_In Mississippi in 1963, you didn’t have to look far to find dynamite. I was eight years old, growing up in Jackson, and I knew where there was a store, housed in a windowless, brick building, with a sign out front which read, “Dixie Dynamite.” Within a mile or two of my neighborhood, two homes, a barber shop and an apartment complex were bombed. A few years later a local elementary school teacher died in a shootout with police as she and a friend prepared to bomb the home of a Jewish leader in Meridian.

I assumed things were this way everywhere. I would see the smoking ruins of bombed-out buildings as just another curious landmark floating past the window of my family’s station wagon. Protests in which hundreds of black people were arrested and held in cattle pens at the fairgrounds meant only that “Negro trouble” would prevent my mother and sisters from ruining my Saturdays with downtown shopping trips.

The daughter of my grandmother’s maid had herself been arrested at a protest rally, but it was difficult, as a young boy, to fully appreciate the significance of that. Maybe because people in Jackson had lived with the threat of trouble for some time, the new violence and strife were given only passing notice at my family’s dinner table. Looking back, I’m sure we weren’t alone in our ability to overlook the troubled reality of Mississippi at the time.

The knowledge of most whites in Jackson was generally limited to what was gleaned from The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News, two very conservative newspapers owned by a local family. Our maids and yard men did not dare to fill us in. Considering that our privileged way of life was at stake, I’m not sure we wanted to know.

Such ignorance could not last. On the night of June 12, 1963, sometime after President Kennedy went on television calling for calm in the face of growing racial tensions in the South, an unknown gunman hid in the honeysuckle vines across from the Jackson home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist, and put a bullet through Evers’s back. Suddenly, publicly, and irrevocably, someone had delineated our racial territory in blood. It was a turning point, the beginning of the most troubling chapter in Southern history since the Civil War, and it could not be ignored, even by an eight-year-old white boy. The murder brought everything that my friends and family had casually observed—the marches, the bombings, the sullen stare of our maid’s daughter as we pulled away from her shotgun shack—into unmistakable and unforgettable focus.

Events began to overtake us. Most of the adults I knew saw this as a continuation of an old, familiar story, and relegated Evers to the same antagonist’s role as General Sherman. They were not prepared to accept Evers as the protagonist of a long running, terrifying, and disgraceful tale that now, after thirty years, we’re still struggling to tell.

* * *

I suppose many whites at the time hoped the courts would settle the issue as quickly and painlessly as possible. But in Mississippi, in 1963, it was too much to expect the judicial system to see the story through to its proper conclusion. Public opinion—white public opinion, that is—would inevitably come into play. The primary vehicle for and record of that public opinion, The Clarion-Ledger, was riddled with inaccuracies and omissions. On the other hand, the newly arrived reporters and commentators for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune and countless other national media, appeared determined to lay general blame for Evers’s assassination on every white resident of Mississippi. Even friendly Walter Cronkite seemed intent on betraying us. There was apparently no middle ground.

Most whites in Jackson didn’t have access to an honest, close-range account, such as I would later hear from Evers’s widow, Myrlie, or find in a crumbling copy of the black-owned Mississippi Free Press.

For years, this bothered me: the lingering feeling that I had been just out of earshot of the truth. And this belief of mine led me as an adult to begin probing the archives, and other material, to see what I could find. By then, more than two decades had passed, and the Evers story had spanned so much time and taken so many forms it seemed almost apocryphal.

* * *

In 1986, I was a newspaper reporter, and the once-infamous Clarion-Ledger, which had been sold to a national chain, sent me to interview Mrs. Evers for a routine story about the annual Medgar Evers Homecoming Festival organized by Evers’s brother, Charles.

Mrs. Evers, I learned, had moved to Los Angeles following her husband’s murder, but still owned the house in Jackson where they had lived and her husband had died. The conversation soon drifted to the murder. Despite years of news reports and investigations of the case I was at first hesitant to bring up what still seemed to me a very private matter, but when I did, Mrs. Evers fixed her gaze on me and said, “I don’t mind. I want to talk about Medgar.”

She then told a story that I could not have imagined on the other side of town in 1963. She recalled waiting with her children for her husband to return from a late night civil rights meeting and hearing the familiar sound of his car in the driveway, then gunfire.

“The children hit the floor like their daddy had taught them to do,” she said. “I dashed for the door and there he was, lying there, his chest just torn apart, and his eyes already rolled back in his head. All I could do was scream.”

