But Albert Dockery complained to his daddy, and his daddy
knew Senator John Sharp Williams from Mississippi, and Senator Williams
wrote to President Wilson about the situation, and suddenly Secretary
Baker is under intense pressure to change his mind. Baker
(38:58):
couldn't assign Colonel Young to a in the war. If
he sent him to the front in Europe, there would
be no getting around him commanding white troops, because by
this point in Wilson's presidency, there weren't enough black troops
for him to command, and the President had told Baker
that it would be quote not only distasteful, but practically
(39:19):
impossible for white soldiers to serve under a black general,
so Young was forced into retirement. Now, in Wilson's letters
to Secretary Baker, he doesn't outright say this black officer
cannot be a general, this black officer cannot command white soldiers.
He's not talking about what should be done to Colonel Young.
(39:43):
He's talking about how we should deal with Dockery's complaint.
The issue he's ostensibly intervening in here is Albert Dockery's
request for a transfer. Because Albert Dockery wasn't saying Colonel
Young shouldn't be in the army. He's just saying I
can can't serve under him. And he'd asked to be
reassigned to a post with a white commanding officer, and
(40:05):
the Secretary of War told him no. But Wilson's willingness
to get personally involved in this extremely minor personnel matter.
In this one lieutenant's frivolous transfer request, it sent a
pretty clear message, this isn't about Albert Dockery, this is
about segregation. A few years later, when Allied soldiers held
(40:29):
a celebratory march in Paris in July of nineteen nineteen,
black soldiers from England and France marched down the street
alongside their colleagues, and the United States Army didn't let
their black soldiers attend the parade. People love comparing Trump
to different presidents. You know, he's Nick Sin, he's Jackson,
(40:52):
He's more corrupt than Warren G. Harding, But in terms
of his approach to the federal workforce, he's decidedly will
And so this is the United States military that Medgar
and Charles Evers are joining in World War Two. It
is more segregated than ever. There are fewer black people
in the military in these inter war years than ever,
(41:15):
and now suddenly we need everybody we can get because
we're going to war. And black soldiers in World War
Two were limited mostly to support roles. They were not
on the front lines. That doesn't mean none of them
saw combat. Of course they did, but they were not
typically assigned to those roles. Charles went off to the
(41:37):
Pacific Theater and Medger went to Europe. And in Europe,
Medgar Evers served in the Quartermaster's Corps in a segregated
battalion under white officers. His unit participated in the famous
Red Ball Express trucking convoy that supplied combat troops after
the invasion at Normandy. Medgar Evers served at Normandy antverp
(41:58):
Liege Lahav Cherbourg and received two Combat stars and a
Good Service Medal. While serving as a military policeman in France.
In nineteen forty five, Medgar Evers fell in love and
on the other side of the world his brother Charles,
he was stationed in the Philippines, and he too had
taken up with a woman he was pretty serious about.
(42:22):
But both brothers had to leave their loves behind because
those women were white. They could not bring home a
bride because those marriages were not legal in Mississippi. It
was illegal for them to touch or kiss, or love
or marry these women in the state where they grew up.
(42:43):
In France, Medgar Evers could walk down the street holding
hands with a white woman at fourteen, he saw a
man lynched for disrespecting a white woman. And at eighteen
he saw the horrors of war. And now he's nineteen
years old, and he's in love, and he's faced with
the reality of going home to decater, Mississippi, where a
(43:06):
white man's liable to lynch him if he'd just thought
about doing what these French people aren't batting an eye at.
His brother told a journalist years later, quote to the French,
Medgar was a soldier first, an American second, and a
Negro third. Going with this French girl made Medgar even
(43:27):
more sure the racism we'd grown up with in Mississippi
was unnatural and could be changed. It convinced him black
and white could live in peace. In the spring of
nineteen forty six, Byron de la Beckwith moved his young bride,
a woman he'd met while stationed in Tennessee, back into
the crumbling family mansion in Greenwood, Mississippi. He hadn't started
(43:52):
beating her yet, but he would soon. Even before the
move to Mississippi, the couple's favorite weekend activity was already
drinking too much and getting into a fight, but he
didn't start hitting her until after the baby was born,
he struggled to find a job, and he struggled even
harder to keep one. Nothing was ever good enough for him.
(44:15):
He deserved more, he deserved better. And now he's back
in this old plantation house, surrounded by the dusty relics
of the ante Bellum South and his strange old bachelor uncles,
and he's longing for the grandeur he feels like his
family name deserves. He's becoming increasingly obsessed with his family
history and with the past, and with holding on to
(44:39):
this imagined past where everything was better. But that's the
place he never lived. When his son, Byron Junior or
Byron the Fourth, depending on what paperwork you're looking at,
was born, the drinking got worse. He resented the baby,
he was of the baby. He stopped enjoying sex, and
(45:04):
then he stopped being able to do it at all.
He was impotent. He became increasingly religious and increasingly violent.
In the spring of nineteen forty six, as Byron de
la Beque is drinking away his disappointment in his childhood
bedroom in an old plantation house in Greenwood, Mississippi, Charles
(45:25):
and Medgar Evers were coming home to Mississippi too, two
hours away indicator. They sat their family down and told
them there's going to have to be a change. Joining
the army was their first real exposure to life outside
of Mississippi, and it wasn't just France that was different.
(45:46):
Their sister Elizabeth told historian Michael Vincent Williams about Medgar's
disbelief that in New York City black people can stay
at the same hotels and eat at the same restaurants
as white people. You can just do it. Medgar Evers
always knew segregation was wrong. He understood that. As a
little boy, he was acutely aware of the injustice he
(46:08):
was suffering. When those white children threw sticks and rocks
at him from their school bus window while he was
walking down the dirt road to his segregated school, he knew.
But now he'd breathed free air. Now he knew what
it felt like. When the Evers brothers got home in
nineteen forty six, Medgar couldn't even write letters to his
(46:29):
French girlfriend because it wasn't safe. Charles had left his
girlfriend behind too. In the Philippines, White Mississippians wouldn't even
allow them to wear their army uniforms in public. Medgar
Evers wasn't allowed to display the combat stars he'd earned
on Omaha Beach. They'd fought a war for freedom or
(46:52):
democracy or something, but where's theirs? They wanted to vote.
