Photo: Medgar Evers, assassinated Civil Rights Organizer in 1963
The National Park Service has removed visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument. Among the anticipated changes? No longer calling his murderer a “racist.”
Edits to the brochure have removed that reference to Byron De La Beckwith, according to Park Service officials, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Other edits include eliminating the reference to Medgar Evers lying in a pool of blood after being shot.
Reena Evers-Everette, executive director of the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute and daughter of the couple, said the family has been told the matter is under review, “but the final product has not been put out yet.”
In 1963, Beckwith shot the civil rights leader in the back on the driveway of the Evers family home in northwest Jackson. It would take 31 more years before a Mississippi jury would convict Beckwith.
Jeff Steinberg, founder of Sojourn to the Past, which regularly takes students and police officers on civil rights tours to the home, questioned the change to the Park Service material. “You can’t call Beckwith a racist?” he said. “If you opened a picture dictionary and turned to the definition for ‘racist,’ you’d probably find a picture of Byron De La Beckwith.”
The original brochures pulled from the home called Beckwith “a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.”
Stephanie Rolph, author of “Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council 1954-1989,” said the council “believed in the natural superiority of the Aryan race. They even went so far as to say that civilizations failed because of racial amalgamation.”
Beckwith also belonged to the nation’s most violent white supremacist group, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, responsible for at least 10 killings in Mississippi.
A Park Service spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
The Park Service’s decision comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused the previous administration of rewriting history. Under Trump’s order, the interior secretary must revise or replace signs that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”
Two months later, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed with his own order, calling for changes to monuments and memorials that “inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures; or include any other improper partisan ideology.”
The secretary’s order calls for the removal of “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
