Report of attempted whitewashing at Mississippi civil rights monument under dispute
The National Park Service is accused of pulling material from a civil rights monument in Mississippi to whitewash language labeling the murderer a racist. A conversation with a local parks employee didn’t back that allegation up.
Mississippi Today published two stories Thursday asserting that an anonymous NPS staffer initially removed visitor brochures at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home monument as they were outdated. Revisions were reportedly to edit out references about Byron De La Beckwith being a racist and the state Medgar Evers was found. The nonprofit publication said in a later report that the NPS returned the brochures.
The pamphlets, however, never left the museum, a worker who answered the museum’s phone told Straight Arrow News. They didn’t know how claims about the removal and edits started. The worker declined to identify themselves and referred further questions to the NPS national office.
“The administration did not authorize these changes made by rogue employees,” the office of the Secretary of the Department of the Interior told Straight Arrow News in an email. “This deliberate act to make this administration look bad is being investigated further and those involved will face administrative consequences.”
According to an archived copy of the brochures, the museum said that Evers was working late at the Mississippi NAACP chapter the night of then-President John F. Kennedy’s televised June 11, 1963, address on civil rights. The 37-year-old got home just after midnight and was unloading T-shirts from his car when Beckwith fired a fatal gunshot to Evers’ back. Evers’ wife, Myrlie, found her husband in a pool of blood.
“Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council, symbolizes the greater hatred that permeated much of the American South throughout the 1960s,” the brochure said.
Beckwith was convicted of the killing 31 years later and died in 2001, according to a New York Times obituary on him. The Times and Mississippi state archives noted Beckwith’s association with the Ku Klux Klan.
Keena Graham, superintendent of the monument, told the Mississippi Free Press that she didn’t know of a directive to remove such references. She told the publication that brochures needed updated hours of operation and tours, and that any further updates would be done with the Evers family’s cooperation. She said the monument has agreements with the family and the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute to consult with them.
“They’re working with us right now to revise it and included more stuff in it,” Graham told the Mississippi Free Press. She didn’t immediately respond to Straight Arrow News’ request for comment.
Civil rights leaders criticize removals
Reporting about the removals drew sharp criticisms from a number of civil rights leaders and Evers’ own family, who stated changes couldn’t erase the past.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in an Instagram post that Medgar Evers was “a hero who dedicated his life to the pursuit of justice and freedom.” Medgar Evers was Mississippi’s first field secretary for the NAACP.
“We owe it to his legacy and to future generations to continue to confront racism head-on, not erase it from our history,” Johnson wrote.
The criticism is the latest lodged against the Trump administration as it made controversial actions to install a statue of Christopher Columbus at the White House, remove slavery exhibits in Philadelphia and restore the changed name of Army bases.
Wanda Evers, a county supervisor and Evers’ niece, told Mississippi Today that while brochures could be removed, “you can’t take away history.” Reena Evers-Everette, the couple’s daughter and executive director of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, confirmed to the publication that the final product of the brochures hasn’t been put out yet.
News reached Martin Luther King III, son of famed civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote on X that Evers’ killing was racial terror and calling it anything besides that doesn’t restore truth, but erases it.
“Sanitizing history from violence and racism does not bring the country together,” he wrote. “It weakens our understanding of who we are and how far we still have to go.”
See the brochures
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