This whole meandering journey started with signs. I don't know
if you remember. A month ago now, I got sidetracked
by some news about the Trump administration trying to whitewash
(47:14):
American history by censoring historical markers and educational material at
national parks, and one of the points of contention was
this brochure the Medga and Rerley Ever's Home National Monument.
That's what got me thinking about Medgar Evers and the
way we remember his story. We're not done yet, of
(47:35):
course not. The story's not over. But before we get
to the part of the story where a drunk, impotent
domestic abuser gets addicted to grievance politics after the Supreme
Court ruled against segregation, I want to leave you with
another sign. Outside of the courthouse in Decatur, Mississippi, there's
a sign with Medgar Ever's name on it. It is
(47:59):
not much to look at, but neither is the courthouse.
It's a small town placed by the Mississippi Department of
Archives in History in two thousand and four. The sign
reads Medgar Wilie Evers born in Decatur, July second, nineteen
twenty five was a graduate of Newton Vocational High School
in Alcorn College. After serving in the military in World
(48:21):
War Two, he returned to Decatur and, along with his
brother Charles, attempted to register to vote here in nineteen
forty six, but was turned away. An active participant in
the fight to end racial segregation, Medgar Evers was later
named as Mississippi's first NAACP Field Secretary. On June twelfth,
nineteen sixty three, Evers was assassinated outside his home in Jackson.
(48:44):
He is buried at Arlington Cemetery. And I didn't know
about this sign when I started. This wasn't one of
the signs we talked about last month. But I saw
it because I wanted to see a picture of this courthouse,
because I needed to picture a pair of moments. This
(49:06):
bookend of experiences outside of this courthouse, one hot night
in July of nineteen thirty four, and one more twelve
years later, in July of nineteen forty six. In the
summer of nineteen thirty four. Medga and Charles Evers were
(49:29):
just little boys. Medgar had just turned nine and his
big brother wasn't quite twelve. And one Saturday evening, these
two little boys snuck into town to see a big speech.
Former Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo was running for senate. Bilbo
was a clansman, an ardent segregationist, and honestly a real blowhard.
(49:52):
His stump speeches were loud and vulgar, and they could
go on for hours. It was a real spectacle. It
was something to see. The whole white population of Newton
County was there at the courthouse to hear this man
shout racial slurs until he was blue.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
In the face.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
And then suddenly, mid rant Bilbo paused because these two
little black boys had slipped to the crowd and they
were sitting just a few feet away from him on
the courthouse steps, And according to a book written later
by Charles Evers, Bilbo looked right at them. He looked
down at Medgar and Charles Evers, and he pointed at
(50:29):
the boys as he shouted to the crowd outside the courthouse.
If we fail to hold high the wall of separation
between the races, we will live to see the day
when these two Nward boys right here will be asking
for everything that's ours. By right, you see these two
lit Lenwards sitting down there. If you don't keep them
in their place, and someday they'll be in Washington trying
to represent you. And according to Charles Evers, a nine
(50:56):
year old Medgar Evers nudged his big brother in the
ribs and looked up at him and whispered that ain't
a bad IDEA Twelve years later, on the eve of
Medgar Ever's twenty first birthday, word had gone round town
and decater that no black folks should come into town
that night. Medgri and his father went anyway. He'd been
(51:21):
bold enough to go when he was nine years old,
and now he's a man, a man who'd seen corpses
on the beach at Normandy, so he went. They stood
across the street watching Bilbo's rally. Medgrev said he remembers
looking right into Bilbo's mouth as he urged the crowd
to pay a nighttime visit to any Negroes who might
(51:42):
be thinking of voting in the morning. The Evers men
sat up all night, but no one came, so they
went to the courthouse. A mob of armed white men
was there waiting.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
For them, but they went inside, and the registrar asked
Medgar Evers, are you sure you boys really want to vote?
And he said, yes, sir, and he signed his name
in the book. And as he signed his name in
that book, he's flicking open the knife in his pocket
with his other hand.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
The mob is restless. They'd survived the war and now
they're going to die on the front steps of the
Newton County Courthouse. I don't think so. It wasn't worth it.
He kept the knife in his pocket and they left
without voting. Medgar Evers never did cast a ballot in
Newton County, Mississippi. But now there's a plaque honoring the
(52:40):
time he tried, stuck in the ground, just a few
feet away from the steps where he'd sat listening to
a clanspan mock him as a little boy. The excerpted
(53:01):
portion of You doora Welty's short story, whereas the voice
coming from that was used at the top of the episode,
was taken from an original draft of the story held
in a special collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives
in History. The final version published in the New Yorker
was edited to remove details specific to the crime, such
as Medgar Evers's name, to avoid legal complications, as the
(53:23):
story was written before but published after Beckwith's original arrest.
Scans of the pages of Wealthy's original typewritten draft with
handwritten edits can be seen in the link of the
show notes. Weird Little Guys is a production of Coolshoe
Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me,
Molly Hunger. Part executive producers are Sophie Littterman and Robert Evans.
(53:45):
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 it, but I probably won't answer.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subredd.
It just don't post anything that's going to make you
one of my Weird Little Guys.
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
That was him.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
I knowed it when he cut off the car lights
and put his foot out, and I knowed him standing
dark against the light. I knowed him then like I
know me now. I knowed him even by his still
listening back. Never seen him before, never seen him since,
never seen anything of his black face but his picture,
(00:30):
Never seen his face alive anytime at all or anywheres,
And didn't want to, need to, never hope to see
that face, and never will as long as there was
no question in my mind he had to be the one.
He stood right still and waited against the light, his
back fixed fixed on me like a preacher's eyeballs when
he's yelling, are you saved? He's the one. I'd already
(00:55):
brought up my rifle, I'd already taken up my sights,
and i'd already got him. Because it was too late
then for him or for me to turn by one hair.
Something darker than him, like the wings of a bird,
spread on his back and pulled him down. He climbed
up once, like a man under bad claws, and just
(01:15):
like blood could weigh a ton, he walked with it
on his back to better light. Didn't get no further
than his door, and fell to stay. He was down.
