In the months leading up to the murder of Medgar Evers, the man who killed him was watching his world crumble. Byron de la Beckwith had dedicated his life to the cause of segregation, but it was a losing battle. The governor of Mississippi had backed down, allowing a second black student to enter Ole Miss. Governor George Wallace in Alabama backed down, too. Integration was creeping in all over. That, and his wife left him. 

Sources & Further Reading:

Doyle, William (2001). An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi 1962. Doubleday.

Lambert, Frank (2010). The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights vs States’ Rights. Oxford University Press.

Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.

Metzl, Jonathan (2009). The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease. Beacon Press.

Rolph, Stephanie (2018). Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954-1989. Louisiana State University Press

Smith, Frank (1964). Congressman From Mississippi. Capricorn Books.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/race/100262race-ra.html 

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/citizens_news/index.3.html 

https://www.southernfoodways.org/the-greenwood-food-blockade/ 

https://snccdigital.org/events/leflore-county-cuts-off-surplus-commodities/ 

https://snccdigital.org/people/dick-gregory/ 

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/22/us/samuel-block-60-civil-rights-battler-dies.html 

https://www.crmvet.org/docs/src/6210_src_ns.pdf 

https://themilitant.com/1962/2633/MIL2633.pdf 

https://snccdigital.org/people/lawrence-guyot/ 

https://snccdigital.org/events/jimmy-travis-shot-greenwood/ 

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/multimedia/medgar-evers-and-jackson-movement.html 

https://www.wlbt.com/video/2026/07/15/medgar-evers-historic-1963-wlbt-speech-missing-over-six-decades/ 

https://da.mdah.ms.gov/vault/projects/OHtranscripts/AU_MP198001_119_098611.pdf