Reopening Old Wounds Of Southern Racial Hatred -- De LA Beckwith To Be Retried For The Murder Of Medgar Evers

JACKSON, Miss. - This old Southern capital, divided by stark racial hatred three decades ago, is preparing uneasily to relive the worst nightmare left from those days of violence.

Officials have dug deeply into the city's past, scraping dangerously at the raw edges of its soul, to resurrect the murder case of black civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, gunned down in his driveway by a sniper's bullet June 12, 1963.

His suspected killer is Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist whose two trials ended with deadlocked juries. Now, as prosecutors reach into the Tennessee hill country to bring Beckwith, 70 and ailing, back for a third trial, the mood is apprehensive.

Blacks and whites say reopening the Evers case is an opportunity for Mississippi to reverse old wrongs and demonstrate to the nation how this state, once a brutal bastion of white supremacy, has progressed. Yet quietly, many fret about how much good can come from rooting around in a bloody and violent past.

The reopening has prompted a call for establishment of a special investigative organization, fashioned after the Nazi hunters, to look into other murders, lynchings and disappearances of blacks in Mississippi's history.

Some would like to see new charges in cases ranging from the heavily publicized murders in 1964 of three civil rights workers buried in an earthen dam near here to the gruesome killing nine years earlier of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black who whistled at a white woman.

``We can never get beyond the past until we acknowledge how ugly and mean Mississippi was in the 1960s,'' said David Sansing, a history professor at the University of Mississippi. ``The Evers case could be a catharsis. But there are dozens of these cases out there. If we open up every one of them, I'm not so sure of the benefit. A lot of white people are going to get nervous. It's going to start getting into their families.''

Evers' assassination ignited the civil rights movement and helped to mobilize Washington against hate crimes victimizing blacks in the deep South.

Evers was as heroic a figure to Mississippi blacks as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was to blacks across America. Field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Mississippi, Evers had applied for admission to the University of Mississippi in 1954, eight years before James Meredith broke that color barrier. He sued to integrate Jackson's schools on behalf of his three children.

When he was killed, Evers was organizing a campaign to integrate municipal workers here. Just after his death, Jackson hired its first black police officer.

Evers was shot in the back with a rifle so powerful that the bullet passed through his body, tore a hole in his chest, then shattered a front window in his house before penetrating an interior wall and ricocheting off the refrigerator.

George Smith, then a young, black college student, met Evers a few days before he was killed and attended Beckwith's trials in 1964. Smith was apprehensive at first about reliving one of the most painful experiences of his life.

``There was no reason to think he would be convicted then,'' Smith said, ``and there is still some question whether or not this case can go forward now and get a conviction.''

Smith was elected to the Hinds County Commission in 1979 and now operates out of the same gray granite courthouse where he faced unfriendly white voter registration officials 28 years ago.

``I think reopening the case shows that, even though you're black in Mississippi, our system works,'' he said. ``If this case goes through, it would mean we have come a long way.''

The case was resurrected early last year after the Jackson Clarion Ledger published an article about another skeleton from Mississippi's past, the State Sovereignty Commission. Established in 1956 to preserve segregation, the commission spied on civil-rights workers and used the information to thwart them.

The commission was dismantled in 1973 and its files sealed for 50 years. But some of the files on Evers' murder made their way to the Clarion Ledger.

In the Evers case, the commission screened prospective jurors and advised Beckwith's defense team about their heritage, racial views and occupation and social affiliation. Jurors regarded by the commission as ``fair'' made the panel; those with ``improper thinking'' did not.

County prosecutors convened a grand jury to investigate possible jury tampering, and the commission was found to have acted improperly but not illegally. By then, however, momentum was building to reopen the case.

In March 1989, the district attorney's office announced that it was reconstructing the files.

Beckwith's first trial ended with the jury deadlocked 6 to 6. Afterward, the Saturday Evening Post said: ``In light of Mississippi's history, and the fears and hatreds which still haunt that troubled land, the fact that six white men held out for conviction was in itself a victory for the law.''

In the second deadlock, eight jurors voted for acquittal.

Beckwith, a 42-year-old fertilizer salesman, had been a cocky witness, even aiming the murder weapon at one juror in a demonstration of his rifle-handling skills. Then-governor Ross Barnett once stopped by the defense table to shake Beckwith's hand. Beckwith eventually went home to Greenwood, Miss., to a hero's welcome.

The state's case had been strong but circumstantial. The rifle, a 1917-vintage Enfield 30.06, was recovered from a clump of honeysuckle vines across the street from Evers' house. Beckwith's fingerprint was on the six-power telescopic sight.

Two taxi drivers recalled that, several days before the murder, a man who looked like Beckwith had asked them where Evers lived, and a carhop at Joe's Drive In, 300 feet from Evers' house, saw someone that night park a white Valiant like the one Beckwith drove.

``But nobody could say, `I saw him,' '' said John Fox III, the assistant district attorney in both trials. ``We had no witnesses to discredit his alibi witnesses.''

The defense produced three witnesses, including two police officers, who placed Beckwith in Greenwood, 97 miles away, 30 minutes after the murder, and the state's case sank.

Two witnesses now have come forward to contradict Beckwith's alibi. The Rev. Robert L.T. Smith, Sr., 90, has told prosecutors that he saw Beckwith in Jackson on the night of the murder. Willie Osborne, 81, a deacon at New Jerusalem Baptist Church where civil-rights leaders met the night Evers was killed, is prepared to testify similarly.

``You have to understand the period,'' Myrlie Evers, Medgar's widow, now a Los Angeles public works commissioner, told The Los Angeles Times. ``Even if you had seen the person pull the trigger, there would be a reluctance to say anything because your life was on the line, your business was on the line and there was an attitude, and rightly so, that it would make no difference whatsoever if you said anything.''

In the book, ``Klandestine,'' Delmar Dennis, a disenchanted Ku Klux Klan member and FBI informer quotes Beckwith as saying at a Klan meeting:

``Killing that nigger 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.''

In December, Beckwith was at his home in Signal Mountain, Tenn., with a giant Confederate flag hanging from the eaves when authorities arrived to arrest him and seek extradition to Jackson. Jailed in Chattanooga, he is appealing the extradition order and has vigorously denied killing Evers or making the remarks cited in ``Klandestine.''

In Mississippi, this case offers much to show that the state has moved forward in the way Evers hoped that it would.

``Whites Only'' restrooms in the Hinds County Courthouse now exist only in grainy black-and-white photographs exhibited in a nearby museum. The judge will not have to grant special permission for black spectators to sit in the front rows with whites. The prosecutor will not feel obliged to ask potential jurors, as District Attorney William Waller did in 1964, if they thought ``killing a nigger was a crime.'' Nor will the Clarion Ledger refer to Myrlie Evers as ``the Evers woman,'' as was its style when writing about black women then.