Hours after Mississippi Today reported Thursday that the National Park Service had removed brochures to the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument that identified his murderer as a racist, the Park Service returned the brochures to the home.

On Thursday, Park Service officials told Mississippi Today that the reason they removed the brochures was they were “outdated.”

The Park Service had pulled the brochures in anticipation of replacing them with a new version, which would remove the word “racist” to describe the killer, Byron De La Beckwith, according to Park Service officials, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Other edits include eliminating the reference to Medgar Evers lying in a pool of blood after being shot.

Medgar Evers’ niece, Hinds County Supervisor Wanda Evers, said, “You can take away the brochures, but the one thing you can’t take away is history.”

Reena Evers-Everette, executive director of the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute and daughter of the couple, said the family has been told the matter is under review, “but the final product has not been put out yet.”

Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson said Thursday he is sending a letter to the National Park Service to get an explanation of what is happening. The Evers home is in Thompson’s district, and he worked for 16 years to get the home recognized as a national monument.

In 1963, Beckwith shot the civil rights leader in the back on the driveway of the Evers family home in Jackson. It would take 31 more years before a Mississippi jury would convict Beckwith.

The pulled brochures called Beckwith “a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.”

Stephanie Rolph, author of “Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council 1954-1989,” said the council “believed in the natural superiority of the Aryan race. They even went so far as to say that civilizations failed because of racial amalgamation.”

Beckwith also belonged to the nation’s most violent white supremacist group, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, responsible for at least 10 killings in Mississippi. 

When he ran unsuccessfully for Mississippi lieutenant governor in 1967, telling crowds that he believed in “absolute white supremacy under white Christian rule.” Six years later, he was caught trying to plant a bomb outside a Jewish leader’s home in New Orleans and went to prison. 

In a 1990 interview, Beckwith repeatedly used racial slurs. He called African Americans “beasts,” referred to Medgar Evers as a “mongrel” and said, “God hates mongrels.”

President Donald Trump, who once called Evers “a great American hero,” issued a March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused the previous administration of rewriting history. Under the order, the interior secretary must revise or replace signs that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”

Two months later, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed with his own order, calling for the removal of “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”

The Washington Post has reported that the administration has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, including an 1863 photo that Christian abolitionists used to prove the horrors of slavery. The picture depicts a Black man whose back was covered in scars from beatings while enslaved.

According to the Post, National Park Service officials are “broadly interpreting that directive to apply to information on racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights or persecution of Indigenous people.”

Park Service officials said Thursday that the interior secretary’s order “directed a review of certain interpretive content to ensure parks tell the full and accurate story of American history, including subjects that were minimized or omitted under the last administration. That includes fully addressing slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, and other foundational chapters of our history, informed by current scholarship and expert review, not through a narrow ideological lens.

“Some materials may be edited or replaced to provide broader context, others may remain unchanged, and some removals being cited publicly had nothing to do with [the order] at all. Claims that parks are erasing history or removing signs wholesale are inaccurate.”

Julien Beacham said while working for the Evers Institute, he recalled the order coming into the Evers home that park rangers could no longer refer to Beckwith as a “racist” on their tours.

Leslie Burl McLemore, a longtime political science professor and founding director of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy at Jackson State University, called it “asinine” to remove such language about Beckwith. “He was a first-class racist, and there’s no way you can get around it,” McLemore said. “He assassinated a man and then bragged about it.”

The Civil Rights Movement never would have happened in Mississippi without people like Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses leading the way, McLemore said. “And now there are people who want to turn back the clock.”