MLK Jr’s Son Accuses Trump-Run National Park of ‘Erasing’ and ‘Sanitizing’ History By Deleting Racism References to Medgar Evers’ Assassin

Arlington National Cemetery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Martin Luther King III, the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, sharply criticized recent changes at the historic museum at the home of assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers as “erasing” and “sanitizing” history.

Evers, who served in the U.S. Army in segregated units that were sent to multiple combat areas in Europe during World War II, became the first field secretary in Mississippi for the NAACP in 1955. His work is described as a “very public leadership” role on the website for the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, and included “travell[ing] throughout the state encouraging people to register to vote,” “investigat[ing] and document[ing] cases of discrimination and violence against blacks,” “work[ing] with other civil rights organizations, and encourag[ing] younger activists’ involvement in local youth councils across the state.”

On June 12, 1963, Evers was shot in the back in the carport in front of his home as he exited his car. His assassination sparked civil rights protests and nonviolent marches that were attended by thousands of people, including Dr. King, and became part of the motivation for the passage of the Civil Rights Act the following year.

Evers’ killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was a member of both the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council, another white supremacist group that was more public in their operations and activities, meeting openly and without the Klan’s white robes or other disguises.

De La Beckwith was arrested less than two weeks after Evers’ murder. At that time, Blacks were heavily disenfranchised by Jim Crow laws in Mississippi and therefore excluded from juries. The White Citizens’ Council paid for his lawyers.

Two all-white juries in 1964 deadlocked and did not reach a verdict but Evers’ widow, Myrlie Evers, was able to get the county to take up the case again in the 1990s. In 1994, with new evidence, De La Beckwith was brought to trial again, convicted of murder by a jury, and sentenced to life in prison. He died in prison in 2001.

The Evers home in Jackson, Mississippi, where the couple lived with their three children and where Evers was assassinated, was donated by Myrlie Evers in 1993 to Tougaloo College, a local historically black college in town. The house was designated a National Historic Monument in 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first term. The property was authorized as a national monument in 2019 and purchased by the National Park Service from the college in 2020.

Jud McCranie, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On Thursday, Mississippi Today reported that Trump’s National Park Service had “removed visitor brochures” from the Evers home museum. The purpose, according to Park Service officials who asked to remain anonymous, is to make edits that will include removing references that called De La Beckwith a “racist.”

These changes are in line with executive orders Trump signed in the first few months of his second term, and similar orders from his agency appointees, ordering the removal of references that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” The Trump administration has characterized these efforts as a dedication to accuracy and eliminating disparagement of American history instead of focusing on the “greatness” and “accomplishments” of the country and its people.

However, in a practical sense, these orders have resulted in the removal of webpages, articles, memorials, and commemorations for minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. Arlington National Cemetery, where Evers is buried, purged his bio from its website last March.

King, whose own father was assassinated by another white supremacist who opposed desegregation, had a highly critical reaction to what Mississippi Today had reported, seeming to directly address the Trump administration’s attempts to spin such changes as “truth” and instead calling it “erasing” and “[s]anitizing history.”

“The murder of Medgar Evers was an act of racial terror,” King wrote. “That fact is not partisan. It is historical. Calling it anything else is not ‘restoring truth.’ It is erasing it. Sanitizing history from violence and racism does not bring the country together. It weakens our understanding of who we are and how far we still have to go.”

The Mississippi Today article included a lengthy section detailing De La Beckwith’s open and public comments embracing racism and antisemitism, including an unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor in which he declared his belief in “absolute white supremacy under white Christian rule,” a prison stint after “New Orleans police caught him with a ticking time bomb that he planned to use to blow up a Jewish leader’s home” (and he “blamed his conviction on the ‘little Jewish prosecutor’ and ‘n***** women’ on the jury”), telling a reporter in 1990 that “n*****s are beasts” because it “says so” in the Bible, saying that Black churches burned down because “n******s are careless with matches,” calling Evers a “mongrel,” bragging that God supported him because Adam and Eve were white and nonwhites were “mud people” who did not have souls, and claiming Jews were the children of Satan and had inherited satanic powers.

And the federal government is spending time and money to remove references that called De La Beckwith a “racist.”

De La Beckwith, who said all those things publicly and who murdered a civil rights leader, should not be called a “racist” at the museum at the museum at the home where he shot Medgar Evers in the back in his own driveway and watched him fall to the ground, struggle to get up and stagger a few steps before collapsing outside the door as his wife and children waited for him inside — that is apparently the position of the federal government, that the word “racist” should not be mentioned to describe the man who said and did such things.

This article has been updated to correct the year Evers became an NAACP field secretary.

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