Freedom Summer 105Beckwith, Byron de la
(1920–2001): Murdered
Mississippi NAACP leader
Medgar Evers.Thirty years elapsed before justice was done. Byron de la Beckwith, a
fertilizer salesman and charter member of the Citizens’ Council, was the lead-
ing suspect in Evers’s murder. While in jail awaiting his first trial, Beckwith
was given creature comforts, including a television set and typewriter, and
allowed to come and go as he pleased. General Edwin Walker visited
Beckwith in jail, and governor Ross Barnett came to the courtroom to shake
the defendant’s hand. When the jury deadlocked, Beckwith was released and
returned home to welcoming banners and a parade. He told a group of klans-
men, ‘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.’ He later ran for lieutenant governor, assuring
campaign crowds that he was a ‘straight shooter.’ Bobby DeLaughter, the
indefatigable prosecutor, had to locate the lost police report, trial transcript,
even the murder weapon, as well as overcome jury-tampering by the State
Sovereignty Commission. His single-minded pursuit of justice convinced a
racially mixed jury in 1994 to hand down a murder conviction and life sen-
tence against Beckwith after three tries.
The escalating violence in the early 1960s led Bob Moses to accept a pro-
posal for a ‘Freedom Vote’ to permit disfranchised blacks to elect their own
representatives. The ingenious idea was suggested by Allard Lowenstein, a
peripatetic 34-year-old lawyer who had been NSA president and assistant
dean of men at Stanford University. Such a mock election would expose the
lie that blacks were politically apathetic and therefore did not deserve suf-
frage. It would also provide an alternative to white candidates who defended
Jim Crow. To organize the vote, Lowenstein recruited dozens of Stanford and
Yale students, including Joseph Lieberman, who became a US senator from
Connecticut, and Marian Wright, later the first black woman lawyer from
Mississippi and president of the Children’s Defense Fund.
Although the students were beaten, shot at, and jailed to drive them off,
the vote occurred as scheduled in November 1963. About 85,000 blacks –
several times the number on the voting rolls – cast ‘freedom ballots’ at places
where they could not be harassed, such as churches, lodges, grocery stores,
beauty parlors, streetside tables, and homes. They voted for two ‘freedom
candidates,’ Aaron Henry, the state NAACP president, who ran for governor,
and his running-mate, Ed King, a young, white Methodist chaplain at the
historically black Tougaloo College, whose pray-ins embarrassed segregated
churches. One SNCC activist said the election showed that blacks wanted to
vote and that politics was ‘not just “white folks” business’ as it had been since
Reconstruction.
The Freedom Vote re-ignited the movement in the Magnolia state.
Building on this success, Moses promoted a voter-registration drive called the
Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, in 1964. The drive’s key,
Freedom Summer: A
massive 1964 project by
SNCC and CORE to recruit
northern college students
to register Mississippi
blacks to vote.