He was down, and a ton load of bricks on
his back wouldn't have laid any heavier there on his
paved driveway, Yes, sir. And it wasn't until the minute
(01:38):
before that the mockingbird had quit saying he'd been singing
up my sassafras tree. Either he was up early or
he hadn't never gone to bed. He was like me,
and that mocker stayed right with me, fell in the
air till come the crack, till I turned loose on
my load. I was like him. I was on top
(02:02):
of the world myself for once. And I says Medgar,
there was one way left for me to be ahead
of you and stay ahead of you, by Christ, and
I'd just taken it. Now I'm alive and you ain't.
What about that, Medgar? An excerpt from where is the
(02:24):
Voice Coming From? A short story by you Doorra Welty,
originally published in The New Yorker July sixth, nineteen sixty three.
American short story author Eudor Welty wrote like a woman
possessed all night On June thirteenth, nineteen sixty three, A
lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi. Wealthy lived just a few
(02:47):
miles away from the driveway where Medgar Evers had just
been shot and killed in front of his wife and children.
She typed out the first draft of the story just
a day after the murder, putting the idea to paper
nearly two two weeks before the killer was identified. She'd
spent decades photographing and writing about the American South, so
(03:08):
she knew what sort of man had been hiding in
that honeysuckle thicket that night. She didn't know Byron Villa
beck With, but she knew Mississippi. I'm Molly Conger, and
this is weird, little guys. We're back to talking about
(03:45):
Byron Villa beck With, the man who shot and killed
civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi in nineteen sixty three.
We took a brief detour for two weeks. Sorry about that,
I mean two weeks ago. I had to push this
back to talk about Elon Musk's fascination with Uve bowls
awful new race war propaganda movie that couldn't be helped.
(04:08):
That was one of those mental emergencies where I knew
I wasn't going to be able to write anything else
until I wrote that, and then last week I stuck
you with a rerun. Sorry, but today we're picking back
up where we left off two weeks ago. If you
can't entirely remember where it was that we left off,
(04:28):
or if you're just jumping in here for the first time, honestly,
don't worry about it. You're right where you need to be.
There won't be a quiz at the end of the episode.
And this is an instance where you really can just
slide on into the story with us here because it's
only kind of about him at all. I know I've
said that before. All of these stories are only kind
(04:52):
of about the awful man whose name is in the
title of the episode. If you want a quick summary
of the life of Byron de la Becku with he's
got a Wikipedia page, knock yourself out. If you're feeling
antsy because it seems like we're not getting to the
point of the story, that is always an option for me.
(05:12):
It's not about getting to the point because a quick
summary of the facts of an event like this stripped
from its context and presented in isolation. Well, that was
never the point of the show. Getting to the point
hitting the highlights of his career in racism. That's kind
of corying to me if I'm just fleshing out the
(05:34):
chronology you can find on Wikipedia. What am I doing?
What are you doing? He did a racist murder, he
got away with it. He went to prison for a
while for planning to do a different racist murder. He
thought he was going to live out the rest of
his days in peace as a hero to racist everywhere.
But he finally faced justice as an old man, and
he died in prison. There that's the short version of it,
(05:57):
But I want to tell you the long version, the
version of this story about a Mississippi poll tax and
a segregated American military and an explosion of organized racism
in response to the Supreme Court ruling in round ver
Sport of Education. That ruling, that moment in May of
nineteen fifty four was like the big bang of modern
(06:20):
American reactionary politics. The debris field from that decision is
still expanding and we live in it. So forget where
you think we're trying to end up and just walk
with me in isolation. Byron de lbeck With is just
a monster. This was an unpredictable inexplicable act of violence.
(06:47):
He's a rogue wave rising out of calm seas to
recavoc is racism personified. He's quite literally a stranger in
the night stalking his victim from the shadows with a rifle.
That's just true crime. You know, we're titillated by the
lurid details, but we don't learn anything if every act
(07:10):
of violence carried out by a right wing extremist is
just some hideous freak accident. But there's nothing you can
do except live in fear, and you don't have to.
The story is about him, it's about what he did.
But he's just our entry point into the world he
lived in, the world he killed in, because he was
(07:32):
a product of that world. I mean, how else could
someone like Eudora Welty have had such a clear idea
of who this killer was before he was even found.
I mean, she wasn't an FBI behavioral analyst. She was
a novelist of that short story she wrote the day
after the murder. She later told William F. Buckley, of
(07:53):
all people, quote, I've lived here all my life. I
know the kind of mind that did this. I'm in
a position where I know I know what this man
must feel like. I've lived with this kind of thing.
She didn't know Byron de la bequ With, but she
knew a million Byron's de la bequ With, And in
(08:15):
that brief, strange story, she captured this image of an
aggrieved white man. A white man whose life wasn't as
good as he felt like he was owed. A white
man who saw a black man living in the suburbs
with a decent house, drive in a new car, and
that made him angry. A black man who wanted to vote,
a black man who wanted equal pay. He was a
(08:38):
white man who was unkind to his wife and not
terribly well educated. He was a white man who didn't
want to be held accountable for his actions, but he
also wanted somehow to get credit for what he felt
like was a heroic good deed. A man who swore
up and down that he didn't do it for political reasons,
(08:59):
but was connected to some very political causes. I mean,
she really nailed him. She knew exactly what kind of
man was standing in the dark across the street from
Medgar Evers House in June of nineteen sixty three, because
she knew Mississippi and both Byron de La Beckwith and
(09:25):
Medgar Evers were sons of Mississippi. In the first part
of this story, we saw a young Beckwith wandering the
grounds of his family's dilapidated Mississippi plantation house, surrounded by
the rotting relics of their glorious Confederate past. And we
saw young Medgar Evers walking for miles to get to
(09:47):
the only school in the county that was opened to
black children, a route that took him past the bloody
clothes that had been stripped from the body of a
lynching victim. A friend of his father's. Byron Dilla Beckwith
was from a white family in Decline. They'd been plantation
owners and slaveholders, and before the war they were rich.
(10:11):
His mother's extended family owned tens of thousands of acres
of cotton field and the Mississippi Delta, and they owned
the hundreds of human beings required to work that land.
