Biography

White supremacist and Klansman convicted in the 1963 assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Byron de la Beckwith was tried three times for the murder, but was finally convicted by a jury of eight African-Americans and four whites on February 5, 1994.

Sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Medgar Evers, Byron de la Beckwith died at the University of Mississippi Medical Center on January 21, 2001 in Jackson, Mississippi, having been transported there from Central Mississippi Correctional Center, aged 80. He had suffered from heart disease, high blood pressure and other ailments.

In January 1942, Byron de la Beckwith enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served as a machine gunner in the Pacific theater of World War II. He fought at the Battle of Guadalcanal and was shot in the waist during the Battle of Tarawa. He was honorably discharge in August 1945.

Byron de la Beckwith was the subject of the 1963 Bob Dylan song "Only a Pawn in Their Game", which deplores the murder of Medgar Evers and the racial environment of the South, and attempts to minimize Beckwith as a poor white man manipulated by Southern politicians.

In January 1966, along with a number of other members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Byron de la Beckwith was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify on Klan activities. In the following years, he became a leader in the Phineas Priesthood, an offshoot of the Christian Identity Movement.