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Beckwith returned to Greenwood, worked for ten years as a tobacco salesman. He and his wife were divorced, remarried, then separated—and Beckwith lived alone in the tumble-down family house. Last January he became a fertilizer salesman. He was glib enough to be good at selling but, as one employer obliquely put it, he was "overly enthusiastic about things not concerned with his job."
By that was meant Beckwith's segregationist obsessions. He attended Greenwood's Episcopal Church of the Nativity. But, says a member, "He tried to inject racism into everything. If you talked about Noah and the Ark, he'd want to know if there were any Negroes in the Ark." In pursuit of his obsessions, Beckwith passed out racist pamphlets that he wrote himself, launched such an aggressive recruiting drive for the local white Citizens Council that its officers finally asked him to desist. He also stood in the doorway of Greenwood's bus terminal to block Negroes trying to integrate the facilities.
Such obsessions—if the criminal charges against him are correct—led Beckwith to the assassination of Negro Leader Medgar Evers. In the honeysuckle patch where the killer hid, police found an abandoned rifle. FBI agents traced its ownership to Beckwith, a gun collector; they also identified a fingerprint on the weapon as Beckwith's. Arrested by the FBI, Beckwith was turned over to state authorities, who are demanding that he be sentenced to death.
Yet for all his obviously weird ways, Beckwith still has his defenders in Greenwood. A local fund drive is under way to pay his legal expenses. Declares a Greenwood businessman: "I say the shooting of Evers was a patriotic act. If Delay pulled the trigger that night, he must have felt he was doing it for the South and the state." Says a Beckwith friend: "Beckwith is a Joan of Arc, and his cause is to destroy the evil of forced integration. I don't think he is fit mentally. But Joan of Arc was a little abnormal too."
-A fact which led the Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger to headline an Associated Press story: CALIFORNIAN is CHARGED WITH MURDER OF EVERS.