When he moved back into his grandparents house as a
little boy, his grandfather would still wear his old Confederate
uniform on special occasions, and if the day was something
(10:34):
really special, his grandmother served tea using the china she'd
received as a gift from Jefferson Davis's widow. But before
Byron Dila Bequwith was a teenager, his grandparents were dead
and his parents were dead too. His father had squandered
his inheritance and died young from complications from alcoholism, and
(10:56):
then his mother wasted away in her childhood bedroom in
between in a sanitarium, and he was left to be
raised in this crumbling old house by a pair of
eccentric uncles. The family name still meant something, but that
was really all they had. The money was gone. It
(11:17):
was a terrible student. He flunked out of several fancy
boarding schools before eventually graduating from his local public high
school at the age of twenty. Then he proceeded to
immediately fail out of college two times before Christmas. Medgar Evers,
on the other hand, was the son of a black
family whose lot in life was overall all things considered
(11:42):
improving from generation to generation as bad at things still were.
His badest things still are for black residence in Mississippi,
It's not hard to say he was doing better than
his ancestors. His mother named him after her grandfather, Medgar Wright,
a man who, according to the family lore, had a
(12:04):
reputation as the most troublesome slave in East Mississippi. When
Medgar and his brother Charles were born in the nineteen twenties,
the Ever's family was doing all right. Sixty years after
the abolition of slavery, a lot of black Mississippians were
still farming the same land that had been worked by
enslaved people before the Civil War, just under the slightly
(12:27):
modified and still highly exploited of terms of sharecropping. But
the Ever's family weren't sharecroppers. I mean, by the time
the depression hit, they weren't well off, nobody really was,
but they owned a little bit of land that they
farmed for themselves. His father, Jim Evers, worked at the sawmill,
and his mother, Jesse, worked as a housekeeper for a
(12:48):
white family in town. His father's family also ran a
funeral home that they were involved with to some degree
at different points in time, and even during the depression.
The Evers children had dress shoes on at church every Sunday,
and there was food on the table every night, which
is more than a lot of people could say. These
(13:10):
two men seem almost as if they were written into
a novel, as literary foils a dowardly mobile son of
the Confederacy flunking out of private school after private school,
and the son of a black landowner who walked to
the next town over to go to high school because
he wanted to be an attorney. Both men volunteered for
(13:32):
the military during World War II. Both returned home to Mississippi,
married and became traveling salesmen, and in the nineteen fifties
they found themselves on the opposite sides of the battle
over segregation. Byron de la Bequeth enlisted in the Marine
Corps in January of nineteen forty two, just a few
(13:54):
weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He'd spent all
of nineteen forty one working at the PEPs bottling plant
after dropping out of college twice. In the fall of
nineteen forty he was twenty one years old. He was
an orphan. He didn't have a girlfriend. He owned a
little bit of land that his mother had left him
from the old family plantation, but he had no interest
(14:17):
in farming. But he'd grown up on stories about his ancestors.
They'd fought great battles from the Revolutionary War to the
Civil War. He'd grow up hearing Civil War stories first
hand from his grandfather. Maybe this war was just what
he needed. This was his chance to be a hero
(14:40):
like his Confederate ancestors. Don't think too hard about that.
He definitely considered his ancestors service in the Revolutionary War
and the Civil War to be equally patriotic endeavors. That
wasn't a contradiction for him. As his biographer wrote, there
(15:01):
was no unresolved conflict in Beckworth's mind about killing the enemy.
It fit his psyche. His ancestors had proudly killed the
enemies of their young country, and he was proud to
finally be among their illustrious company. His was a boy's
pride grounded in a sense of insecurity that made him
want to prove himself worthy of his noble ancestry. This
(15:24):
comes from kind of an unusual source. That quote is
from a fascinating biography of Byron Della Beckwith called Portrait
of a Racist by Reed Massengil. Masengillis Beckworth's nephew. His
mother's sister was Beckwith's first wife, and growing up, Massengil
(15:46):
didn't know his uncle. He had no contact with this
man for obvious reasons. But when he graduated with a
degree in journalism. In the mid eighties, his estranged uncle
reached out. He wanted someone to write a book about him.
He'd tried to write it himself, but he hadn't gotten
very far, and he hadn't found any interest in publishers.
(16:10):
But he's in his sixties at that point and he
wanted a story told, so he reached out to this
nephew he's never met. Massing Kill's book is unique. It's
one of the better biographies of a terrible man I've
ever read, and I think that's because it's maybe the
(16:30):
only one I've ever read where the author had the
long term trust and cooperation of the subject without any
sort of emotional entanglement, either familial or because he himself
is a believer. I mean, they're related, but they do
not have a relationship. I've talked a few times on
(16:52):
this show about various biographies of racist that I've used
for my research. There's one I come back to a
lot that I can't rely on necessarily. Fame of a
Dead Man's Deeds is the most detailed account of the
life of William Muther Pierce, the Nazi who wrote the
Turner Diaries. So I keep coming back to it. But
(17:15):
over the course of their work together on the book,
Pierce managed to recruit the book's author, Robert S. Griffin.
So as he's interviewing him to write this unbiased biography,
he's becoming a white supremacist. So the book is detailed,
but it's deeply flawed. And then I'm thinking too, of
(17:37):
other biographies I've used for the show. One's written by
relatives of the subject, and those are intimate looks at
the subject of the book. But there's this entanglement, right.
It's difficult to write about your father, for example, or
your ex husband. Massing Gill is in this unique position
of having this close, intimate relationship with the man without
(18:00):
the emotional baggage that would allow the subject to manipulate him.
It's interesting. Everything has a bias, but it seems clear
where the author stands. He's repulsed by and at times
terrified of his uncle. He spent years working with his uncle,
(18:22):
talking to him, writing to him, being proselytized to by him,
and his uncle gave him letters and materials that wouldn't
have been available to anyone else. Because he's cooperating, because
he thinks this is going to be a flattering book,
and critically it's not because Read Masengil does not appear
to be a racist. He was not charmed by his uncle.
(18:44):
He's not making excuses for this man. And the subject
of the book wasn't his only source. His aunt, Beckwit's
ex wife provided her own recollections of their marriage and
gave the author access to her personal letters. It really
is rare to get a look at one of these
men that is both intimate and growded. In reality, the
(19:11):
uncle and nephew had a pretty bad falling out long
before the book was actually published. But I couldn't find
anything definitive to answer my biggest question, did Byron de
la Beckwith know what kind of work his nephew would
end up being most famous for aside from this book,
which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but most of
(19:33):
Reed Massingale's other works in photography, According to a press
release for an exhibition of his work at the Bob
Meiser Museum in Photographic archive, quote best known for his candid, erotic,
and deeply humane portraits of the all American male, Read
Massingille has long chronicled an alternative history of masculinity, one
(19:53):
grounded in everyday beauty, queer intimacy, and unguarded self presentation.
