Dispatches Going the Last Mile with Medgar

By MICHAEL RILEY, in Jackson, Mississippi

As she sat on the witness stand, staring down at the small color photograph in her lap, Myrlie Evers' hands quivered slightly. The wood-paneled courtroom was silent. Mrs. Evers paused, drew in a breath and then spoke, her clear voice cracking for the first time that day. "Yes," she said, "this is Medgar in his casket." The photograph showed the exhumed body of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who had been shot and killed in 1963; even in his coffin he wore a gold N.A.A.C.P. pin on his lapel. Evers had been taken from his grave, and his widow had been called to testify because white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith was on trial for his murder.

Twice in 1964 Beckwith walked free after all-white juries deadlocked. Indeed, exactly 30 years ago to the day -- Jan. 27 -- Beckwith's first trial had begun. Back then Mrs. Evers sat in this same Hinds County courtroom and saw former Governor Ross Barnett embrace Beckwith in full view of the jury. She watched while Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and expert marksman, winked, smiled and clowned through both trials. But today "Delay", as his friends call him, now 73, sat stonefaced. In his lapel he wore a Confederate-flag pin. He strained to hear Mrs. Evers as she recounted her husband's final moments.

Shortly after midnight on a balmy June night, she said, she and the Evers' three young children, who had waited up after listening to President Kennedy give a speech on civil rights, heard Medgar's Oldsmobile pull into the driveway. Then a rifle fired from a honeysuckle thicket some 200 ft. away. Myrlie ran to the door and saw her 37-year-old husband, bloody and dying, slump toward the steps, his car keys still in hand. His arms had been laden with T shirts reading jim crow must go. The children ran out, crying "Daddy, Daddy, please get up, Daddy!" When he died, Mrs. Evers noted in her testimony, Medgar Evers was working for the simplest things: to have black school-crossing guards, to make it possible for blacks to try on hats and clothes in department stores.

The rifle was an Enfield 30.06, and Beckwith's fingerprint was found on the scope; his white Valiant was seen parked nearby; he later bragged at a Ku Klux Klan meeting, "Killing that nigger gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children." Yet he has remained free.

Until the trial, Mrs. Evers had not seen her husband's accused killer face to face in 30 years. "It was very traumatic," she said. "I can't find the words right now about what my feelings were. I simply can't. It was terribly emotional. I felt ill. I actually felt physically ill And determined -- determined to see this thing through I'm going the last mile of the way with Medgar, and that's what it's all about."