The children, who had followed her from the house, cried, “Daddy, get up!” as Evers lay sprawled on the concrete, an armload of “Jim Crow Must Go” T-shirts scattered around him.

The bullet had torn through Evers’s chest, passed through the wall of the house, ricochetted off the refrigerator and come to rest on the kitchen counter. Then Mrs. Evers told me something that she believed was important: her husband had expected to be killed for his role in the civil rights movement, and had been prepared to make the sacrifice. He had done everything in his power to draw attention to the racial injustices that he saw occurring then in Mississippi. He knew this made him a target.

From the files at the Department of Archives and History in Jackson, I later learned these details:

In 1946, after four years of service in the U.S. Army, Medgar Evers, at age twenty-one, attempted to register to vote, a move that was anathema to the white Mississippi power structure at the time.

In 1954, the year the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the public schools in the South to be integrated, Evers tried to enroll in the University of Mississippi Law School. The attempt, eight years before the National Guard was deployed to ensure the admission of a black man named James Meredith to the same university, reportedly earned him a spot on the state Ku Klux Klan’s top ten hit list.

Evers was convicted in 1963 of contempt of court for publicly stating that a black defendant, Clyde Kennerd, was sentenced unjustly. (Kennerd had been given seven years in jail for “arranging the theft of five sacks of chicken feed.”) Not long after, Evers called for a desegregation campaign that led to the arrest of almost seven hundred people in Jackson, among them, the daughter of my grandmother’s maid.

After four students and a professor from Tougaloo College staged a sit-in at a Jackson lunch counter and were subsequently beaten by a mob of whites, Evers urged a crowd, estimated at two thousand, to take to the streets in protest. A week later, someone threw a firebomb at his house, which Mrs. Evers, at home alone with the children, extinguished with a garden hose.

Shortly before his murder, Evers filed suit to integrate Jackson’s all-white public schools, almost ten years after the Supreme Court had issued its order, and began organizing a campaign to integrate municipal workers in Jackson.

Soon after the murder, Charles Evers, Medgar’s brother (who would later become Mississippi’s first black mayor), issued a statement from his Chicago home saying that he did not believe the “better white people” of the state were behind the assassination. “It was some crank or idiot who thought he’d do something big,” he said.

Even if that were true—and most everyone I knew then hoped that it was—the murder did not come out of nowhere. As the Jackson native Eudora Welty wrote after hearing of the shooting, “I thought, whoever the murderer is, I know him; not his identity, but his coming about in this time and place.”

* * *

A time and place where bombings and protest marches could be taken as a matter of course would not seem to easily lend itself to the kind of justice needed in the Evers case.

My father’s recollection is that many white people in Jackson were unnerved by Evers’s assassination and its aftermath, but not necessarily sorry it had happened. Evers represented a nuisance, he explained. I recall hearing about a big march downtown, which I did not see, and which disturbed the adults I knew. There was a local funeral march prior to Evers’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery, and more than three thousand mourners marched down Capitol Street in Jackson chanting, “We want the killer.”

I remember my parents watching Mayor Allen Thompson, who would later commission a riot van known as “Thompson’s Tank,” pleading for calm on the local TV news. It was evident that the killing of a black man in Mississippi—by anyone—had never sparked so much anger, received so much press, or been so intensively investigated by local and federal law enforcement officials. The mood seemed to be that this case should be solved.

Soon, $22,350 was raised for a reward, including $10,000 from the NAACP; $5,000 from the City of Jackson; $1,000 from The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News; $1,000 from Service Music Co.; $200 from Jackson Broadcasting Co.; $100 from J.R. Gilfoy; and $50 from then Hinds County District Attorney Bill Waller.

The big news in my neighborhood was that a friend’s father, Ralph Hargrove, an investigator for the Jackson Police Department, had been assigned to help break the case. This confused the neighborhood boys, who mistakenly believed Ralph’s father worked for the FBI, since they were the ones pushing to solve the murder. Hargrove, it turned out, produced the first clue to the murderer’s identity: a fingerprint lifted from the scope of the 1917 Enfield rifle which, surprisingly, had been found in the honeysuckle vines across from Evers’s home.

* * *

My first glimpse of Byron De La Beckwith was in a photograph on the front page of The Clarion-Ledger, on June 24, 1963, the day after he was arrested by FBI agents and charged first with violating Evers’s civil rights and, later, with murder. In the photograph Beckwith is beaming. He is dressed in a short-sleeved white business shirt and wearing conservative black-rimmed glasses. His hair is Brylcreemed and cut very short. He looked like most every other man whose photograph ran in the paper that day.

