President Donald Trump’s administration won’t allow a Ku Klux Klan member convicted of murdering a civil rights leader to be labeled a racist.
To kick off Black History Month, the Trump administration has directed the National Park Service to scrub any mention of racism from the brochures and a plaque outside the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi, including removing language labeling Medgar Evers’ killer as a racist, Mississippi Today reported.
Assassin Byron De La Beckwith, a Ku Klux Klan member, waited in the bushes outside Evers’ home on June 12, 1963, until the civil rights leader returned from an NAACP meeting, then shot him in the back in his driveway. Evers died lying in a pool of his own blood—a grisly scene federal officials have also removed references to.
His wife, Myrlie Evers, spent 30 years fighting for justice for her husband, as well as becoming a NAACP board chair and delivering the invocation at Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
Evers was one of at least ten victims of Ku Klux Klan violence in Mississippi during the civil rights era. For decades, many of those crimes went largely unpunished, including Evers’ murder. Beckwith was acquitted twice by all-white juries and welcomed back into society, later mounting a failed bid for lieutenant governor before ultimately being convicted of other hate crimes—including attempting to bomb the home of a Jewish leader in New Orleans.
“N—-s are beasts. It says so in here in the book of Adam,” Beckwith said in a 1990 interview, where he praised white supremacy and the Jim Crow era.
But while Beckwith may be a racist by his own admission, the federal government doesn’t see it that way.
“You can’t call Beckwith a racist?” Jeff Steinberg, a local activist and founder of Sojourn to the Past, told Mississippi Today on Thursday. “If you opened a picture dictionary and turned to the definition for ‘racist,’ you’d probably find a picture of Byron De La Beckwith.”
Beckwith was finally convicted of Evers’ murder in 1994—more than 30 years after the killing—and died seven years into his sentence.
Trump himself referred to Evers as a “great American hero” at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in 2017. But that didn’t spare him from Trump’s anti-woke executive order in March 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” it reads. “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
The order directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to scrutinize public monuments, memorials, statues, and other similar properties that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”
In May, Burgum released his own order implementing the president’s directives. He instructed the National Park Service and other bodies under his purview to review properties for content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).”
Similar scenes have been playing out at federal monuments across the country. Just weeks ago, National Park Service staff took down slavery exhibits at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, detailing the history of nine people enslaved by President George Washington.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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