In this exhibition, massen Yell turns to the Fuji Instacts
mini format to create a tactile, instant archive of desire
and disclosure. The resulting images are raw, yet affectionate, playful
yet sincere, offering a vernacular counterpoint to stylized queer portraiture
(20:18):
and mainstream erotic conventions. Portrait of a Racist was his
first book, published in nineteen ninety four, but in the
three decades since he's mostly an expert on vintage nude
male photography. He's written and edited several volumes, and his
(20:38):
photographs have been shown in galleries and museums all over
the country. I couldn't tell you what Beckwith may have
thought about that, but I think you can.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Imagine what I'm getting at here is the book is
unusual in a good way, and I trust the author
(21:08):
enough to believe some of the claims that appear without citation,
like this description of the injury Beckwith suffered at the
Battle of Tarawa in November of nineteen forty three.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
Quote, he was lucky. The doctor's thought slightly higher and
to the right, and the Japs would have literally blown
Corporal Beckwith's testicles away. End quote. Now, the book is
largely very thoroughly footnoted. It's well sighted. I checked a
lot of these primary sources myself just to see more information.
(21:44):
But oddly, this bit about how the doctors were amazed
that his testicles hadn't been blown off, there's no citation
for that. Maybe it's something his uncle told him personally
Byron de la Beckwith spent the first half of nineteen
forty two in San Diego before his platoon was shipped
off to the Pacific Theater at the end of the summer,
(22:06):
where his unit ran supplies for the troops fighting at Guadalcanal.
Massengkill interviewed several marines who'd served with Beckwith, and they
all remember him fondly. He was quote a very likable person,
one of them said. Another said he was one hell
of a good marine. Frankly, I liked Beckwith, said another.
(22:32):
The guy who said he was likable shared fond memories
that he had of hanging out with Beckwith while they
were in the Solomon Islands. They'd throw hand grenades in
the water and scoop up the dead fish. They spent
their afternoons off swimming off the coast of the island,
playing make believe in a sunken ship they found. I mean,
they were practically just kids, and that really drives home
(22:54):
that God, these young men they send off to war,
they were really barely adults swimming down to a sunken
ship a few feet underwater and pretending to drive it
like their little boys.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
You know.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
The trip down memory Lane ends abruptly.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
I can't remember if it was Japanese skulls or teeth
that he kept, but it was one of the other.
That was one thing that was a little weird about him.
End quote. Beckwith unit spent most of nineteen forty three
stationed in New Zealand. He drank too much and spent
(23:35):
all his money on shore leave and read his Bible
every day. And the Marines trained for an amphibious landing
using the landing vehicles that had been debuted at Guadalcanal.
When those amphibious tracked vehicles made their second appearance at
the Battle of Tarawa November of nineteen forty three, Byron
de la Beckwith was one of the men manning a
machine gun Taroa is a little atoll in the Gilbert
(23:59):
Island in what is now the Republic of Kiribas and
in nineteen forty three, the United States felt that the
tiny Japanese airstrip on the tiny island in that atoll
had to be taken before they could gain control of
the Marshall Islands, which they needed in order to launch
an attack on the Mariana Islands. They were just leapfrogging
(24:22):
their way across the Pacific Ocean to get close to Japan.
And just a quick side note about the pronunciation of
these locations in the Gilbert Islands. I'm sorry. I watched
a ton of videos of historians and World War two
weirdos talking about the battle, and it seems like they
were just choosing which syllable distress at random. And half
(24:46):
the tourist videos I found were Australians pronouncing the country Kiribati,
which is what it looks like, but that's not how
it's pronounced, so I don't think I can trust them.
They were saying Tarawa. I think it's Taroa. I did
my best, and I apologize to any Gilbertese speakers and
any e Kiribas people in the audience. The Japanese garrison
(25:10):
there was on this teeny tiny island at the tip
of the atoll called Bischeo. Bisheo is half a square mile,
that is the total area of the island of Bisheo.
It's eight hundred yards wide at its widest point, so
they thought they could take it pretty easily. But the
(25:32):
Americans had not anticipated the extent of the Japanese fortifications
on Bascheo, and they failed to thoroughly account for the
neep tide that's those two days a month where the
high tide is slightly less high than usual, and this
tidal miscalculation left their troop transport ships stuck on coral
(25:54):
reefs under heavy fire from the Japanese troops on the beach.
Over the course of this four day battle, more than
six thousand people died. There were over one thousand American casualties.
Almost every last Japanese soldier on the island was killed
(26:15):
or died by suicide, over thirty five hundred of them.
And there were over one thousand forcibly conscripted Korean laborers
there on the Japanese base, and almost all of them died.
It sounds like it must have been hell on Earth.
A shocking number of the American casualties were drownings. Men
(26:37):
who were desperate to get out of those stranded troop
transport ships just jumped into the water and never made
it to shore. I'm not a huge World War two guy.
I mean, I know a lot about Nazis, but mostly
the ones that came later. I don't really know shit
about the Pacific theater. But I'm a little surprised I'd
(26:57):
never heard of Taroa. The mistakes they made and planning
that beach landing are kind of why the Navy Seals exist.
The Navy had been studying ways to improve amphibious landing
since World War One, but after the massive and deadly
miscalculations regarding the coral at Taroa, a group of Navy
officers and sailors were recruited for a formal training program
(27:20):
in underwater reconnaissance and demolition. This formed the first underwater
demolition Team, which was the precursor to the Seals Who
Knew Byron de la Beckwith was one of more than
two thousand American Marines who were injured in the Battle
of Tarowa. He was a machine gunner on one of
the amphibious landing vehicles, and those were heavy enough to
(27:43):
make it over the reefs to land on the beach.
