Talk:Byron De La Beckwith
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We should perhaps have more on this guy. I think I remember seeing him interviewed on TV — wasn't he in the oil industry? David.Monniaux 06:35, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] Date of birth
I have changed the date of birth from 1921 to November 9, 1920 as the latter is what other Web sites (including Britannica) have, and our date had been there, unsourced, since the first version of the article. If anyone has more or conflicting information, please speak up!
—John Mark Williams <⌂|☏> 30 June 2005 14:31 (UTC)
[edit] Membership in organization ??
This article says that Byron De La Beckwith was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but the article about Medgar Evers says he was a member of the White Citizens' Council
Also, he may have run for Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi (year??) and once sold the anti-communist newspaper, The Southern Review, door-to-door. (unconfirmed - http://web.archive.org/web/20040625021918/http://www.nationalist.org/alt/2001/jan/unreconstructed.html )
--Samatva 23:26, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
- On the first point, my understanding is that the two organizations had quite a bit of overlap in their membership rolls - which they also shared with the various police and sheriffs' departments, city councils and chambers of commerce, attorneys general and judges. All part of the "Invisible Empire" that enforced the Southern "way of life".
- On the second, the website you link to provides quite an illuminating glimpse into that "way of life" and its proponents. To call The Southern Review an "anti-communist newspaper" is at best a partial description. It is, as the linked-to page proudly proclaims, a white-supremacist paper, which refers to struggle for civil rights as "negro agitation", and speaks of the jury that finally convicted Beckwith as an "Ojay jury", an "affirmative action" jury that consisted of "eight minorities, three American women and one American man" as if "minorities" were not "Americans" at all. If all of that is contained within the definition, "anti-communist", then everyone I know or want to must be a communist too. --Davecampbell 08:07, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
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- First, I agree with the last sentence of Davecampbell's statement. Despite a lifetime of opposition to communism, I suppose I too would have to fall under that rubric.
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- Second, it's almost certainly true that there was overlap between Klan membership and the White Citizens' Council. However, the two organizations are not, to my knowledge, duplicates of each other. I am not aware that the latter was ever involved in the organized terrorist violence that the Klan was during, and, sadly, after the Civil Rights' era. I could be wrong.
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- Many prominent Mississippians have belonged to the White Citizens' Council. The fact that Sen. Trent Lott (the utterly ineffectual former Republican Senate Majority leader but that's another article...) spoke to a White Citizens' Council gathering at a county fair, or some such gathering, was used against him by the Drive-By media. While this may show poor judgment on Lott's part, I don't think anyone can accuse him of having been a racist in the way that self-admitted former Ku Klux Klan member Sen. Robert Byrd (Democrat from West Virginia and the longest serving Senator) most certainly was.
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- To be fair, I suppose one should mention (former "Dixiecrat") and anti-integrationist South Carolinian GOP Senator the late Strom Thurmond--the longest serving Senator in history; after all, one wouldn't want to be "partisan".
PainMan 00:18, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] "Assassination" is not a crime
The article states that Beckwith was convicted of the "assassination" of Medgar Evers. The only problem with this is that "assassination" is not a crime, per se. Beckwith was convicted of murder. So I'm going to make that slight change. If someone can demonstrate that assassination is a crime in Mississippi, pls provide the citation. While in some languages, notably Spanish, use "assesino" as a synonym for murder, the word is not used thusly in English. Assassination is reserved for murders committed for political or religious reasons, etc. If one shoots one's neighbor dead over a neighborly dispute, that's not assassination.
I just think it's important that articles state the exact facts. Some might find this nit-picking but Britannica would not make such an error and I should hope that wikipedia strives to at least equal Britannica in exactitude.
I have no quarrel with describing Evers' murder as an assassination; it most certainly was.
But Beckwith was convicted of murder and died in prison after thirty years of undeserved freedom due to racist all-white, all-male juries. It's just too bad he didn't see the inside of the death chamber. The needle would have been a far more humane death than the one he dealt to Medgar Evers.
PainMan 00:05, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Removed Blatant POV--and racist--statement
I removed the following sentence from the aritcle because it's clearly and indisputably POV and thus violates wikipedia policy (NPOV).
I can't imagine anyone seriously arguing that this sentence should not be removed. I don't think I need to wait for "consensus." Not on this one.
The sentence in question written, I believe, by Kingbotk* :
He fully deserved more time in prison but due to racist America a Ku Klux Klan member was free for an extra 32 years of his life.
Not only is the grammar bad, but this editorializing is not suitable in an encyclopedia article. Beckwith was scum but the purpose of the article isn't to heap abuse on the man.
Nor is it to smear and entire nation by labelling it racist. "America" didn't sit on the juries that ended in mistrials in '64. "America" didn't wait till 1994 to rety--and convict him of murder. 36 jurors and the DA's office in Mississippi did that.
There's a place for this kind of polemic, it's a called a blog.
Certainly, Beckwith should have either been executed for First Degree Murder or sentenced to life in prison in 1964. But the juries hung. If they had all been the horrible racists, as Kingbotk asserts, wouldn't they have acquitted him? Clearly some--if not just two, one on each jury-- wanted to convict him of the crime. Are those jurors racists simply because the other jurors refused to convict? Simply because they happened to be European-Americans as well?
This is simply anti-European-American racism, in my opinion, by Kingbotk. And our supposedly "racist" society did put Beckwith in prison--where he spent the rest of his life, short as that unfortunately was.
A truly racist society would never have allowed African-Americans on the jury, let alone sent the old assassin to prison. This crime is just one of the excellent reasons there's no statute of limitations on murder. It may have taken more than 30 years to bring Beckwith to justice but it did happen. Justice delayed can indeed be justice denied, but I doubt that Myrlie Evers and her children would agree with that axiom in this case.
- If I'm wrong about who wrote this, pls feel free to correct my misapprehension, I'm merely going by the History page for this article.
PainMan 09:41, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
[edit] No longer stub article
I rewrote the article in more encyclopedic form and, I believe, it is now suitable to stand on its own without the stub designation.
The larger part played by the Edgars murder in the Civil Rights movement is beyond the scope of an article on the late Byron De La Beckwith; obviously it belongs in an "omnibus" history of the African-American struggle for civil rights as well as the modern Civil Rights Movement.
A larger discussion about the biased, racist justice system in the South and in MS in general is also beyond the scope of an article about this man.
Thus a short article is entirely appropriate for Beckwith.
Therefore I removed the stub designations.
I look forward to discussing the matter with anyone who disagrees with me.
PainMan 09:41, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Biography assessment rating comment
The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. --KenWalker | Talk 02:49, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
