Jeff Steinberg, founder of Sojourn to the Past, which regularly takes students and police officers on civil rights tours to the home, questioned the change to the Park Service material. “You can’t call Beckwith a racist?” he said. “If you opened a picture dictionary and turned to the definition for ‘racist,’ you’d probably find a picture of Byron De La Beckwith.”
The original brochures pulled from the home called Beckwith “a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.”
Stephanie Rolph, author of “Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council 1954-1989,” said the council “believed in the natural superiority of the Aryan race. They even went so far as to say that civilizations failed because of racial amalgamation.”
Beckwith also belonged to the nation’s most violent white supremacist group, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, responsible for at least 10 killings in Mississippi.
A Park Service spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
The Park Service’s decision comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive
order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused the previous administration of rewriting history. Under Trump’s order, the interior secretary must revise or replace signs that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history."...
During Beckwith’s two 1964 trials, the Citizens’ Council provided him with three top criminal defense lawyers free of charge. Former Gov. Ross Barnett, who attended the trial and shook hands with Beckwith, was the law partner of one of the attorneys.
Those two trials ended when the all-male, all-white juries deadlocked, and many in Greenwood welcomed Beckwith as a hero.
Afterward, the assassin tried to ride his infamy into public office when he ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 1967, telling crowds that he believed in “absolute white supremacy under white Christian rule.”
His violent ways continued afterward. In 1973, New Orleans police caught him with a ticking time bomb that he planned to use to blow up a Jewish leader’s home, and he went to prison. He blamed his conviction on the “little Jewish prosecutor” and “n—- women” on the jury.
In the years that followed, Beckwith made no secret of his racism. In a 1990 interview, he called the white Citizens’ Council, created to preserve Jim Crow ways, “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.”
He pointed to his Bible and said, “N—-s are beasts. It says so in here in the book of Adam.”
He bragged about Mississippi having more churches per capita than any other state.
“That’s a fact — till the n—-s started having all those holy roller meetings and NAACP meetings in those churches. Then they began to burn down.”
Then he said, “You know, n—-s are careless with matches,” before erupting in laughter.
As for the NAACP leader he killed, Beckwith called him a “mongrel” and said, “God hates mongrels.”
Beckwith bragged that God was on his side. He said he served as a minister in the Christian Identity Movement, a white supremacist religion that teaches Adam and Eve were white people and that those who aren’t white are “mud people” without souls.
He made no secret either of his hatred of Jews, calling them the offspring of Satan and claiming they had satanic powers. One day, white people, whom he called the “true Israelites,” would destroy these Jews, he said. “We Israelites have more firepower.”
Jackson Mayor John Horhn called Beckwith “a self-described racist. If the National Park Service is taking exception to that, just listen to the man’s own words.”
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