Byron de La Beckwith - Representation in Other Media

Representation in Other Media

"Where Is the Voice Coming From?" (1963), a short story by the notable writer Eudora Welty, is considered one of the most significant works related to Beckwith's crime. Welty was from Jackson, Mississippi and she said later:

"Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind. I wrote his story--my fiction--in the first person: about that character's point of view."

Welty's story was published in The New Yorker (July 6, 1963) soon after De La Beckwith's arrest. So accurate was her portrayal that the magazine changed several details in the story before publication for legal reasons.

Byron De La Beckwith was the subject of the 1963 Bob Dylan song "Only a Pawn in Their Game", which deplores Evers' murder and the racial environment of the South.

In 1991, the murder of Evers and first trials of Beckwith were the basis of the episode entitled "Sweet, Sweet Blues", written by author William James Royce for the NBC television series In the Heat of the Night. In the episode, actor James Best plays a character based on Beckwith, an aging Klansman who appears to have gotten away with murder.

The 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi tells the story of the murder and 1994 trial. James Woods portrayed De La Beckwith in an Academy Award-nominated performance. The prosecution lawyer Robert DeLaughter was played by Alec Baldwin. Myrlie Evers was portrayed by Whoopi Goldberg.

On HBO's Mr. Show, De La Beckwith was lampooned as a character named Byron T. Lebockwith, "Racist in the Year 3000", one of the last white men left alive, traveling the universe and attempting to "propagate the species" with his gay lover, Dougie.

In 2001, Bobby DeLaughter published his memoir of the case and trial, Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medger Evers Trial.