Mississippi’s Social Transformation in Public Memories of the Trial against Byron de la Beckwith for the Murder of Medgar Evers

Authors

Kristen Hoerl, Auburn UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

1-2008

Citation

Western Journal of Communication 72:1 (January–March 2008), pp. 62–82.

doi: 10.1080/10570310701828966

Comments

Copyright © 2008 Western States Communication Association; published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Used by permission.

Abstract

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted for the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Journalistic coverage of the trial and the 1996 docudrama Ghosts of Mississippi crafted a social values transformation myth that depicted Beckwith as the primary villain of the civil rights past and cast his conviction as a sign that racism had been cleansed from Mississippi. Popular media naturalized this myth intertextually though narrative repetition and through symbolic cues that established the film as a source of historic understanding. These cues deflected critical attention from contemporary social conditions that have maintained racial inequity and continue to prompt racially motivated hate crimes.