Editor’s note: This column includes excerpts from Jerry Mitchell’s book, “Race Against Time,” which details how some of the nation’s most notorious killings came to be punished decades later.

I figured I had the right place when I saw the bumper sticker for David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who nearly became Louisiana’s governor. I knew I had the right place when I saw a Confederate battle flag flapping in the breeze outside a white wooden-frame house.

As I stepped down the gravel driveway, a wiry 5-foot-8 man hailed me. I shook the hand of the 69-year-old, surprised by his steady grip. As I let go, I realized it was the same hand that squeezed the trigger of the .30-06 rifle that killed Medgar Evers in 1963.

Byron De La Beckwith waved me inside his home in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, and guided me into a back room, where he sat in a floral chair, holding court. An orphan by age 12, he had fought in the Pacific during World War II and returned to Mississippi with a Purple Heart. Eager to belong, he joined the Sons of the American Revolution, where he told me members began telling him “the horrible, insidiously evil things that went on in local, county, state, federal and worldwide government.”

Beckwith and his wife belonged to the far-right Liberty Lobby. Through its newspaper, The Spotlight, the organization claimed that fraud enabled “illegal aliens” to stay in the U.S. and that 6 million Jews didn’t die in the Holocaust because only 74,000 died at Auschwitz. (Historians put the actual Auschwitz figure at 1.1 million deaths, nearly all of them Jews.)

Spotlight, whose readership reached up to 1 million, pushed the agenda that secret sinister forces controlled the government, seeking to harm Americans through drinking water, prescription drugs and conventional medical treatment, including vaccines, despite the role vaccines have played in the global eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. A recent study concluded that immunizations had saved more than 150 million lives.

Now, decades since my 1990 interview with Beckwith, what was once fringe thinking has become fashionable. Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-immigrant and anti-federal government rhetoric have made their way into the mainstream.

In 1998, The Lancet published a landmark study by Andrew Wakefield and other scientists about a possible link between vaccines and autism.

Although the British medical journal later retracted this study, mistrust mushroomed. Celebrities from Jim Carrey to Robert De Niro questioned the safety of childhood vaccines. They found a supporter in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the nation’s Health and Human Services secretary. In the wake of parents refusing to vaccinate their children, measles — virtually eradicated in the 2000s — has roared back to about 1,800 cases so far this year, resulting in at least three deaths, two of them children.

After the pandemic hit in 2020, Kennedy said in a video that “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not.” He called the COVID vaccine — developed during President Donald Trump’s first administration and backed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

On Aug. 8 this year, a man angry about the vaccine fired hundreds of rounds at the CDC headquarters, killing a police officer before he committed suicide.

Inside Beckwith’s home in 1990, his wife, Thelma, brought him a glass of an orange drink. I noticed it was bubbling like a mad scientist’s potion. I asked him about it, and he explained it was orange soda, combined with food-grade hydrogen peroxide.

This, he told me, was part of his chelation therapy, which he insisted had kept his arteries clear since renal surgery. Chelation — a dubious treatment that Spotlight championed — grabs poisons and expels them through the kidneys, Beckwith said. “Right-wing folks all over the country are drinking hydrogen peroxide,” he said.

While chelation is used to treat lead poisoning, the medical community has rejected broader use. But that hasn’t stopped Kennedy from touting chelation. Celebrity Jenny McCarthy claims chelation cured her son of autism, but at least one child has died from this treatment.

Beckwith’s wife poured me a glass of this orange concoction, and I pretended to sip it. He promised me it would remove the poisons that the government had been pumping into my body through fluoridated water. “Fluoridated water has been killing babies,” he said. “It’s being suppressed by the government and national TV.”

For decades, the CDC praised fluoridated water, saying studies show the treatment reduces cavities. Despite that, Utah and Florida recently banned fluoride in public water systems. At least 16 other states have introduced bills to do the same. Mississippi has, too, despite the fact that much of the state’s water supply contains no fluoride.

Since taking over as HHS secretary, Kennedy has called fluoride a “dangerous neurotoxin” that can cause bone fractures, bone cancer, arthritis, thyroid disorders and reduced IQ in children. The Environmental Protection Agency is now reviewing evidence on fluoride in drinking water.

Beckwith said the words that changed him most came from Judge Thomas P. Brady, who decried the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to desegregate public schools in an infamous speech known as “Black Monday.” He told a bizarre racist version of history in which he claimed whites built the pyramids in Egypt and that racial “mongrelization” had destroyed this society. This was nothing more than a desire by white supremacists to believe they were behind the world’s greatest achievements. In reality, these ancient civilizations were anything but white.

Brady said people of African descent should regard the day they arrived in America in 1619 as “Thanksgiving Day” because they were “brought from abject ignorance, primitive slavery and placed in a country that was Christian and civilized.” White Mississippi students read this speech in their classrooms along with textbooks that claimed the KKK had saved the South. These same textbooks failed to mention the savage massacres of Black Mississippians from Vicksburg to Meridian.

In recent years, attacks on “critical race theory” and diversity, equity and inclusion have led to revised textbooks. In Florida, new standards require textbooks to say “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Some textbooks now call slavery “black immigration,” and one book describes Reconstruction as a time when “great southern leaders and much of the old aristocracy were unable to vote or hold office. The result was that state legislatures were filled with illiterate or incompetent men. … In retaliation, many southerners formed secret organizations to protect themselves and their society from anarchy. Among these groups was the Ku Klux Klan.”

