Captain Ralph Hargrove of the
Jackson Police Department with the .30-calibre rifle used to assassinate civil
rights activist Medgar Evers (37).
The assassination took place on June 12th,
1963, outside of Evers’ home in Jackson, Mississippi. The killer, 42-year-old
Byron De La Beckwith, fired a single (and fatal) shot from the bolt-action
M1917 Enfield rifle which struck Evers in the back. Beckwith was a Klansman who
hated Evers for his work as the field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi.
Earlier in the day, President Kennedy had given an atypically supportive speech
of civil rights on television - which may have served to further enrage
Beckwith and spur him to violence.
The first two attempts to try
Beckwith for murder failed, with both trials ending in a hung jury. Only on the
third attempt was the state successful in its prosecution. While the first two
juries were entirely constituted of white people, the third trial was put
before a jury of eight black people and four white people. This jury voted
unanimously to convict Beckwith of first-degree murder, with him being
sentenced to life imprisonment without any chance of parole. Prior to this
sentence, Beckwith had already spent three years in prison in Louisiana for
plotting to assassinate A.I. Botnick, a regional director of the ADL. Beckwith
died in prison due to heart disease aged 80 on January 21st, 2001.