But Beckwith never made it to the island, and honestly,
he's lucky he got shot when he did, because I
think making it to the island would have been worse
for him. But with fifty yards of ocean between him
and the Japanese soldiers on the shore, he took a
bullet to the upper thigh. A roving medic found him
(28:05):
unconscious in the water, and he woke up aboard a
hospital ship headed for Hawaii. He spent a month there
recovering before being sent back to the mainland. He received
a purple heart for his service and spent the remainder
of his time in the military working as an airplane
mechanic at a base in Tennessee. In the definitive account
of the battle written by war correspondent Robert Sherid, his
(28:29):
name is misspelled in the list of casualties. According to
his nephew, Beckwith believed God had spared him at Taroa,
and if God had personally intervened to save his life
that morning in the middle of the ocean. Well, surely
he was meant to do something important. In October of
(28:52):
nineteen forty three, a month before Byron de Labequit got
shot in the leg, Medgar Evers dropped out of high
school at seventeen enlist in the army, following his older
brother Charles, who'd already signed up twenty years later. Shortly
before his death, Fivers told journalist ben Bagdickian quote, just
before I went into the Army, I began wondering how
(29:15):
long I could take it. I used to watch the
Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down
a Negro with their car, or white gang is coming
through town to beat up a Negro. He wanted to
get out of Mississippi. There had to be more in
this world than getting spat on by a white man
in Decatur, Mississippi, and he was gonna see it. The
(29:36):
United States Army that Medgar Evers joined in nineteen forty
three was segregated. It always had been, although the rules
changed from war to war. But black Americans have fought
and died in every conflict in American history before there
was an America. But they did so as second class
(29:58):
citizens at the I mean, they were fighting and dying
for this country a century before you could even call
them second class citizens because they weren't granted the legal
right to be considered citizens at all. In seventeen seventy five,
George Washington signed an order stating that boys unable to
bear arms, old men unfit to endure the fatigues of battle,
(30:22):
and negroes were not suitable for enlistment in the Continental Army.
It wasn't until nineteen forty eight, when President Truman signed
an executive order that the entire United States military was
legally integrated. But that path isn't linear. We like to
smooth out the bumps in the road when we look
(30:44):
back at history. So we have this idea that history
is a story of things getting incrementally better all the time.
It's just this smooth upward trajectory. To get from slavery
in eighteen sixty to a black president in two thousand
and eight, to get from Washington's whites only militia to
today's multi racial armed forces, this must be a story
(31:04):
of steady, positive trajectory in American race relations.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Right.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
It doesn't work like that. I mean, Washington himself ended
up changing his mind. The decision to exclude black men
from the Continental Army had been motivated mostly by fear
of slave rebellions. You can't give these people weapons, you
can't train them to do violence, because they'll do it
to us, right, that's what they're worried about. But their
(31:33):
refusal to engage with willing black volunteers just made Lord
Dunmore's offer twice as appealing. The former governor of the
Virginia Colony was offering freedom to any black slave or
indentured servant who took up arms for the British, and
hundreds of men took him up on the offer. Lord
(31:54):
Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, as he called it, was formidable. Now
I'm embarrassed to say, I don't think i've ever heard
this story. I was telling my husband about it, and
he very excitedly said, oh, yeah, after you go to
bed at night, I'm watching that new ken Burns Revolutionary
War documentary and that's in there. And he was telling
me things that I hadn't even read. I haven't watched
(32:16):
the ken Burns documentary, but I feel like they should
have taught me about this in school, not just because
it's fascinating American history. But because one of the battles
Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian regiment won was the Battle of Kemp's Landing,
And like, I don't know, maybe that could have come
(32:36):
up in some kind of lesson at my middle school,
which was called Kemp's Landing. This battle happened in the
neighborhood I grew up in, but I never heard this story.
And initially Washington's only partially reversing course. He's allowing only
free black men to enlist. But as the colonists are
(32:59):
getting more and more desperate for more bodies for their war,
the looser these rules become. Enslaved men were first admitted
to the army as a form of alternative to service.
A white man could avoid the draft by sending an
enslaved person in his place, or he could send someone
that he owns and have them send his salary home.
But by the war's end, the Continental Army was compensating
(33:22):
slaveholders for the use of their property and offering those
men freedom in exchange for service, and ultimately George Washington
accidentally ended up commanding the closest thing to an integrated
armed services that this country would see until nineteen fifty.
(33:43):
But despite all that, as President George Washington codified a
white's only army. The Militia Act of seventeen ninety two
defined eligibility for service as being a free, able bodied,
white male citizen. Nevertheless, black Americans have served in every
(34:18):
conflict sense, but generally in segregated units commanded by white officers,
and often relegated to what we're seen as lesser roles
and paid less and not promoted. Oddly, the Navy has
always been kind of an exception here. I mean, I'm
not saying black sailors got equal pay and equal respect,
(34:41):
absolutely not, but the Navy's always been far less segregated
than the other branches. A lot of the sources I
read just chalk this up to an oddly simplistic explanation of, well,
it's just too hard to do segregation on a ship
because there's no privacy. But I don't buy that. I
don't buy that because they did eventually manage to do it.
(35:04):
But also I think there's more going on here. I mean,
the sea is a different world. Sailors have always had
different laws than we have on the land. They have
their own culture at sea, and There's a long, rich
history of black mariners, free black men who find work
on merchant vessels and traveled the world and eras where
that kind of freedom of movement and economic mobility just
(35:28):
wasn't an option for them on land. Whaling was famously diverse,
and the whaling ships of the eighteen hundreds were nothing
if not a racially integrated workplace. Demani Davis, an archivist
at the National Archives and an expert on African American history,
points to this whaling ship history to explain the disproportionate
number of black men serving in a relatively integrated Union
(35:52):
Navy during the Civil War. The large number of free
black men in the American Northeast who had experience on
whaling vessels meant there was a ready pool of experienced
sailors for the Union Navy, and they couldn't really afford
to turn them down. But even the Navy wasn't safe
from Woodrow Wilson. Progress isn't linear, and there is no
(36:16):
better proof of that than Woodrow Wilson. I mean, he's
a real contender in the very fierce competition to be
America's most racist president. When he took office in nineteen thirteen,
he resegregated the federal workforce. I mean, we're right there
at the halfway point between the abolition of slavery and
the civil rights legislation of the nineteen sixties, and we're
(36:38):
sliding backwards. Bathrooms, lunch rooms, whole offices in federal buildings,
the postal service. They'd been integrated before Wilson turned back
the clock. Wilson, the only American president to have been
born a Confederate citizen, packed his cabinet with rabbit white supremacists.
