Medgar Evers was killed by a ‘self-described racist’—the National Park Service reportedly plans to remove that detail

Critics say new edits to National Park Service materials strip away the violent, racist reality of Medgar Evers’ murder.

On this day (Feb. 5) in 1994, Byron De La Beckwith, the white supremacist who killed NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963, was finally convicted of Evers’ murder. Now, 32 years later, the National Park Service is reportedly trying to rewrite a piece of that history. As reported by Mississippi Today, the Park Service plans to revise the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument visitors’ brochures. 

The pamphlets have reportedly been temporarily removed to remove the word “racist” as a descriptor for Beckwith, an unnamed Park Service official told the outlet. Additionally, the edits will also include removing details of Evers lying in a pool of blood after he was shot in the back in the driveway of his home in northwest Jackson.  

“It’s turning the assassination of Medgar Evers into something that is bloodless and had no impact. We can talk about him being a wonderful veteran, but not about what it cost him. He gave the last full measure of devotion, and now we want to ignore that,” Alan Spears, senior director for cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, told the outlet. 

In the original brochures distributed to visitors, the monument shares details about the Evers’ shooting and Beckwith’s affiliation with two segregationist groups: the White Citizens’ Council, a group that “believed in the natural superiority of the Aryan race,” and the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups. 

However, following President Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, these details may be erased from the national monument. Trump’s March 2025 legislation ordered federal agencies to review and replace any signs that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” Kickstarting a wave of historical erasures aligning with the president’s orders, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s directed that changes be made to monuments, exhibits and memorials that “inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures; or include any other improper partisan ideology” also requesting the removal of ““descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” 

“Interpretive materials that disproportionately emphasize negative aspects of U.S. history or historical figures, without acknowledging broader context or national progress, can unintentionally distort understanding rather than enrich it,” Park Service spokesperson Rachel Pawlitz told the Washington Post in regards to removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery. 

Most recently, the city of Philadelphia filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration, specifically the US Interior Department, Secretary Doug Burgum, the National Park Service, and its acting director, Jessica Bowron, for removing a slavery exhibit from the city’s President’s House without warning. Now, when it comes to the changes being made at Evers home, visitors can not fathom the removal of the descriptor “racist” for a man who proudly boasted about his prejudice for decades calling Black people “mongrels,” “beasts” and that segregrationist groups like the White Citizen’s Council design to preserve Jim Crow laws as ““the first ray of light Dixie had seen since we fought through Reconstruction and captured the right to vote, the right of white people to run the South.”

“If the National Park Service is taking exception to that, just listen to the man’s own words,” Jackson Mayor John Horhn added, per the outlet describing the white nationalist murderer as a “self-described racist.” 

60 years after his murder, Evers was awarded the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2023.