Trump Administration Doesn't Want Us to Call Medgar Evers' Racist Assassin a 'Racist'
Continuing the tradition of whitewashing history, the National Park Service is editing brochures at Medgar Evers' home to remove the word "racist" in a description of Klansman Byron De La Beckwith.
Medgar Evers didn’t die quietly, and he didn’t die accidentally. He was hunted.
On June 12, 1963, shortly after midnight, Evers pulled into his Jackson, Miss., home, tired. He’d been working late doing the hard work of organizing voter-registration drives, investigating racial violence, and pushing Mississippi to acknowledge Black humanity.
Earlier that evening on June 11, President John F. Kennedy had gone on national television to call civil rights a “moral crisis.” Evers listened, knowing that the Southern morality clock moves on its own time. He also knew that every time the country moved forward, Mississippi always answered with a steel boot. Evers got out of his car carrying NAACP T-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go.”
He never made it to the door.
From across the street, hidden in the darkness, a white supremacist klansman named Byron De La Beckwith fired a .30-06 rifle. The bullet tore into Evers’ back, ripped through his chest and exited his body. He collapsed in his own driveway, blood pooling beneath him, his children inside the house, his wife, Myrlie, running toward him, screaming his name.
This wasn’t a mugging. This wasn’t random violence. This was an execution.
Mississippi barely blinked.
University of Mississippi Medical Center, where Evers was taken, failed to save him.
And because President Donald Trump is more concerned with upholding white supremacy, he doesn’t want Byron De La Beckwith to be called a racist.
You know who would hate that?
Byron De La Beckwith.
Isn’t it just like Trump’s America to think that erasing a word would erase the history?
The National Park Service, under the direction of Lil Big Baby Vladimir Trump, is celebrating Black History Month by editing brochures at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument to avoid calling the full-card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan and well-known white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith a “racist.” (The brochure will also no longer include a reference to Evers lying in a pool of blood after he was shot.)
And it would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.
Over the last year, federal agencies have quietly—and sometimes not so quietly—been instructed to flag, limit, or outright remove words related to race and discrimination from official use. Terms like “racism,” “racial justice,” “anti-racism,” “white privilege,” and even “Black” have been treated as radioactive. Thousands of federal web pages were altered or scrubbed to comply with new guidance discouraging language deemed “divisive” or “woke.” The goal, we’re told, is neutrality. What it actually achieves is something far more sinister: the institutional permission to harm.
This isn’t a debate about tone or decorum. This isn’t about people being too sensitive on X/Twitter. This is the federal government deciding that certain words—words that describe real, measurable social conditions—are too inconvenient to exist in its vocabulary. And when the government starts editing reality through language, that’s not restraint. That’s censorship dressed up as common sense and another dangerous step towards Jim Crow.