(36:59):
He appointed Josephus Daniels as his Secretary of the Navy.
Daniel's only qualification seems to have been that he was
extremely racist. I mean, he had no military experience at all.
I can't imagine what he thought he was going to
do in this job, because, aside from segregating the United
States Navy, Josephus Daniel's main claim to fame is that
(37:22):
he incited the Wilmington massacre. As the editor of the
News and Observer, he was responsible for running the propaganda
that whipped up the angry white mob that overthrew the
integrated government of Wilmington, North Carolina in eighteen ninety eight.
The mob killed and displaced most of the town's black population,
(37:44):
and as a result of the changes made by Secretary Daniels,
by nineteen fifteen, black sailors had been reduced to working
as servants for their white counterparts aboard naval ships, and
in the pages of the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper,
one sailor Lamente in the Navy of the United States,
we are Jim Crowd. On the eve of the United
(38:10):
States entry into World War One, Wilson personally intervened to
prevent the promotion of Colonel Charles Young. Young would have
been the army's first black general. Albert Dockery, a white
Southern officer, wrote to the Secretary of War to complain
about serving under a black officer, and surprisingly, the Secretary
(38:33):
of War told him to suck it up, do your duty,
or resign. Those are your options, soldier, simple as that.
But Albert Dockery complained to his daddy, and his daddy
knew Senator John Sharp Williams from Mississippi, and Senator Williams
wrote to President Wilson about the situation, and suddenly Secretary
Baker is under intense pressure to change his mind. Baker
(38:58):
couldn't assign Colonel Young to a in the war. If
he sent him to the front in Europe, there would
be no getting around him commanding white troops, because by
this point in Wilson's presidency, there weren't enough black troops
for him to command, and the President had told Baker
that it would be quote not only distasteful, but practically
(39:19):
impossible for white soldiers to serve under a black general,
so Young was forced into retirement. Now, in Wilson's letters
to Secretary Baker, he doesn't outright say this black officer
cannot be a general, this black officer cannot command white soldiers.
He's not talking about what should be done to Colonel Young.
(39:43):
He's talking about how we should deal with Dockery's complaint.
The issue he's ostensibly intervening in here is Albert Dockery's
request for a transfer. Because Albert Dockery wasn't saying Colonel
Young shouldn't be in the army. He's just saying I
can can't serve under him. And he'd asked to be
reassigned to a post with a white commanding officer, and
(40:05):
the Secretary of War told him no. But Wilson's willingness
to get personally involved in this extremely minor personnel matter.
In this one lieutenant's frivolous transfer request, it sent a
pretty clear message, this isn't about Albert Dockery, this is
about segregation. A few years later, when Allied soldiers held
(40:29):
a celebratory march in Paris in July of nineteen nineteen,
black soldiers from England and France marched down the street
alongside their colleagues, and the United States Army didn't let
their black soldiers attend the parade. People love comparing Trump
to different presidents. You know, he's Nick Sin, he's Jackson,
(40:52):
He's more corrupt than Warren G. Harding, But in terms
of his approach to the federal workforce, he's decidedly will
And so this is the United States military that Medgar
and Charles Evers are joining in World War Two. It
is more segregated than ever. There are fewer black people
in the military in these inter war years than ever,
(41:15):
and now suddenly we need everybody we can get because
we're going to war. And black soldiers in World War
Two were limited mostly to support roles. They were not
on the front lines. That doesn't mean none of them
saw combat. Of course they did, but they were not
typically assigned to those roles. Charles went off to the
(41:37):
Pacific Theater and Medger went to Europe. And in Europe,
Medgar Evers served in the Quartermaster's Corps in a segregated
battalion under white officers. His unit participated in the famous
Red Ball Express trucking convoy that supplied combat troops after
the invasion at Normandy. Medgar Evers served at Normandy antverp
(41:58):
Liege Lahav Cherbourg and received two Combat stars and a
Good Service Medal. While serving as a military policeman in France.
In nineteen forty five, Medgar Evers fell in love and
on the other side of the world his brother Charles,
he was stationed in the Philippines, and he too had
taken up with a woman he was pretty serious about.
(42:22):
But both brothers had to leave their loves behind because
those women were white. They could not bring home a
bride because those marriages were not legal in Mississippi. It
was illegal for them to touch or kiss, or love
or marry these women in the state where they grew up.
(42:43):
In France, Medgar Evers could walk down the street holding
hands with a white woman at fourteen, he saw a
man lynched for disrespecting a white woman. And at eighteen
he saw the horrors of war. And now he's nineteen
years old, and he's in love, and he's faced with
the reality of going home to decater, Mississippi, where a
(43:06):
white man's liable to lynch him if he'd just thought
about doing what these French people aren't batting an eye at.
His brother told a journalist years later, quote to the French,
Medgar was a soldier first, an American second, and a
Negro third. Going with this French girl made Medgar even
(43:27):
more sure the racism we'd grown up with in Mississippi
was unnatural and could be changed. It convinced him black
and white could live in peace. In the spring of
nineteen forty six, Byron de la Beckwith moved his young bride,
a woman he'd met while stationed in Tennessee, back into
the crumbling family mansion in Greenwood, Mississippi. He hadn't started
(43:52):
beating her yet, but he would soon. Even before the
move to Mississippi, the couple's favorite weekend activity was already
drinking too much and getting into a fight, but he
didn't start hitting her until after the baby was born,
he struggled to find a job, and he struggled even
harder to keep one. Nothing was ever good enough for him.
(44:15):
He deserved more, he deserved better. And now he's back
in this old plantation house, surrounded by the dusty relics
of the ante Bellum South and his strange old bachelor uncles,
and he's longing for the grandeur he feels like his
family name deserves. He's becoming increasingly obsessed with his family
history and with the past, and with holding on to
(44:39):
this imagined past where everything was better. But that's the
place he never lived. When his son, Byron Junior or
Byron the Fourth, depending on what paperwork you're looking at,
was born, the drinking got worse. He resented the baby,
he was of the baby. He stopped enjoying sex, and
(45:04):
then he stopped being able to do it at all.
He was impotent. He became increasingly religious and increasingly violent.