The Clarion-Ledger, ever the defender of the Southern Way, tried to deflect criticism from Mississippi by running a headline that read, “Californian Is Charged With Murder Of Evers.” Technically, this was true. Beckwith had been born and lived briefly as a small child in California. But he had returned to his family’s Mississippi home early on, and by the time of his arrest, had long been a fixture around Greenwood.

Beckwith had deep Mississippi roots, and he had many friends and compatriots here. As evidence of his Southerness, he told reporters that his grandmother had been a friend of Jefferson Davis’s wife, and that his grandfather had ridden in the Confederate cavalry.

The Clarion-Ledger article reported that U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had said in a television interview on Meet the Press that there was ample evidence of Beckwith’s guilt, and his arrest had been ordered by the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover himself. If Beckwith had friends, he had important enemies too.

Beckwith was a source of discomfort and embarrassment for most adults I knew. He was a hotheaded, white supremacist who made the rounds at KKK meetings in the state. That Beckwith was a dogmatic, unreconstructed Southerner was unremarkable in itself, since such men could be found at any number of gas stations, banks, newspapers, courthouses, or even churches around the state. But Beckwith distinguished himself by his tireless, unrepentant vigilance for the white resistance movement. Although he denied killing Evers it was apparent he revelled in the role of the accused.

Beckwith knew the crime he was charged with was condoned by the more radical whites, and his arrest quickly transformed him from a small town eccentric into a cult hero for “the cause.” For years, he had rambled the streets of Greenwood, preaching hate. Some accounts had him holding a Bible to his chest while carrying a pistol in his coat pocket. In my research I found recollections of Beckwith acquaintances saying he had become vitriolic following the same 1954 Supreme Court ruling that had spurred Evers to action. His anger reportedly grew until 1963, when it seemed his entire public identity fed upon the tension that existed between whites and men like Evers. It was a role he would reprise again and again, to this day.

In a letter written five months before the murder, to the National Rifle Association, Beckwith predicted that, “For the next 15 years we here in Mississippi are going to have to do a lot of shooting to protect our wives, children and ourselves from bad niggers.” When he appeared in court for his first trial, in 1964, contemporary accounts described him as cocky, defiant and proud. He seemed almost to dare the jury to convict him. And why not? This was Jackson, Mississippi, and the only crime with which he had been charged was killing a troublesome “Negro”—something for which no white man in the state had ever been convicted. When Bill Waller, the District Attorney for Hinds County, brought Beckwith to trial, it took four days to find twelve jurors who would answer yes to the question, “Do you believe it’s a crime for a white man to kill a nigger?”

* * *

As if anyone needed to help Beckwith portray himself as a plausible assassin, Delmar Dennis, a Klan informant for the FBI, would publicly claim that Beckwith had bragged to Klansmen after Evers’s murder that, “Killing that nigger gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children.” Beckwith has repeatedly denied ever making such a declaration.

The evidence presented against Beckwith at the trial was extensive. In addition to owning the rifle upon which his fingerprints were found, Beckwith had, at the time of his arrest, a small, circular bruise over his right eye that matched the rifle’s scope, which he claimed he received from its kick while “shooting varmints.” He testified the gun had later been stolen, but he had not reported the theft.

Two white taxi drivers testified that a man who looked like Beckwith had asked for directions to Evers’s home a few days before the killing, and a carhop at Joe’s Drive Inn, on Delta Drive close to Evers’s house, testified that on the night of the shooting she saw someone park nearby in a white Valiant with a tall antenna, just like the car Beckwith drove.

“Byron De La Beckwith is a fanatic, pure and simple,” the Assistant D.A. John Fox III said in his summation to the court. “He had not only the capacity and the capability and the power to kill, he had the deep compelling motive. And as calmly as he would kill a turtle on a log, as coolly as he would shoot a crow out of a tree, he did execute Medgar Evers, a human being—shot him like a varmint—in the driveway of his home, in the nighttime, in the summertime, in 1963....”

Beckwith’s attorneys produced three witnesses, including two police officers who placed him in Greenwood the night of the murder. That was enough. The jury was deadlocked, six to six, and a mistrial was declared. A second trial, also in 1964, ended similarly, but with only four jurors voting against acquittal.

After the first trial, the Saturday Evening Post editorialized: “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 itself a victory for the law.”

