A state agency and governor abetted Evers’s killer across three trials until 1994.

Evidence

Just two years before murdering Evers, when Beckwith heard rumors that black visitors might try to attend his own church in the Mississippi delta, he had arrived early and stood on the steps with a pistol, declaring to his fellow members that he would handle things. At Beckwith’s first trial for Evers’s murder, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission—an official state agency operating from 1956 to 1977 to preserve segregation—illegally investigated potential jurors to help his defense attorneys weed out Jews and blacks. Governor Ross Barnett personally appeared in the courtroom, shaking hands with Beckwith in full view of the jury. Two successive trials with all-white juries failed to reach a decision. Beckwith was not brought to justice until a third trial finally convicted him in 1994. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 134

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how white supremacy operated through official state machinery, echoing themes in the reader’s other colonial/racial-state books like the French West Africa and colonial Dutch Indies material.