In the spring of nineteen forty six, as Byron de
la Beque is drinking away his disappointment in his childhood
bedroom in an old plantation house in Greenwood, Mississippi, Charles
(45:25):
and Medgar Evers were coming home to Mississippi too, two
hours away indicator. They sat their family down and told
them there's going to have to be a change. Joining
the army was their first real exposure to life outside
of Mississippi, and it wasn't just France that was different.
(45:46):
Their sister Elizabeth told historian Michael Vincent Williams about Medgar's
disbelief that in New York City black people can stay
at the same hotels and eat at the same restaurants
as white people. You can just do it. Medgar Evers
always knew segregation was wrong. He understood that. As a
little boy, he was acutely aware of the injustice he
(46:08):
was suffering. When those white children threw sticks and rocks
at him from their school bus window while he was
walking down the dirt road to his segregated school, he knew.
But now he'd breathed free air. Now he knew what
it felt like. When the Evers brothers got home in
nineteen forty six, Medgar couldn't even write letters to his
(46:29):
French girlfriend because it wasn't safe. Charles had left his
girlfriend behind too. In the Philippines, White Mississippians wouldn't even
allow them to wear their army uniforms in public. Medgar
Evers wasn't allowed to display the combat stars he'd earned
on Omaha Beach. They'd fought a war for freedom or
(46:52):
democracy or something, but where's theirs? They wanted to vote.
This whole meandering journey started with signs. I don't know
if you remember. A month ago now, I got sidetracked
by some news about the Trump administration trying to whitewash
(47:14):
American history by censoring historical markers and educational material at
national parks, and one of the points of contention was
this brochure the Medga and Rerley Ever's Home National Monument.
That's what got me thinking about Medgar Evers and the
way we remember his story. We're not done yet, of
(47:35):
course not. The story's not over. But before we get
to the part of the story where a drunk, impotent
domestic abuser gets addicted to grievance politics after the Supreme
Court ruled against segregation, I want to leave you with
another sign. Outside of the courthouse in Decatur, Mississippi, there's
a sign with Medgar Ever's name on it. It is
(47:59):
not much to look at, but neither is the courthouse.
It's a small town placed by the Mississippi Department of
Archives in History in two thousand and four. The sign
reads Medgar Wilie Evers born in Decatur, July second, nineteen
twenty five was a graduate of Newton Vocational High School
in Alcorn College. After serving in the military in World
(48:21):
War Two, he returned to Decatur and, along with his
brother Charles, attempted to register to vote here in nineteen
forty six, but was turned away. An active participant in
the fight to end racial segregation, Medgar Evers was later
named as Mississippi's first NAACP Field Secretary. On June twelfth,
nineteen sixty three, Evers was assassinated outside his home in Jackson.
(48:44):
He is buried at Arlington Cemetery. And I didn't know
about this sign when I started. This wasn't one of
the signs we talked about last month. But I saw
it because I wanted to see a picture of this courthouse,
because I needed to picture a pair of moments. This
(49:06):
bookend of experiences outside of this courthouse, one hot night
in July of nineteen thirty four, and one more twelve
years later, in July of nineteen forty six. In the
summer of nineteen thirty four. Medga and Charles Evers were
(49:29):
just little boys. Medgar had just turned nine and his
big brother wasn't quite twelve. And one Saturday evening, these
two little boys snuck into town to see a big speech.
Former Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo was running for senate. Bilbo
was a clansman, an ardent segregationist, and honestly a real blowhard.
(49:52):
His stump speeches were loud and vulgar, and they could
go on for hours. It was a real spectacle. It
was something to see. The whole white population of Newton
County was there at the courthouse to hear this man
shout racial slurs until he was blue.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
In the face.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
And then suddenly, mid rant Bilbo paused because these two
little black boys had slipped to the crowd and they
were sitting just a few feet away from him on
the courthouse steps, And according to a book written later
by Charles Evers, Bilbo looked right at them. He looked
down at Medgar and Charles Evers, and he pointed at
(50:29):
the boys as he shouted to the crowd outside the courthouse.
If we fail to hold high the wall of separation
between the races, we will live to see the day
when these two Nward boys right here will be asking
for everything that's ours. By right, you see these two
lit Lenwards sitting down there. If you don't keep them
in their place, and someday they'll be in Washington trying
to represent you. And according to Charles Evers, a nine
(50:56):
year old Medgar Evers nudged his big brother in the
ribs and looked up at him and whispered that ain't
a bad IDEA Twelve years later, on the eve of
Medgar Ever's twenty first birthday, word had gone round town
and decater that no black folks should come into town
that night. Medgri and his father went anyway. He'd been
(51:21):
bold enough to go when he was nine years old,
and now he's a man, a man who'd seen corpses
on the beach at Normandy, so he went. They stood
across the street watching Bilbo's rally. Medgrev said he remembers
looking right into Bilbo's mouth as he urged the crowd
to pay a nighttime visit to any Negroes who might
(51:42):
be thinking of voting in the morning. The Evers men
sat up all night, but no one came, so they
went to the courthouse. A mob of armed white men
was there waiting.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
For them, but they went inside, and the registrar asked
Medgar Evers, are you sure you boys really want to vote?
And he said, yes, sir, and he signed his name
in the book. And as he signed his name in
that book, he's flicking open the knife in his pocket
with his other hand.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
The mob is restless. They'd survived the war and now
they're going to die on the front steps of the
Newton County Courthouse. I don't think so. It wasn't worth it.
He kept the knife in his pocket and they left
without voting. Medgar Evers never did cast a ballot in
Newton County, Mississippi. But now there's a plaque honoring the
(52:40):
time he tried, stuck in the ground, just a few
feet away from the steps where he'd sat listening to
a clanspan mock him as a little boy. The excerpted
(53:01):
portion of You doora Welty's short story, whereas the voice
coming from that was used at the top of the episode,
was taken from an original draft of the story held
in a special collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives
in History. The final version published in the New Yorker
was edited to remove details specific to the crime, such
as Medgar Evers's name, to avoid legal complications, as the
(53:23):
story was written before but published after Beckwith's original arrest.
Scans of the pages of Wealthy's original typewritten draft with
handwritten edits can be seen in the link of the
show notes. Weird Little Guys is a production of Coolshoe
Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me,
Molly Hunger. Part executive producers are Sophie Littterman and Robert Evans.
(53:45):
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 it, but I probably won't answer.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subredd.
It just don't post anything that's going to make you
one of my Weird Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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