In March, Trump issued an executive order that instructed the National Park Service to remove materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans.” The Washington Post reported that the administration has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, including an 1863 photo used to expose slavery’s horrors — a Black man whose back was covered in scars.

After Brady gave his “Black Monday” speech, Beckwith sold copies of it and joined the white Citizens’ Council. He said the most powerful members of society — bank presidents, judges, lawyers, congressmen and other politicians — made up the council. “That was my first love,” he sighed, as if reminiscing about a high school sweetheart. “The Citizens’ Council was the first ray of light Dixie had seen since we fought through Reconstruction and captured the right to vote, the right of white people to run the South.”

He said there had been a “great awakening of council activity in St. Louis, but it’s under a little different name” — the Council of Conservative Citizens.

A quarter-century after Beckwith’s words, a young white man named Dylann Roof stumbled upon that group’s website in his Google search for “black on White crime.” After reading page after page of such violence, Roof took action.

On June 17, 2015, he walked inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in time for Wednesday night Bible study. While a dozen Black members closed their eyes in prayer, Roof fired 70 rounds from a Glock .45-caliber pistol, killing nine. When he recounted the slaughter to the FBI, he laughed.

Beckwith laughed, too, when he spoke about Medgar Evers. “I didn’t kill that n—, but he’s sho’ dead,” he chuckled. “He ain’t comin’ back.”

In 1964, two trials for Beckwith ended in mistrials. The all-white juries couldn’t agree on a verdict, despite the fact his rifle with his fingerprint had been left at the murder scene. But the Klansman failed to dodge conviction when he tried to bomb a Jewish leader’s home in New Orleans in 1975.

After spending two and a half years in prison, he joined the Liberty Lobby, which pushed for the deportation of all immigrants. Beckwith called those of Asian descent “the yellow plague” and said, “The Chinamen come over here and eat rice and dead rats, and all the money goes back to China.”

More than three decades later, these tropes persist. After a far-right outlet claimed Haitians, who migrated legally to Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets, then-Sen. JD Vance shared it on social media. City officials denied the report, but Trump repeated the claim in a 2024 presidential debate. He vowed to deport millions of immigrants, starting in Springfield.

In 2025 so far, more than 2 million undocumented immigrants have left the U.S. through deportations or other means, according to the Department of Homeland Security. In September, Trump announced that the fees to hire skilled foreign workers would rise from nearly $1,000 to $100,000.

Beckwith’s beloved Liberty Lobby advocated “America First,” a slogan adopted by the KKK in the 1920s in their opposition to Catholics, Jews and immigrants. The white supremacist group skyrocketed to more than 6 million members, electing thousands to state and national offices. In Mississippi, Klansman Theodore G. Bilbo served as both governor (1916-20 and 1928-32) and U.S. senator (1935-47).

Trump has since revived the slogan “America First,” and new Labor Department posters feature 1940s-era workers and families, promising “high-skilled jobs to AMERICANS FIRST.” All the workers are white men.

In a recent interview with conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, host of the “America First” livestream, decried “organized Jewry” and declared, “We need to recognize that white people have a special heritage here as Americans. … We’re losing our civilization because of mass immigration.” Trump should crush anyone in the way of deporting the 10 million people here illegally, Fuentes said. “If you’re not on board with that, you’re going to jail.”

The Liberty Lobby denounced foreign aid. After taking office in 2025, the Trump administration halted this aid, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and asked Congress to rescind $8.3 billion in funding.

Beckwith told me to thank the KKK. If the group didn’t exist, “you’d be a damn mulatto, quadroon or octoroon instead of a white man, a Nordic man of blood and culture. You’d just be a damn mongrel,” he said. He told me that Evers, the civil rights leader he had shot in the back on that dark night in Jackson, was “nothing but a mongrel, and God hates mongrels.”

Beckwith told me that our ancestors were the true Israelites and that “anyone who calls Jesus a Jew is blaspheming.” His basement was already packed with an arsenal for the “holy war” that he said white Christians would win against Satan and the Jews. “We have more firepower,” he said.

In 2017, hundreds of white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” On Aug. 27 of this year, a mass shooter opened fire at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. He wrote on his guns, “Burn Israel,” “6 million wasn’t enough,” and “Kill Donald Trump,” a strong supporter of Israel who has survived two assassination attempts.

Back in the 1950s, the Liberty Lobby joined forces with the white Citizens’ Council, trying to get Black Americans shipped to Africa. Beckwith supported this. He said he believed that those of African descent were “mud people” who had no souls. “What is a n— but a heathen?” he told me. “He’s not a Christian. After you turn him into a literate Christian, he’s still a n—.”

I felt overwhelmed, stunned that such a person could exist, let alone that he could be celebrated — and worse — protected by those in power. Noticing the darkness outside, I told him it was time for me to go.

“Let me walk you to your car.”

“That isn’t necessary.”

He walked ahead of me, anyway, blocked my way to the car and spoke. “God will bless you if you write positive things about white Caucasian Christians. If you write negative things about white Caucasian Christians, God will punish you.”

He paused, then locked eyes. “If God does not punish you directly, several individuals will do it for him.”

He stepped aside, and I closed the door. I was glad to have something, even just a pane of glass, between him and me.

I couldn’t start the engine fast enough.

Four years after my interview, a Mississippi jury convicted Beckwith of murdering Evers, and the judge sentenced him to life in prison, where he died in 2001. Hardly anyone attended his funeral.

Thousands flocked to the funeral service of Evers, who was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Words from the prophet Micah reminded author Margaret Walker Alexander of Evers: “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Mississippi needs more people like Medgar Evers.