A massive controversy is brewing in Jackson, Mississippi, as Black History Month kicks off with reports that the National Park Service has been scrubbing the “racist” truth from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument.
According to Mississippi Today, federal officials were told to pull brochures and edit a plaque to remove any mention of racism, including the specific label of Medgar Evers’ killer as a racist. The site honors the legacy of the NAACP leader who was ambushed and killed by KKK member Byron De La Beckwith in 1963, but even the graphic details of the murder, like Evers dying in a pool of his own blood, have reportedly been wiped from the materials. As of late Thursday, the brochures were returned to the landmark, with Park Service officials claiming they were “outdated.”
The White House is currently pointing the finger at staff, telling The Daily Beast that these changes weren’t authorized and calling it a “deliberate act” by certain employees. While an investigation is underway into why it happened, the move follows a March 2025 executive order from the Trump administration aimed at “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” That order claims that “revisionist” history has spent too much time “casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” Because of this, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been directing agencies to review sites for content that might “inappropriately disparage” figures from the past.
Activists and locals are completely stunned that the government is hesitating to call Beckwith what he was, especially since he never hid it himself. Back in 1990, the assassin bragged about his white supremacist views, infamously saying, “N***ers are beasts. It says so in here in the book of Adam.” Jeff Steinberg, who founded “Sojourn to the Past”, didn’t hold back when speaking to Mississippi Today about the changes.
“You can’t call Beckwith a racist?” Steinberg asked. “If you opened a picture dictionary and turned to the definition for ‘racist,’ you’d probably find a picture of Byron De La Beckwith.”
This isn’t just happening in Mississippi. Just recently, slavery exhibits at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall were taken down, despite them detailing the lives of people enslaved by George Washington. Myrlie Evers spent three decades fighting to finally get a conviction against Beckwith in 1994, but now it seems the federal government is more concerned with polishing the narrative than telling the raw truth.
As the investigation continues, many are left wondering why the ugly parts of the civil rights struggle are suddenly being treated like they never happened.
