Mississippi Weighs Effort to Erase Stain of Evers Killing : Civil rights: Suspect, who asserts innocence, may face third trial in case symbolizing state’s violent, racist past.

It was a time of night riders, lynchings, threatening phone calls in the night, colored entrances, drinking fountains and “You want to register to do what , boy?”

Medgar Evers bought a car with a V-8 engine so he could outrun anything on the road. The 37-year-old NAACP official expected to die, was prepared to die, his wife and friends insist. But if he could help it, he was not going to be an easy mark.

They got him one June night in 1963, the night President John F. Kennedy spoke on television of a “moral crisis” and vowed to end segregation. Evers had watched the speech, then had gone to a civil rights rally. When he pulled into his driveway and stepped out of his car, the assassin, nestled in a thicket of honeysuckle across the street, took aim. The bullet tore into Evers’ back.

Almost 30 years later, the state of Mississippi still has not washed away the resulting stain from its reputation or its conscience, although it soon may have another chance. The Mississippi Supreme Court is weighing the question of whether prosecutors may once again try Evers’ accused killer. It would be the third trial for Byron De La Beckwith, a 71-year-old white supremacist and former fertilizer salesman who insists that he is innocent.

At his first trial in 1964, in a vivid sign of the tenor of the times, the governor strolled into the courtroom in front of the all-white jury and shook Beckwith’s hand. That trial, like the second later that year, ended in a hung jury.

The killing of Medgar Evers, while one of the most notorious slayings of the civil rights era, was hardly an isolated act of racial violence. Between 1881 and 1966, there were 4,709 lynchings in the United States, most of them the racially motivated killings of Southern blacks, according to Daniel T. Williams, archivist for Tuskegee University in Alabama.

In Mississippi alone, there were 536 black lynchings. Most of the murders, including those from the bloody civil rights era of the 1950s and ‘60s, remain unsolved. These include the brutal slaying of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy killed in 1955 for whistling at a white woman, and the 1964 killing of three civil rights workers who were investigating the bombing of a black church.

In that case, seven people, including a Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard and a deputy sheriff, eventually were convicted and sentenced to prison on federal charges of violating the civil rights of the three men, Ben Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. But local murder charges were never filed.

“We have to settle these dastardly acts of old,” said Myrlie Evers, wife of the slain civil rights leader and a former Los Angeles public works commissioner. “It’s time to come to terms with this--not only time for me as an individual but it is also time for Mississippi itself and the nation as well. If we don’t, we live with guilt that will haunt us forever.”

Neil McMillen, who has been a history professor at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg since 1969, said that Evers’ unpunished death “symbolizes so much that the state has not yet owned up to. Mississippi not only is complicitous in his unpunished assassination, but Mississippi has a lot to atone for . . . . It’s a symbolic thing.”

All evidence pointed to Beckwith when Evers was killed. He was a gun collector who had been outspoken in his hatred of integrationists and blacks, openly calling for the use of violence. His gun, a 1917 Enfield 30.06 rifle, was used in the murder. And one of his fresh fingerprints was found on the scope. Prosecutors argued that a bruise around his eye could have been made by the recoiling weapon. Furthermore, witnesses spotted a car that looked like his near Evers’ home about the time of the shooting.

Nevertheless, after Beckwith testified that his gun had been stolen and two policemen from his hometown of Greenwood, Miss., testified that they had seen him 90 miles away from the scene of the crime, two juries were unable to reach a verdict.

The case was reopened, at the urging of Myrlie Evers and others, after the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in 1989 published stories detailing the secret role that high-level state officials played in Beckwith’s defense. The Sovereignty Commission, an organization dedicated to preserving segregation and led by the highest-level officials, including the governor and attorney general, had helped screen jurors.

Prosecutors could find no evidence that the commission had affected jurors’ votes; nevertheless, they pressed ahead with reopening the case. They found two witnesses who contradicted the two policemen’s testimony, saying that they saw Beckwith the night of the murder at the church rally Evers attended.

“He was standing at the entrance of the church, leaning back against the wall, observing the crowd,” said one of the witnesses, Willie Osborne, who was a deacon at the church at the time.

Osborne said he had not come forward to tell his story earlier because he was afraid that he also could be killed. It generally is conceded, as well, that his testimony would not have made a difference in 1964, since no jury had ever convicted a white for killing a black in Mississippi.

“A white man got more time for killing a rabbit than he got for killing a Negro,” said Samuel Bailey, a close Evers friend and fellow civil rights worker who said he was shocked that Beckwith was not acquitted in the earlier trials.

Beckwith has been in jail for a year without bail while his attorneys battle to get the case thrown out. They have taken their case to the state Supreme Court. In arguments before the court last Thursday, Bobby DeLaughter, an assistant Hinds County district attorney, said that among new evidence are four new witnesses who will testify that Beckwith, “believing he would never be held accountable,” made statements to them that incriminated him in the murder.

One of them is Dan Prince, a 47-year-old tile setter who was a tenant and neighbor of Beckwith in 1986-87 at Signal Mountain, Tenn. He said Beckwith, a longtime member of the Ku Klux Klan who has been a darling of white racist groups since his 1960s trials, often told him of his hatred of African-Americans and Jews. During one of those conversations, he said, Beckwith boasted of having killed a black man.

“He said that he had a job to do and he did it,” Prince said last week in an interview. “It seemed he wanted to brag about it . . . . He never called (Evers) name. The only thing he ever said was ‘that nigger,’ ” Prince said.

“At the time that I had these conversations with him and he would talk about this, I had no idea who Medgar Evers was. I could never remember hearing of him . . . . But, after they reopened the case and the name came out I knew that that was who he was talking about.”

He has no doubts that his former landlord assassinated Evers, Prince said. “The man has got a lot of hate in him. He’s a wild, crazy man,” he said.

