Trump admin won't call Klansman who murdered civil rights leader a 'racist'

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 5, 2026. REUTERS/Al Drago

Mississippi Today reports that President Donald Trump’s National Park Service (NPS) is replacing visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, in Jackson, Mississippi.

Among the anticipated changes? No longer calling his murderer a “racist.”

“Edits to the brochure have removed that reference to Byron De La Beckwith, according to NPS officials, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Other edits include eliminating the reference to Medgar Evers lying in a pool of blood after being shot,” reports Mississippi Today writer Jerry Mitchell.

In 1963, Beckwith shot civil rights leader Medgar Evers in the back as he stood in the driveway of the Evers family home in northwest Jackson. His children were inside the home awaiting their father at the time of his death, and they saw him bleeding out in the front yard.

The original brochures pulled from the home described Beckwith as “a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.” That council, according to history author Stephanie Rolph, “believed in the natural superiority of the Aryan race.”

“They even went so far as to say that civilizations failed because of racial amalgamation,” Rolph added.

Mississippi Today reports 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.

“You can’t call Beckwith a racist?” said Jeff Steinberg, founder of Sojourn to the Past, which regularly provides civil rights tours to the home. “If you opened a picture dictionary and turned to the definition for ‘racist,’ you’d probably find a picture of Byron De La Beckwith.”

Mississippi Today reports NPS' decision comes in the wake of Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused the Biden administration of a “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

Furthermore, the order demanded the Secretary of the Interior “ensure” that all public monuments and properties within its jurisdiction “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

This apparently includes race-based assassins.

Mississippi Today adds that Trump initially hailed Evers, a World War II veteran, as a “great American hero” at the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in 2017. But after his 2025 executive order, his U.S. Army removed Evers, and the names of other Black heroes, from a section on the Arlington National Cemetery website that honored non-white Americans who fought in the nation’s wars.

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