Civil Rights: A Little Abnormal

Byron De La Beckwith fancied himself a real Southern gentleman. He dressed with casual care, always bowed deeply from the waist when passing friends, punctuated his drawl with soft “suhs.” It therefore came as a consider able shock to some of his Greenwood. Miss., acquaintances when “Delay” (after his middle names) Beckwith, 42, was charged last week with the slaying of N.A.A.C.P. Leader Medgar Evers. Said Greenwood’s Mayor Charles E. Sampson: “We are just stunned. I don’t think he’s the type. He would always greet you with a smile.”

Yet others, who knew Beckwith better, were less surprised. To them, that gracious smile was merely the facade of a twisted, troubled personality.

The Family Tree. Family was everything to Beckwith. He never wearied of noting that a great-grandfather, Judge Hunter Holmes Southworth, owned vast spreads of rich Delta cotton land in pre-Civil War days. The judge’s daughter, Mrs. Susie Southworth Yerger, moved in the highest social circles of the Confederacy, was a close friend of Jefferson Davis’ wife Varina.

Beckwith’s paternal grandfather helped develop Lodi, Calif., south of Sacramento, where he served as the first postmaster. Beckwith’s mother, one of Greenwood’s prettiest, most popular girls, went to California to visit an aunt, married Beckwith’s father, a real estate agent. “Delay” Beckwith was born in California.*

When Beckwith was five, his father died of what the death certificate termed “pneumonia and alcoholism.” The widow returned to Greenwood with her son, was hospitalized several times for mental ailments, died of cancer at 47. The boy was then twelve. He was thereafter reared by an eccentric uncle, William Green Yerger, who dabbled at farming his family’s remaining cotton acres. Mostly, the uncle liked to catch catfish. Sometimes he just stuffed the fish into a dresser drawer at home and left them there to rot.

The family home rotted too. Says a Greenwood merchant: “Beckwith was reared in the sort of place white people ought not to live in.” Yet the premises were cluttered with mementos of the family’s better days: a letter to Beckwith’s grandmother from Jeff Davis: pieces of china from Beauvoir, the Davis mansion near Biloxi. To Beckwith, these must have suggested lush plantations, colonnaded mansions—and white supremacy.

The Fingerprint. There had been almost no Negroes in the California town of Beckwith’s birth. When, upon moving to Mississippi, he first saw a black man, he asked a relative: “When God made Negroes, did he cover them with mud and hang them on a fence to dry?”

As a noncom in the Marine Corps, Beckwith was a machine gunner in the invasions of Guadalcanal and Tarawa. Wounded in the chest before reaching the beach at Tarawa, he saved himself by swimming half a mile to a reef. He married a Navy WAVE, Mary Louise Williams, a descendant of Rhode Island’s Founding Father Roger Williams.

Beckwith returned to Greenwood, worked for ten years as a tobacco salesman. He and his wife were divorced, remarried, then separated—and Beckwith lived alone in the tumble-down family house. Last January he became a fertilizer salesman. He was glib enough to be good at selling but, as one employer obliquely put it, he was “overly enthusiastic about things not concerned with his job.”

By that was meant Beckwith’s segregationist obsessions. He attended Greenwood’s Episcopal Church of the Nativity. But, says a member, “He tried to inject racism into everything. If you talked about Noah and the Ark, he’d want to know if there were any Negroes in the Ark.” In pursuit of his obsessions, Beckwith passed out racist pamphlets that he wrote himself, launched such an aggressive recruiting drive for the local white Citizens Council that its officers finally asked him to desist. He also stood in the doorway of Greenwood’s bus terminal to block Negroes trying to integrate the facilities.

Such obsessions—if the criminal charges against him are correct—led Beckwith to the assassination of Negro Leader Medgar Evers. In the honeysuckle patch where the killer hid, police found an abandoned rifle. FBI agents traced its ownership to Beckwith, a gun collector; they also identified a fingerprint on the weapon as Beckwith’s. Arrested by the FBI, Beckwith was turned over to state authorities, who are demanding that he be sentenced to death.

Yet for all his obviously weird ways, Beckwith still has his defenders in Greenwood. A local fund drive is under way to pay his legal expenses. Declares a Greenwood businessman: “I say the shooting of Evers was a patriotic act. If Delay pulled the trigger that night, he must have felt he was doing it for the South and the state.” Says a Beckwith friend: “Beckwith is a Joan of Arc, and his cause is to destroy the evil of forced integration. I don’t think he is fit mentally. But Joan of Arc was a little abnormal too.”

-A fact which led the Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger to headline an Associated Press story: CALIFORNIAN is CHARGED WITH MURDER OF EVERS.