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Investigative reporting
A conversation with Jerry Mitchell
Special to chipsquinn.org
Posted: Feb. 14, 2005
© The Clarion-Ledger |
Edgar Ray Killen, a 79-year-old reputed member of the Ku Klux Klan, stood in
court in early January in Mississippi, accused in the killings of three 1960s
civil-rights workers.
More than 40 years had passed since James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew
Goodman were found dead after they tried to register black voters in east-central
Mississippi.
Nineteen men -- many described as Klansmen -- were indicted in 1967. One pleaded guilty and testified against the others. Seven were convicted in the case that inspired the movie Mississippi Burning. Killen’s trial on federal civil-rights violations ended in a hung jury.
In 1999, the case was reopened after reporting by Jerry Mitchell, investigative
reporter at
The Clarion-Ledger
in Jackson. Killen’s indictment
on state charges early this year followed.
The newspaper’s investigation into the 1964 murders is the latest in a string
of reporting efforts by Mitchell that have led to reopening of cases and prosecution
of three other Klansmen in civil-rights era deaths:
- Byron De La Beckwith, convicted in 1994 in the 1963 murder of NAACP official
Medgar Evers (the case was depicted in the movie Ghosts of Mississippi);
- Sam Bowers, convicted in 1998 in the 1966 death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer;
- Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted in 2002 in the 1963 bombing of an Alabama
church that killed four girls.
In a profile of Mitchell, USA TODAY quoted Susan Glisson, director
of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University
of Mississippi in Oxford: “I don’t think that anybody can doubt the important
effect that Jerry and the paper have had in highlighting and pushing for resolution
in these cases.”
For his work, Mitchell has been presented with the
Sigma
Delta Chi Award for Public Service, the Sidney Hillman Award, Gannett’s
William Ringle Outstanding Achievement Career Award, and the Heywood Broun Award,
among others. He was among journalists honored in 1998 by the Anti-Defamation
League at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for “their courage and conviction
that the world must know of the brutality of hatred, injustice, and inhumanity.”
Mitchell agreed to talk with chipsquinn.org about his reporting on crimes against
civil- rights advocates. Questions were suggested by journalists -- including
1993 Scholar Jamesetta Walker and 2001 Scholar Cintia Furtado, both of whom
are living in Mississippi -- and Chips Quinn staff.
Jerry Mitchell interview
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