Mississippi's Social Transformation in Public Memories of the Trial Against Byron de la Beckwith for the Murder of Medgar Evers

Abstract

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted for the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Journalistic coverage of the trial and the 1996 docudrama Ghosts of Mississippi crafted a social values transformation myth that depicted Beckwith as the primary villain of the civil rights past and cast his conviction as a sign that racism had been cleansed from Mississippi. Popular media naturalized this myth intertextually though narrative repetition and through symbolic cues that established the film as a source of historic understanding. These cues deflected critical attention from contemporary social conditions that have maintained racial inequity and continue to prompt racially motivated hate crimes

Keywords:

• Byron de la Beckwith
• Civil Rights
• Ghosts of Mississippi
• Hegemony
• Medgar Evers
• Public Memory
• Social Values Transformation Myth

The author wishes to thank Dana Cloud, Lisa Foster, and Emmett Winn for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The author also gives special thanks to the anonymous reviewers and to the editor for their valuable remarks and suggestions.

Notes

The Southern Poverty Law Center identified 15 of these cases in Mississippi at the time of Beckwith's conviction including the 1964 murders of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi; the 1966 murder of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg; and the 1964 murders of Henry Hezekiak Lee and Charles Eddie Moore near Meadville (Nossiter, 1994, p. B18).

Men recently convicted for civil rights murders include Sam Bowers on August 21, 1998, for the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer (Sullivan, 1998, p. A1); Thomas Blanton on May 1, 2001, for the 1963 bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four Black girls (Copeland, 2001, p. 2A); Bobby Frank Cherry on May 22, 2002, also for the 1963 bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church (Bragg, 2002, p. A2); and Ernest Avant on February 28, 2003, for the 1966 murder of Ben Chester White (Hart, 2004, p. 23).

Rushing and Frentz (1978) define myth as “society's collectivity of persistent values, handed down from generation to generation, that help to make the world understandable, support the social order, and educate the society's young” (p. 67).

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Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl (PhD, 2005, The University of Texas at Austin) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Auburn University. An earlier and condensed draft of this paper also appears in Rhetorical Agendas: Political, Ethical, Spiritual (Selected papers from the 2004 Rhetoric Society of America Conference.) (2006). Ed. P. Bizzell. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.