The Reed Massengill Portrait of a Racist Collection houses all research, correspondence, drafts and other papers related to Massengill's 1994 biography of his uncle, Byron de la Beckwith, a white supremacist accused of the 1963 murder of NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers. Although Beckwith was tried twice in the years following the murder, both trials ended in hung juries. A third trial in 1993 finally convicted him of first-degree murder. He died on January 21, 2001.