Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 28, 1994 TAG: 9401280126
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: JACKSON, MISS. LENGTH: Medium
Evers was gunned down early on June 12, 1963, with a bullet "aimed by prejudice, propelled by hatred and fired by a coward, a back-shooting coward," Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter told the jury in his opening statement.
His first witness, Evers' widow, Myrlie, swept away the years with an emotional and bitter accounting of the night her husband was shot in the driveway of their Jackson home while she and their three children were inside. They had been up late watching President Kennedy deliver a ground-breaking speech on civil rights.
"We heard the car pull in the driveway and this horrible blast, and the children fell to the floor as he had taught them to do," she recalled, her usually commanding voice beginning to quaver. "The baby was on the bed with me, and I just bolted up off the bed and ran to the front door, and opened the front door, and there was Medgar on the ground, reaching toward the door with his keys in his hand.
"I screamed, I guess uncontrollably, and the children ran out and Myrlie Evers they cried out, `Daddy! Daddy! Please get up, Daddy!' "
De La Beckwith, 73, is accused of lying in wait for Evers and firing a single bullet from an antique deer-hunting rifle through Evers' chest.
He has said he was happy Evers was killed, but denies killing him.
Evers, then 37, was the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, and as such was one of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders. He was leading a voter registration drive and other efforts to overturn Mississippi's system of racial segregation.
As a staunch segregationist, Beckwith was a hero to many at his two 1964 trials. Both ended in De La Beckwith deadlocks by all-white juries.
The case was reopened in 1990 because of allegations of jury and evidence tampering.
In his opening statement, DeLaughter said the prosecution's case was not about the civil rights movement, nor simply an attempt "to right an old wrong." Rather, he insisted, it is simply a retrying of a murder case.
But his questioning of Evers, who retained her first husband's name after remarrying, evoked much of the tenor of the era in which Medgar Evers lived and died.
When DeLaughter asked her what changes her husband had been trying to make when he was slain, she ticked off many, her voice edged with indignation. "To be able to use the libraries, to be able to go to department stores and be able to try on clothes. . . . To be able to be called by a name instead of `boy' or `girl.' To be able to be called by a courtesy title. . . . There were just any number of things that he was working for."
In a brief opening statement by the defense, court-appointed lawyer Merrida Coxwell Jr. said that, as in the two previous trials, witnesses would place Beckwith 90 miles away from Jackson at the time of the shooting.
"By the time this case is over, you will have seen that it was physically impossible for Mr. Byron De La Beckwith to have killed Mr. Evers," Coxwell said.
by CNB