Byron De La Beckwith
American White Supremacist and murderer (1920-2001)
Byron De La Beckwith Jr. (November 9, 1920 – January 21, 2001) was an American white supremacist and member of the Ku Klux Klan who murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi.
In 1964, he was tried twice on a murder charge in Mississippi. The all-white male juries each ended in hung juries, and De La Beckwith went free. In 1994, based on new evidence, he was tried again. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001 at the age of 80.
Early life and career
De La Beckwith was born in Colusa, California, the only child of Byron De La Beckwith Sr., a postmaster for the town of Colusa, and Susan Southworth Yerger. His father died of pneumonia when Byron Jr. was only 5 years old. One year later, he and his mother settled in Greenwood, Mississippi, to be near her family.
“Byron De La Beckwith” enters the record as american White Supremacist and murderer (1920-2001). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Byron, Beckwith and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1018601. VIAF identifies the subject as 94217632. The Library of Congress control number is n93021587. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 2001, 1963 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “Byron De La Beckwith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.