My recollection is that a lot of people were also surprised that the young district attorney, Waller (who would later be elected governor), had prosecuted Beckwith as aggressively as he had.

Those tidbits did little to appease Mississippi’s burgeoning civil rights movement, or Myrlie Evers, for whom the trials were an outrage. Governor Barnett had visited the courtroom to shake Beckwith’s hand and clap him on the back in the presence of the jury. And it was common knowledge that Beckwith had been allowed to keep his gun collection and color television set in his jail cell. But black indignation was not yet enough, and the story might very well have ended there. It was, indeed, put aside.

* * *

The remaining years of the 1960s brought more bombings and more marches, but by 1967, many white Mississippians were finally recognizing that the civil rights movement would inevitably succeed. Myrlie Evers attributes much of the progress to her husband’s actions, and even to his death. After the murder, she said, racial tensions in Jackson “just broke. We had a list of demands that we’d made [earlier] to the city, and they had refused them all. But after Medgar died, all of the demands were met. It was one change that sparked other changes.”

Grudgingly, blacks began to be hired for jobs that they had previously been denied, and limited integration began to take place in the public schools. I was a seventh grader at Jackson’s Chastain Junior High School in 1967, when the new school year brought two apprehensive young black students into the formerly all white student body. The change was largely symbolic and uneventful—but the black students were not welcomed with open arms.

As if on cue, Beckwith re-entered the limelight, apparently still determined to arrest progress. He ran for lieutenant governor and garnered 30,000 votes, coming in third in a field of five candidates. I am not sure what Beckwith represented for most white Mississippians at the time. There was little reaction when then Hinds County District Attorney Jack Travis successfully sought the dismissal of the charges against Beckwith in 1969. It’s possible that people just wanted Beckwith to go away. And, at times, it seemed he might.

Over the years, the Enfield rifle and the transcripts of Beckwith’s trials disappeared from the courthouse storeroom. The case appeared closed, a part of history.

* * *

By the early seventies, a decade of voter registration—prompted in part by Evers’s death—had given Mississippi the highest number of black elected officials of any state in the nation. Former Governor Ross Barnett, who had publicly defied President Kennedy during the effort to enroll James Meredith at Ole Miss, and who had shown  support for Beckwith during his trials, had taken to riding in the annual Medgar Evers Homecoming parade though Jackson. On June 12, 1973, Governor Waller proclaimed “Medgar Evers Memorial Festival Day.”

The state’s racial climate was far from stable, however, and the question of Beckwith’s guilt or innocence lay like an old, unexploded bomb just beneath the surface of the “new” Mississippi. There was no consensus on how best to deal with it—to detonate, defuse or ignore it?

Beckwith himself forced a decision. Again, as before, he was not going to let anyone forget. In 1973, he was arrested in New Orleans with a ticking time bomb in the trunk of his car and a map to the home of a local Jewish leader. For this offense, he was sent briefly to prison, but he was not silenced. He continued an earlier practice of writing letters to newspapers around the state, and in a circular soliciting funds for his continuing legal defense, he proclaimed: “Because of who I am, I have the right type of enemies. I am proud of my enemies. They are every colour but white, every ‘creed’ but Christian, they are numerous and ‘in high places.’ ”

Still testing the limits of tolerance, or intolerance, he fired off a letter to a neo-Nazi magazine in which he referred to Evers as “Mississippi’s mightiest nigger,” and added, “We have had no trouble with that nigger since they buried him—none!”

In his circular, Beckwith noted that he was former owner of the “ultra conservative Southern Review" (now defunct and not to be confused with the literary journal of the same name) and a member of the Citizens’ Council, the Sons of the American Revolution and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The Citizens’ Council, it turned out, would have personal significance for me. When full integration was achieved in Jackson’s schools, in 1970, and it sparked massive white flight to newly created private schools, I was among the misguided refugees. I left Chastain Junior High at the height of integration and enrolled in a private school that was operated by the same Citizens’ Council, as more or less a holding pen for beleaguered white students.

Neither I nor my parents viewed my enrollment as any sort of political statement; it was merely a response to the unavoidable disorder that at first characterized the integration process. The status quo we had so closely guarded had quickly collapsed. Chastain was beset by student walkouts and smoldering racial hostility. If the parents of my friends who remained in public school were determined to endure these adversities, my goals were less noble. My best friends were also leaving Chastain and at Council Schools the classrooms were air-conditioned, carpeted and calm. I was glad to leave integration behind.

