cover image Portrait of a Racist: The Man Who Killed Medgar Evers?

Portrait of a Racist: The Man Who Killed Medgar Evers?

Reed Massengill. St. Martin's Press, $23.95 (403pp) ISBN 978-0-312-09365-5

There is a morbid fascination to this biography of Byron De La Beckwith, the white supremacist charged (but not convicted) in the murder of Mississippi civil rights activist Medgar Evers (1925-1963). Massengill, who has written for Vanity Fair and Forbes , is Beckwith's nephew and had his uncle's cooperation for two years--until his uncle insisted that he wanted a book that ``would call attention to what he viewed as past legal injustices he had suffered at the hands of the Jews.'' But Massengill did have the full cooperation of his aunt Mary, who lived through three stormy marriages with Beckwith (the last ending in 1965). With the Medgar Evers case reopened in 1990, Massengill does not offer any new evidence of Beckwith's guilt, but Massengill's aunt Mary is convinced of it. In highly readable detail, Massengill portrays the life and trials of his uncle, who progressed from 1960s arch segregationist to a role in the right-wing Christian Identity movement. Beckwith, who served a Louisiana prison term from 1977 to 1980 for his involvement in a bomb plot, still awaits a third trial in the Evers case. Photos not seen by PW . (Feb.)