Trump Admin Doesn’t Want Us to Call the Klansman Who Murdered Medgar Evers a Racist
Mississippi Today reported that several officials said the National Park Service attempted to remove museum brochures that described Byron De La Beckwith as "a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.”
Politics
There are few civil rights icons more central to Mississippi history than Medgar Evers. The NAACP’s first field secretary for the Magnolia State, Evers was a decorated U.S. Army veteran who earned three medals while serving in World War II and later launched a public investigation into the murder of Emmett Till. This week, however, Trump’s National Park Service tried to declare his killer, Byron De La Beckwith—a Ku Klux Klan member and white supremacist— should no longer be described as “racist.”
On Thursday, Mississippi Today reported that several officials, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, said NPS told them to remove visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument and edit out details about Beckwith. Among the details reportedly flagged for removal: that Evers was found lying in a pool of blood after he was shot. The brochures referred to Beckwith as “a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.”
Hours after the report was published, the brochures were returned. Park officials claimed they had been pulled because they’re “outdated.”
Evers was 37 years old when he was murdered on June 12, 1963—just hours after Beckwith watched President John F. Kennedy deliver a televised Oval Office address on civil rights. Beckwith had been hiding in the bushes outside Evers’ home in Jackson, Mississippi, and shot him in the back after he stepped out of his car. The bullet hole is still visible if you visit the property today. Beckwith was not convicted of murder until 1994, after two all-white juries previously refused to find him guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison and died in 2011.
It remains unclear what changes, if any, the NPS ultimately plans to make to the brochures. But Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) told Mississippi Today he’s sending a letter to the agency for clarification. Reena Evers-Everette, the Evers’ daughter, who serves as executive director of the institute, said that while NPS told them the issue is under review, “the final product has not been put out yet.”
Evers’ house, which he shared with his wife, Myrlie, was designated the 423rd unit of the National Park System in 2020. At the time, then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt (a Bush appointee who also served under Trump’s first term) called the designation an “honor.” “Medgar Evers was a true American hero who fought the Nazis at Normandy and fought racism with his wife Myrlie on the home front,” Bernhardt said. “It is our solemn responsibility as caretakers of America’s national treasures to tell the whole story of America’s heritage for the benefit of present and future generations.” Trump himself referred to Evers as a “great American hero” at the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in 2017.
The current controversy stems from another one of Trump’s hateful, discriminatory executive orders. In March, he signed “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” ordering Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to “remov[e] or chang[e information that] perpetuate[s] a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.” under this directive, the administration has already removed a historic photograph depicting the scars on the back of an escaped enslaved man from a Louisiana park, as well as a memorial in Philadelphia honoring people enslaved by George Washington, among other rollbacks related to slavery and Black history.
Jezebel has reached out to the NPS, and will update the story if we hear back.
The murder of Medgar Evers was an act of racial terror. That fact is not partisan. It is historical. Calling it anything else is not “restoring truth.” It is erasing it.
— Martin Luther King III (@officialmlk3.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 12:53 PM
Before his conviction, Beckwith gave multiple television interviews in which he openly espoused white supremacist views, spoke about “the right of white people to run the South,” referred to Black people as “beasts,” and continued to call Evers a “mongrel” decades after murdering him. “God hates mongrels,” Beckwith told Mississippi Today in a 1990 interview.
And in Trump’s America, that still apparently doesn’t qualify as racism.
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