While at Council School, I would spend hours in the library during periods designated for Physical Education (there was no gymnasium) and Drivers Education (we drove for a week), perusing copies of the Citizens’ Council’s publications. In them were articles attempting to prove the biological and mental inferiority of blacks, alleged Biblical endorsements of racial segregation and so on. What I read disturbed and angered me, and I began writing long, confrontational letters to the president of the Citizens’ Council denouncing everything his organization stood for. When, as a result, my father was called in for a meeting, the president told him that I was “dangerous.” My father asked to see the letters and after reading them, told the man, “I agree with everything he said.” It was time for me to go back to public school.

Such was the quandary the typical white Mississippian found himself in during the early and middle years of the long running Evers-Beckwith story. My parents were neither racist nor progressive; I was not allowed to use the word “nigger,” and I was raised to treat everyone, of any color, with respect. At the same time, I was told that blacks and whites could never share schools, restaurants, work places, churches or neighborhoods as equals. But we were uncomfortable siding with people like Beckwith and the Citizens’ Council, so in 1971 I enrolled in Murrah High School, which was 65 percent black and 35 percent white.

By then, the child who had yearned for the romanticized world of Gone With The Wind (the first half, of course), was listening to Neil Young on his eight-track tape player singing, “Southern change gonna come at last/Now your crosses are burnin’ fast/ Southern man.” My reaction to Byron De La Beckwith, and the whole case, was lukewarm, though. I remember thinking, “What is it with this guy? Does he want to be convicted? Why doesn’t he just shut up and go away?” I believed Beckwith killed Evers, but I did not know enough to feel strongly about reopening the case.

Feelings in the black community were not so dubious. It was a perennial sore subject, and Myrlie Evers made it clear all along that she would not rest until her husband’s killer was brought to justice. As it turned out, Beckwith’s harangues helped to keep his name at the top of the list of suspects.

His name came up again in 1990, when journalists- including reporters for the ubiquitous Clarion-Ledger—uncovered evidence of possible jury tampering in the 1964 trials. Though the claims proved unfounded, they prompted the Hinds County District Attorney’s Office to take another look. The reporters again sought out Mrs. Evers, who offered a sympathetic and forceful argument for a third trial. True to character, Beckwith, who had since moved to Signal Mountain, Tennessee, offered what ultimately became an even more powerful incentive for a reopening of the case. As he stood on his porch, a Confederate battle flag draped behind him, Beckwith declared for reporters, “I did not kill the nigger.” I now wonder if he realized the effect his words had in 1990, or if he understood that a reprisal of his old role would be played before an entirely new, and much less patient, audience.

It did not matter much what Beckwith thought. Momentum was growing to reopen the case. The Clarion-Ledger pushed for the opening of the sealed files of the Sovereignty Commission, which had been founded in the 1960s to preserve segregation. The Commission had investigated the backgrounds of jurors before the 1964 trials began. Soon, Mrs. Evers was saying publicly she wanted the case reopened, and when it was apparent that her suggestion was being taken seriously, she supplied the district attorney’s office with copies of the first trials’ transcripts, which she had kept in a safe. Not long after, the now biracial Jackson City Council passed a resolution calling for a new trial, and numerous other officials, organizations and governmental bodies followed suit. 

* * *

Beckwith continued to incite strong reactions in Mississippians. He was viewed variously as a symbol of the individual and institutional sins of the state during the 1960s; as a scapegoat; as a diehard champion of the true Southern Way; or as a man who murdered another, boasted of it, and was allowed to go free.

Of course, the idea of reopening the case remained controversial. The editors of the Biloxi Sun Herald were among those who cautioned that a retrial should be undertaken only if unquestionably solid and damaging new evidence had been found. “In the event of an acquittal, or if the trial were to end in a third mistrial, Mississippi would gain another demerit in the ledgers of those who believe Beckwith to be guilty,” the editors wrote. “Those who believed him to be guilty three decades ago are not likely to be convinced of his innocence now. And if Beckwith were to be tried and found guilty without conclusive evidence, there would always be those who would claim the state finally pinned the murder on a scapegoat to hush the echoes of accusations.’’

But the tenor of the times called for exorcizing ghosts. Buoyed in part by public sentiment in favor of a new trial, Hinds County District Attorney Ed Peters decided to reopen the case, and on December 14, 1990, Beckwith was reindicted.