Another piece of incriminating evidence was published in a 1975 book, “Klandestine,” by two members of the right-wing John Birch Society. In a brief reference, the book depicts Beckwith telling a klan meeting: “Killing that nigger (Evers) gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children. We ask them to do that for us. We should do just as much. So, let’s get in there and kill those enemies, including the President, from the top down!”

Beckwith’s attorneys argue, however, that the case is too old to retry. To reopen the case now, after it was officially closed in 1969, would violate their client’s constitutional right to a speedy trial and deny him due process, since much of the evidence has disappeared and many of the witnesses needed to counter prosecution witnesses are dead, they contend.

“The delay in this case is greater than any delay that . . . I have been able to find in Mississippi history,” attorney Merrida Coxwell said in arguments before the state’s highest court.

Even some of Evers’ old colleagues in the civil rights movement think the case should be dropped.

“These are things of the past,” said Dr. Felix Dunn, a former local NAACP vice president from Gulfport, Miss., and an Evers friend. “It opens up old wounds . . . . Nothing could be gained from a conviction,” he said. “Mississippi is trying to prove a point--that it can convict him. But Mississippi can never separate itself from its past.”

If the case is retried, it will be in a far different Mississippi than that which existed in 1964. Blacks did not serve on juries then and still were struggling for the right to vote. Now a black man sits on the state Supreme Court. (The black justice, Fred Banks Jr., removed himself from participating in the Beckwith case because, it is believed, he is a longtime member of the NAACP’s national board.)

As the NAACP’s first state field secretary, Evers was responsible for opening new NAACP branches throughout the state and registering voters--heroic acts in the 1950s and ‘60s. He also had personally investigated a number of killings, once going undercover to get information on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till.

“Medgar paved the way and he paid for it with his life,” Dunn said. “And he wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

Dunn, now a doctor in Gulfport, said he telephoned Evers three or four days before the assassination, after getting a purported white supremacist hit list. “I told him I’d seen the list; his (name) was at the top; mine was third, and ‘Medgar, you’ve got to be careful.’

“He said, ‘You know that doesn’t mean anything. There’s no way to be careful. You either get out of it or you stay the course.’ He stayed the course.”

In a sign of the past’s hold on this state, the Confederate battle flag is incorporated into the banner that flies over the Mississippi state Capitol and is displayed in courtrooms. But now for the first time such Old South symbolism is sharing the stage with symbols that resonate positively for blacks, who make up 36% of the state’s population. Evers now has a street and library named after him in Jackson. A statue of him stands in front of the library, only a few blocks from the house where he was slain.

It probably should be noted, however, that it took years to raise the $80,000 for the statue and that white support was negligible. Also, Evers, while hailed by historians as fearless and an important figure in Mississippi history, was inducted into the state’s Department of Archives and History’s Hall of Fame only last year.

“I just don’t think whites have ever fully recognized the enormity of Jim Crow, and more than that, the enormity of massive resistance, the wholesale violation of human rights in order to protect an immoral system,” said McMillen, the University of Southern Mississippi history professor. “Whites are generally comfortable with the new order, but I just think our state has a heavy burden to bear and one way we can bear it is by fully recognizing what went on then. I don’t think we’ve done that yet.”

One of the ways the state resisted change was through the Sovereignty Commission, which McMillen described as “the KGB of race.”

Created in 1956 to preserve and promote segregation, the commission went on to become an intelligence agency that spied on blacks and passed its information to police departments, racist hate groups and others.

In Beckwith’s second trial, the commission helped defense attorneys screen jurors to weed out Jews and civil rights sympathizers. While people who were involved in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s accuse the commission of harassing blacks and forcing one black dentist out of business by threatening his patients, the full extent of the commission’s efforts remain unknown because in 1977, four years after the commission was abolished, the Legislature ordered its files sealed for 50 years.

One document that has been uncovered and printed in the Jackson newspaper, however, is a letter that Beckwith wrote to the commission in 1956 applying for work for the organization. In the letter, he said he was “expert with a pistol, good with a rifle and fair with a shotgun--and--RABID ON THE SUBJECT OF SEGREGATION.”

No evidence has surfaced that the commission accepted Beckwith’s offer of employment. Nevertheless, many believe that the state is as guilty of Evers’ murder as the man who pulled the trigger.

“The state killed Medgar,” said Bailey, Evers’ close friend, who believes that Evers’ death was a paid assassination.

But whether or not the Sovereignty Commission or some other group hired the assassin, Dunn--noting that the governor shook Beckwith’s hand in the courtroom--said the state’s power structure had sent a clear signal. “The message (the handshake) gave to the jury was that this man is one of us . . . . You can’t find this man guilty. He was saying: ‘Byron, I endorse what you did and I want you to go free.’ ”

Between the early 1960s and today, while the state of Mississippi was undergoing vast changes, Beckwith never wavered from his white supremacist path. In 1967 he ran for lieutenant governor on a racist ticket and came in fifth in a field of six. In 1973 he was arrested in Louisiana with a carload of weapons--including a time bomb--and a map to the home of a prominent New Orleans Jewish leader. He spent five years in prison for possession of dynamite.

He later moved to Signal Mountain, Tenn., near Chattanooga, and married his second wife. Outside of white supremacist circles, he had sunk into obscurity until efforts began in 1989 to reopen the case.

At the forefront of the efforts was Myrlie Evers, who moved to Los Angeles after her husband was killed. She served for five years as a public works commissioner until she resigned last year, saying that physical problems resulting from an injury kept her from doing her job.

Her health has not stopped her from pressing on tirelessly for a new trial.

“I have no tolerance for those who say that too much time has passed,” she said.

“It’s very evident that justice has not been done in this case.”

Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.