Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has taken various measures to sanitize displays of American history and erase references to racism and anti-Black oppression. Now, the federal government appears to be stepping in to censor information about the death of a Civil Rights Movement icon’s murder, removing references to racism in the killing. After public outrage, the status of the proposed changes remains unclear.
Removing mentions of racism from a notorious story of racist murder
Mississippi Today initially reported that sources within the National Park Service have indicated that informational brochures have been removed from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, which honors the slain civil rights leader and his wife. The sources within the Park Service requested to remain anonymous to avoid reprisals for revealing this information. They indicated that the brochures will be edited for content, including removing language that refers to Evers’ killer, white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith, as “racist.” The proposed edits also include downplaying the gruesome nature of the murder by removing the description of Evers lying in a pool of his own blood.
The racist motivations behind the 1963 assassination of Evers, who served as the field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP. In addition to Beckwith belonging to the KKK, he was also a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council, which provided the killer with free legal counsel during his two criminal trials in 1964. Both trials ended with hung juries as the all-white, all-male jurors failed to convict Beckwith. After the killings, Beckwith regularly made his hatred of Black people known, regularly using racial epithets. He ran for lieutenant governor in 1967 with a platform of “absolute white supremacy under white Christian rule.” Beckwith was also violently antisemitic and served prison time for attempting to bomb the home of a Jewish leader. But Beckwith remained unpunished for Evers’ murder until 1994 when new evidence, including his fingerprints on the murder weapon, led a new, diverse jury to convict him; he was sentenced to life in prison.
After the initial story was reported on Thursday, the National Park Service returned the removed brochures, saying that they had been removed for being “outdated.” The agency said that the administration is doing a sweeping review of the material it displays “that includes fully addressing slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, and other foundational chapters of our history, informed by current scholarship and expert review, not through a narrow ideological lens.” It also said that “some materials may be edited or replaced to provide broader context,” but maintained that “claims that parks are erasing history or removing signs wholesale are inaccurate.”
Evers honored, but recognition is being removed by Trump’s orders
Evers’ death happened shortly before the 1963 March on Washington and helped to inspire desegregation activities in Mississippi and around the country during the Civil Rights Movement, as well as more recent political and social activism. Evers has received presidential recognition in recent years; then-President Joe Biden awarded him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024. In a statement honoring Evers and his wife, Myrlie, the Biden White House noted that Evers “fought for his country in World War II and returned home to lead the fight against segregation in Mississippi. After he was murdered at his home at age 37, his wife, Myrlie continued the fight to seek justice and equality in his name.” Even Trump hailed Evers, a World War II veteran, as a “great American hero” during his first term as president.
However, since returning to the White House, the Trump administration has issued a variety of executive orders and directives that have led to the removal of honors and recognition for Black Americans like Evers and whitewashed the history of anti-Black violence. Evers’ story, and the stories of other Black veterans, were removed from the Arlington National Cemetery website last year. A naval vessel named after Evers, along with vessels named after Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall and others, were marked for renaming as part of Trump’s anti-diversity policy. The U.S. Naval Academy library marked books on Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson as among those that might violate Trump’s anti-DEI policies. Memorial information about Black soldiers was even removed from an American military cemetery in the Netherlands in order to conform to Trump’s orders.
Despite public outcries, the Trump administration shows no sign of changing its policies of whitewashing American history. In doing so, parts of the stories of Evers and other remarkable Black figures have been erased from public display in order to paint a sanitized and less diverse picture of the country’s past.