Byron De La Beckwith was born on November 9, 1920 in Colusa, California. His father, the elder Byron De La Beckwith, was one of Colusa's most prominent citizens. Despite great early business success, at the time of his death in 1926 he owed almost all of his once substantial holdings to creditors. The newly widowed and impoverished Susan Southworth Yerger Beckwith consequently chose to relocate herself and five-year-old son to the Yerger family home in Greenwood, Mississippi, where young Beckwith spent the remainder of his childhood and early adulthood.

On June 12, 1963, NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers was found by his wife in front of their home in Jackson, Mississippi. He had been shot once in the chest, and died later after being taken to the hospital. Police found the sniper's rifle in a nearby thicket and subsequent tests proved that the gun bore Beckwith's fingerprint. Although several witnesses for the defense put Beckwith outside of Jackson on the night of the murder, other witnesses for the prosecution insisted that his car had been seen nearby just before the murder and that he had been seen around town in days prior asking locals for the Evers' address.

Two subsequent trials in which all-male, all-white juries presided failed to reach a verdict, and Beckwith was eventually released. Evers' murder went unsolved for three decades. In 1993, Beckwith was living in Signal Mountain, Tennessee when he was extradited to Mississippi to be retried using new evidence. This third trial convicted him of first-degree murder, which he later appealed. At the time of his death on January 21, 2001, he remained in the custody of the State of Mississippi.