Many of the original witnesses are still alive. And there are new witnesses, including a woman who claimed to have seen Beckwith at a civil rights rally in Jackson the night before the killing; the Klan member and FBI in- formant, Delmar Dennis, who claimed that Beckwith bragged at KKK rallies about killing Evers; and a former New Orleans police commander who said Beckwith told him that he had shot Evers.

Perhaps most surprising of all, Peters announced that the missing Enfield rifle, which was essential to the prosecution, had been rediscovered in a storage room belonging to the father-in-law of Hinds County Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter.

The press Mississippi received following the reindictment was as good as it had been bad in 1964. The headlines in the December 19, 1990, Ft. Worth Star-Telegram announced that, “Missis- sippi Leaves Past Behind.” Other newspapers gushed, “New Trial, New Mississippi” and “South Changes.” In an article in the New York Times, the reindictment was applauded by Hinds County supervisor George Smith, whom Evers had helped register to vote the day before the murder and who sat through both of Beckwith’s 1964 trials, and by Ole Miss history professor David Sansing, who called the new trial the beginning of a “cleansing process for the state.”

Richard Barrett, head of the White Supremacist National Movement, based in a small town on the outskirts of Jackson, told a reporter for the New York Times that the reindictment was “an exercise in vengeance and a kangaroo court in the making.”

But the prevailing mood was summed up by DeLaughter, himself a young white boy growing up in Jackson at the time Evers was murdered. In the December 23 Chicago Tribune DeLaughter said, “This single cowardly act has probably done more to hurt the state and the perception of Mississippi than any other single act I can think of. When you have somebody just shot from ambush in the back, while his wife and kids are right there in the house—shot not for anything violent that he did but just for what he believes—that leaves a great, gaping wound in a society. And when the person responsible is never given a full dose of justice, the wound can’t ever heal.”

In October 1991, after a nine-month extradition fight from Tennessee, Beckwith found himself again in the Hinds County Detention Center. When his photograph reappeared on the front page of The Clarion-Ledger, he was an old man being led in handcuffs from the jail to the courthouse. This time, he glared defiantly. He was no longer among peers. Among the faces that now appeared along with him in the newspaper were blacks and whites, men and women, who had grown up after integration. On this new stage, Beckwith hovered like a ghost.

* * *

Now, more than a year later, Beckwith awaits trial. After hearing arguments that his right to a speedy trial had been denied, the state Supreme Court ruled that he could be retried. The case was moved, because of publicity, from Jackson to DeSoto County, with jurors to be drawn from neighboring Panola County. Although a trial date has not been set, it appears this pivotal story, which spans the entire history of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi, will find its conclusion. Myrlie Evers said that Beckwith’s legal fate “is personal to me, but this has gone beyond simply being about Medgar.” Many say the state’s claims of progress, and its willingness to come to terms with the past, will also be on trial. And the legal outcome itself could lead to the reopening of cases involving a dozen or more unsolved murders during the civil rights period in Mississippi.

* * *

Many of the artifacts from Mississippi’s segregationist past have vanished over the last thirty years. The “colored” water fountains were long ago ripped out; the bombed homes and barber shops have been repaired; the ruins of the ill-fated apartment complex that I grew up near are covered in weeds. The Evers’ home, empty now in a crime-ridden neighborhood, has been nominated to the National Register of Historic Places, and nearby Delta Drive has been renamed Medgar Evers Drive. Evers has been commemorated in a statue commissioned with local funds. Mississippi’s public schools, restaurants, offices and many neighborhoods—including the one where I grew up and where my parents still live—are now racially integrated.

None of these advances, however, necessarily eliminates the need to get to the end of the story.

* * *

For more than three decades this maddening story of Evers’s murder and the question of Beckwith’s guilt or innocence has been told again and again, in conflicting voices and varying contexts, with no conclusion. Facts have been rearranged, deleted, added, interpreted differently. Yet one fact remains undisputed: the man responsible for one of the most notorious murders of the civil rights era remains free. Who is he? It is as if we are driving in rush hour traffic in a rusty Valiant with an expired tag. Along side us sits an old and familiar white supremacist. We hear the ticking of a bomb in the back seat. The old man grins. Where is it we are going?

* * *

In a May 16, 1991 segment of ABC’s PrimeTime Live, Beckwith spoke with the reporter Diane Sawyer. “You see,” he said, “when you’re accused of killing, no matter whether you killed a nigger, a Jew, a white man or a Chinaman, any murder in Dixie is not a thing that lightly goes away. So if you’re accused of murder, that is forever.”

As the song goes: Old times here are not forgotten.