Word: beckwiths
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...boldly declared that "history has reached a turning point, here and over the world." His words, originally intended as commentary on the plight of the civil rights movement, might serve as a profound epitaph for two crucial events of last week--the conviction of Evers' murderer Byron de la Beckwith by a Mississippi jury and the decision by the Clinton administration to normalize relations with Vietnam...
...June 12, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith aimed and fired his deer rifle at the Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a father of three. The murder quickly became a watershed in the history of the civil rights movement, a spur to greater national awareness both of the evil of racism and of the collective obligation to remedy...
...Beckwith, twice tried by all-white juries in 1964, was never convicted of the crime--that is, until last Saturday, when a jury of eight blacks and four whites needed only six hours of deliberation to declare him guilty as accused...
With Byron De La Beckwith about to live out his last days in jail and the United States about to embark on an economic relationship with Vietnam, a decade--and with it, a mindset--has passed on. It is left to us at Harvard to follow the lead of the rest of our nation, and to turn the six on our daily planners upside-down to reveal that it is, in fact, a nine...
...rifle was an Enfield 30.06, and Beckwith's fingerprint was found on the scope; his white Valiant was seen parked nearby; he later bragged at a Ku Klux Klan meeting, "Killing that nigger gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children." Yet he has remained free...