Medgar Evers
Mississippi has a dark history of racism. It was in the state’s capital Jackson that Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963.
On the morning of June 12, 1963, around 12:20 a.m., Medgar Evers arrived home from a long meeting at the New Jerusalem Baptist Church located at 2464 Kelley Street. He got out of his car, arms filled with “Jim Crow Must Go” T-shirts, and walked toward the kitchen door when a shot was fired from a high-powered rifle, striking Evers in the back. Myrlie heard the shot, ran outside with the children behind her, and saw Medgar lying face down in the carport. Next-door-neighbor Houston Wells heard the shot and called the police. The police arrived only minutes later and provided an escort as Wells drove Evers to the emergency room of the University of Mississippi Medical Center on North State Street. Evers died shortly after 1:00 a.m. of loss of blood and internal injuries.
A white man was arrested and charged with the murder of Evers.
On June 22, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council, was arrested and charged with the slaying of Medgar Evers. Beckwith was tried twice for Evers’s murder, first in February and later in April 1964. Both trials (before all-white male jurors) ended in hung juries. Beckwith was not retried for the Evers murder until 30 years later. In a two-week trial, held in February 1994 before a jury of eight blacks and four whites, Beckwith was found guilty of the murder of Evers, for which he received a life sentence. Beckwith served only seven years of his life sentence at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County before dying of a heart attack January 21, 2001.
Nearly half a century later, Jackson, Mississippi is once again the site of a vicious, racially-motivated murder. This time, the crime was caught on video.
James Craig Anderson
On a recent Sunday morning just before dawn, two carloads of white teenagers drove to Jackson, Mississippi, on what the county district attorney says was a mission of hate: to find and hurt a black person.
In a parking lot on the western side of town they found their victim.
James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old auto plant worker, was standing in a parking lot, near his car. The teens allegedly beat Anderson repeatedly, yelled racial epithets, including “White Power!” according to witnesses.
Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith says a group of the teens then climbed into their large Ford F250 green pickup truck, floored the gas, and drove the truck right over Anderson, killing him instantly.
You can watch the video at the CNN link if you are so inclined. The video was taken from some distance away.
Deryl Dedmon, Jr.
The young man who proposed to his friends that they attack a black person–any black person–and who drove his truck over Anderson’s already battered body is Deryl Dedmon, Jr., age 18. Dedmon had been robbed a few weeks previously, and wanted some kind of twisted “revenge,” according to the New York Daily News.
According to the CNN article linked above,
Shortly after he allegedly drove the truck over Anderson, Dedmon allegedly boasted and laughed about the killing, according to testimony given by some of the teens to detectives.
“I ran that nigger over,” Dedmon allegedly said in a phone conversation to the teens in the other car.
He repeated the racial language in subsequent conversations, according to the law enforcement officials.
“He was not remorseful he was laughing, laughing about the killing,” said district attorney Smith.
Dedmon and the driver of the SUV, John Aaron Rice, have been arrested. Dedmon has been charged with murder, but a judge reduced the charges against Rice to aggravated assault. None of the other teenagers who were involved have not been charged with anything. Reportedly the two people in the car with Dedmon were girls. Rice had driven off with the others before the murder.
WJTV in Jackson talked to a former classmate of Dedmon’s, Branden Richardson, who said he was bullied by Dedmon and isn’t surprised to learn of the terrible crime.
“Didn’t surprise me at all, whatsoever, none at all,” says Richardson.
Richardson went to James Anderson’s funeral. Not because he knew Anderson, but because he knew that it could have been his own funeral.
“I very much felt that it could have been, a different day, it could have been me in that casket,” Richardson tells us. “I believe that just because Deryl didn’t like me.”
What I want to know is, why aren’t the other participants in this hate crime being prosecuted? They apparently chose to go along after Dedmon proposed hurting a black person. Isn’t participation in a felony in which someone is killed usually prosecuted as murder? Why isn’t the death penalty on the table? After all, this is Mississippi, where the death penalty is often invoked. Will justice be served in this case?
We’ll have to keep on eye on this one.
